Showing posts with label Malaysia. Show all posts

Recycling Is NOT a "LIE" Part 2. Alexander Clapp Fails Math On Plastic Recycling

Plastic recycling is not a lie. It's not perfect, but if you have to choose how your fresh spinach leaves are sold to people who live in Vermont, steel cans, copper, glass and paper may be easier to recycle at the end of package life... but lifecycle analysis of mining and refining and transportation also count for the environment. We need to keep working to fix the parts of plastic recycling that are not working, but attacking the plastic recyclers who ARE WORKING is shameful. Lying about PETE bottle bill plastic recycling will not fix the recycling prospects for a microgram of toothbrush at its end of life.

In part 1 of "Recycling is not a Lie" we shared just how aggravating it is to have African Geeks in the Tech Sector profiled as landfill scavengers. Yes they are both black, and yes they both make less money that the white guy running mobile phones through a shredder while wearing a white lab coat. In the same kind of way, successful plastic recycling companies are being cast as failures because the word "plastic recycling" doesn't cover the toothbrush. In both cases, the arrogant claim that "Recycling Is A Lie" profiles honest, incredible people as shameful.

PETE (#1) and HDPE (#2) Plastics are incredibly successful. They are not subsidized, they are not "a lie", and they are not thrown away at the recycling facilities. People who are telling us that may have a legitimate gripe about the film plastic your spinach leaves were transported in, but they don't have an answer other than "don't eat your spinach". They might imagine that spinach farmers in Mexico will successfully ship it 3000 miles without most of it spoiling, or being packaged in material far heavier to transport and more harmful in lifecycle analysis (see Oregon DEP study on paper bags vs. single use plastic). But doing so, they imagine they are more truthful than Malaysian Plastic Recycling Factories.

I'll focus on Malaysia, because Malaysia and Indonesia are getting a lot of recycling hate, and I've got experience with successful plastic recyclers - inventors and investors - in both nations. Both nations have been "Asian Tigers", economies who have muslim-majority DEMOCRACIES. There is plenty to criticize (extinction of orangutans for palm oil plantations for starters), but attacking their plastic recyclers is just ignorant.

I have learned the hard way that it is dangerous to single out a single recycler unless they are already (a la Joe "Hurricane" Benson in the UK, or Semarang Indonesia's PT Imtech) falsely accused. Saying "what is wrong with this factory" has drawn sick attacks, like Jim Puckett's letter shutting down my friends at Net Peripheral in Penang Malaysia after Adam Minter visited them and wrote about them in Recycling International. But let's just look at the largest Malaysia recycler on this list.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis, reporter at The Guardian and author of Wasteland, at least accepted my invitations to meet and speak about the potential for "collateral damage" in Emerging Markets. He visited Evans Quaye's shop in Accra (the smallest electronics refurbished I could risk introducing him to), and as a result wrote a nuanced chapter about his capacity to judge Africa's Tech Sector. And to his credit, he admitted to me he had not visited a single plastic recycler in Malaysia or Indonesia while writing about their businesses (blamed covid travel restrictions). Oli is honest. But Alexander Clapp has not responded to any of my twitter or Linkedin invitations. Alexander Clapp is the one who told the NYTimes that people like me are LYING about recycling.

Here is a plastic recycling plant my Fair Trade Recycling Team visited in Semarang Indonesia about 15 years ago, when the factory was being "outed" by Basel Action Network as a "primitive" operation. We verified their ISO Certifications and photographed their ABS and HiPS plastic recycling lines. Colin Davis, my former VP and Middlebury College Grad (now CEO at Shacksbury Cider) visited in 2009 (I think).

This factory used plastic from used computer monitor housings - removing their paper and foil labels - to peletize them, adding black die, and made brand new computer monitor plastic housings out of 100% recycled plastic. Was the factory perfect? No, but it made brand new computer monitors as a contract manufacturer to OEMs before converting to a recycling and reuse operation... so making computer monitors out of old computer monitors seems like progress to me. The plastic was just one part of the operation - they reused 4 year old CRTs to make affordable new TVs and monitors as well... while USA companies were grinding those CRTs up to make abandoned piles of toxic dust, and accusing this factory (through BAN.org) of lying. That was more than 15 years ago... my guess is that Alexander Clapp was in Junior High School at the time. Now he's "recycling" Puckett's stories about these genius entrepreneurs... sigh. Maybe someone in his friends and family circle will read this and suggest he is only "holding up a mirror" to factless journalism.

So back to the present day. I've posted the image and link to the list of the largest plastic recyclers operating in Malaysia as of 2023. Clapp and Puckett have accused the largest factory (in that they have accused ALL of them) of operating illegally.

The factory claims to recycle 60,000 tons per year of HDPE (milk jug), LDPE (film), and PP Plastic grades into pellets that can be extruded to make new products. Putting a photo of domestically generated Indonesia river mixed-plastic litter hardly disqualifies their claims to employe hundreds of staff, or their ISO 14001 certification, or their import permits. If Alexander Clapp wants to accuse this factory of lying, he has had more than 10 years to visit and show us how they manage to pay for the plastic (PETE and HDPE scrap sell for much more per ton than paper), pay for shipping, employ hundreds, document residuals management, and somehow are "lying" and somehow responsible for plastic litter in an Indonesian river thousands of kilometers away.

Burden of proof much?

The Thorny Distraction of Environmental Police / Malaysia Rhino Horn

It has been a couple of years now since WR3A's last meeting with INTERPOL in Lyon, France. After our first and second visit to Agbogbloshie, laughingling labelled the "world's largest e-waste dump", INTERPOL officials let me know that "Project Eden" was a misfire. They would sunset it silently. This is what grown up environmentalists do.

The #ewastehoax launched by Jim Puckett of Seattle almost two decades ago has distracted environmental regulators, and has diluted their enforcement, from much more important concerns. Like this.

Fifty rhino horns, worth $12M, seized by Malaysian environmental officials in Kuala Lumpur. This is a big news story. Yet it's been distracted from and diluted by Basel Action Network, and there's been no country more so distracted by BAN's war on repair than Malaysia DOE.

Basel Amendment to End E-Waste

When we discuss the rapid meshing of cultures in rapidly growing cities, and how the "last mile" of people tend to migrate to the first mile of track (and electric cable, TV broadcast, and internet), there's another factor to consider in making comparisons:

Age.

Rural families tend to be large. My late buddy Yadji had a brother in Yenwa who had 12 kids and 4 wives, and said his goal was to have 25 kids. I met other men in Cameroun who boasted of 30 children. It has been well studied that this is a rural phenomena that tends to decluster within a couple of generations of living in a city. Quarters are more cramped, school is expensive, and multilingualism is mandatory. Girls get to school more often, and educated women have fewer kids.

But life is tough in the slums for the first generation. As Adam Minter told me, the young Cantonese may take the super-long workshift at Foxconn for a year or two, but they burn out and adapt more reasonable habits. It's a difficult way out of rural poverty. But the rural immigrants don't remain "suckers" for long...

It’s estimated there were 1.2-billion people in extreme poverty in 2010. That’s a decline of 700-million since 1990. - Chronic Poverty Report

There are about six billion people in the "non-OECD", but "non-OECD" doesn't mean poverty or hunger for most. The young kids from rural villages have it the worst, and they are the fodder for sex traders, child soldier warlords, pirates, drug runners, etc. The worst jobs Africa has tend to fall disproportionately on the families with the most children.

Youths have a reputation in every country for thinking they are ten foot tall and bullet-proof. If you want a challenging environment for OSHA rules, hire a bunch of recently graduated blue collar high schoolers. The race of the kids doesn't matter, the geography doesn't matter, kids are willing to exploit themselves and to be explioted, especially if they are hungry.

But the flame of experience burns quickly. You can fool them once. You cannot exploit them permanently, you either have to hire more rural immigrants, or move to a place where they are more abundant. And in the meantime, you have grown an urban middle class which will stick around another 40-50 years. Visit the demographics in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Incheon.

[China's] costs have grown while surplus labour has shrunk, as three decades of the one-child policy means China’s working age population will likely fall by 20% in the next 40 years, and by a further 20% from 2050 to 2100.

Tweets responding to Fareed Zakaria's links (to Jack Goldstone in TheCoversation.com) always yield interesting links. Jonathan Berman's Havard Business Review (10/13) article "Seven Reasons Why Africa's Time is Now" points out, among other things, that Africa will have more working population than China by 2050, and that investments in "assessembly" jobs are already coming strong. Today only 24% of Africa's $2 Trillion economy come from natural resource extraction. The "resource curse" in Africa is beginning to look a lot like Indonesia and Malaysia, which (as I've frequently written) are seesawing away from resource economies into "tinkerer blessing" repair-and-assembly economies... the same path as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and originally Japan followed. The less rural land a country has drawn ("lines on maps") around it, the faster it makes this motion. Singapore was originally part of Malaysia, and it's stunning growth is as attributable to its cessation from rural geography as it is the country's difference from Penang, KL or Jahor Bahru. The growth of Taiwan correlates to its ability to concentrate on the "first mile of track".

Cities shrink families. Smaller families have more disposable income. That's the parentage of e-waste at African dumps, smaller families from a generation passed own TVs, and the TVs are scrapped by kids from rural families, more recently immigrated. It's ripe for improvement and reform, either through StEP or Fair Trade Recycling or by Indian and Taiwanese entrepreneurs. It has nothing to do with ratification of the "Basel Convention".

Ask Nneka Egbuna (Soul is Heavy artist)

@Nnekaworld

Open Minded Electronics Importer Gets R2 Shaft: CEFAD

There are way too many trolls on the internet. People who are either super sure of themselves, or who get off somehow by acting that way, appear to go out of their way to shock and provoke insult.

trolling e-waste downstream markets

There are also too many wishy-washy agreeable people, people who 'like' whatever is being said today by the people they are near, most comfortable with repeating second hand impressions as fact.

And then there are really principled people, who really think they are good and fair, who really mean to do well, but they are caught in a tide of group-think.

Some of us cannot even see how our perceptions of reality have been caught in a kind of cultural gravity that general impressions cannot escape. Many of these people are even agents of conscience, trying to make the earth a better place, as best as they know how.

It was someone like the latter to whom I sent the email (bottom, in yellow) for someone's first R2 (Responsible Recycler) end market report two years ago. I have changed names, hotlinks, and email addresses, otherwise this is exactly what we sent. This is a real case of "collateral damage"... no one meant to do anything but good...

Someone I wrote about in September 2012 is now out of business.

So I used to sell to Egypt, now I don't.

I used to sell to Indonesia, but it's illegal now, so I stopped.

And for years I exported to Malaysia for refurbishing, and that factory - which recycled 100% of accidental breakage at the CRT glass furnace in KL - no longer speaks English. We gave them a price cut in return for their obtaining ISO14001 certification. They began a takeback program, creating a domestic Malaysia CRT recycling infrastructure...

It's all dead. Supply and demand.

The E-Waste Industry, at the EScrap Conference in Orlando, will be talking about there being no demand for CRT glass, cathode ray tube cullet. But that's not exactly what there's no demand for.

There's no demand for self-righteous bigotry and b******t.

Back to the drawing board. I can cross off lots of places that are expensive to visit, expensive to audit, and give R2 Auditors the heeby-jeebies. Turns out, the heeby-jeeby feeling is mutual. In Vermont, we have practically eliminated CRT export for reuse. I could become an E-Steward right now, if I was willing to pay the dues. I'm not doing anything they don't want me to do.

So gee... I should look back at the invitation to join E-Stewards, the gracious invitation extended to me last
winter. Sure, I'm qualified now to be a "steward". But, it's wasted on me. See, I'm really not into calling innocent people guilty, and the whole making myself look like a better recycler by making other people look worse. If an all white country club chased off my colored fiance, and said now I could be a member, I wouldn't be too keen with all that.

I'm E-Steward qualified, E-Steward eligible, E-Steward compliant. I'm a good ole e-waste steward boy. Just got to show them my downstreams and write them a check.

Electronic waste—time to take stock

A member of WR3A based on Sao Paulo, Brazil, emailed me a copy of an article in the respected journal "The Lancet" yesterday. It reminded me of the Charlie Schmidt article in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2006, when I was interviewed, and unfortunately, kept a hand tied behind my back. Charlie erred on the side of "white guilt" and wrote an article that supported J. Puckett's of BAN.org now completely discredited allegation that African importers were "mostly" importing TVs to be burned for copper. Puckett only recently admitted (in the comment section of an article by Bloomberg) that he had done no research while in Africa and made the "80%" statistic up. He simply made it up.

Profiling kids at dumps

I now realize that once an allegation is printed in a respected journal, like EHSP or The Lancet, especially when accompanied by "poverty photos" of kids at dumps, that the "presumption of guilt" shifts, rather violently, against reuse FIXers techs geeks of color. The white guilt ricochets around, and in the end, it's the African, like Hamdy of Egypt or Benson of Nigeria, who is accused, arrested, loses his business.

For that reason, my new policy is to never let a "reporter", like Dr. Jack Caravanos, off the hook as easily as Charles Schmidt. I haven't met him yet, am certain he's a good guy, just like Therese Shyrane and David Higgins of Interpol, and UK enforcement leaders lik Graeme Vickery (a supporter of Joe Benson's arrest). All good people, armed with the statistics Basel Action Network hallucinated, who think that most African importers are guilty of #wastecrime.

OPEN LETTER TO THE LANCET AND JACK CARAVANOS

Dear Mr. Caravanos,

Are you the author of the piece in the Lancet? http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)61465-8/fulltext First, I want to congratulate you on entering the discussion, and second, to introduce you to three professors who are working on a grant together to explore reform, rather than ban, of the trade. Dr Lepawsky is from Memorial University, Dr. Goldstein from USC, and Dr. Kahhat teaches engineering at PCU Peru.

"Much e-waste (estimated to total 45·6 million tons in 2012) originates in developed countries. Treaties such as the 1989 Basel Conventionprohibit the export of defunct electronic equipment for disposal in developing countries. However, a loophole that allows the export of electronic equipment for re-use results in most of this retired equipment ending up in developing countries—a problem exacerbated by a lack of resources to test equipment for functionality. E-waste output from developing countries is also rising rapidly, and will soon overtake the developed world as the dominant source."

While there is definitely an element of truth here, and while the aspects of bored children burning things in landfills is completely unacceptable, I'd like to invite you to revisit the article from another point of view. According to several studies, the import of used electronics cannot really be explained, economically, by any economics of "externalization". Externalization of recycling costs definitely exists, but would not explain the sorting of loads sold. From what I've personally observed, cities like Accra and Lagos have had television and electronics for several decades, and the way their own eventual discards are treated bears reform in the same way ours did two decades ago.

Nigeria, in 2007, had 6,900,000 households with television (World Bank). And according to a 2012 storty, the UNEP, which intercepted and tested 279 sea containers imported by Nigerian techs, found 91% reuse in those containers - actually higher reuse rate than brand new product sold in Africa. I'll share two quotes from the UNEP studied (funded in part by a grant from the Basel Secretariat).

"The majority of refurbished products stem from imports via the ports of Lagos. The interim results from project component 2, the Nigerian e-Waste Country Assessment, show that 70% of all the imported used equipment is functional and is sold to consumers after testing. 70% of the non-functional share can be repaired within the major markets and is also sold to consumers. 9% of the total imports of used equipment is non-repairable and is directly passed on to collectors and recyclers."

- Final report of the UNEP SBC, E-waste Africa Project, Lagos & Freiburg, June 2011

Here's another quote from the Nigeria E-Waste Assessment Study:

"Refurbishing of EEE and the sales of used EEE is an important economic sector (e.g. Alaba market in Lagos). It is a well-organized and a dynamic sector that holds the potential for further industrial development. Indirectly, the sector has another important economic role, as it supplies low and middle income households with affordable ICT equipment and other EEE. In the view of the sector’s positive socio-economic performance, all policy measures aiming to improve e-waste management in Nigeria should refrain from undifferentiated banning of second-hand imports and refurbishing activities and strive for a co-operative approach by including the market and sector associations."

If you simply mean that most of the used goods imported to Africa work or are repaired, but will eventually be discarded in a decade or two, I'd agree with that, since 70% of the sales documented (product in use) are used product. I don't think that mining more lead, tin, copper etc. to make brand new product, however, would either eliminate the eventual dumping problem. It would certainly elevate the exposure of Africans to lead and other pollution - hard rock metal mining is the primary source of toxics in both the USA and Africa.

The photo above, taken from a film by Greenpeace, shows a typical load of imports. Frequently these are used CRTs taken out of hotels, upgraded for flat screens. The Africans who purchase them are very picky, and you will not see a lot of variety of age or type of e-waste in these loads.

I'd invite you to visit my plant in Vermont, or to come down and meet with you at CUNY. Our organization, Fair Trade Recycling (fairtraderecycling.org) is dedicated to improving quality of loads sold to repair and refurbishing markets.. The moral of your article seems to be that the "reuse" is some kind of a "loophole", and that people should be somehow ashamed if some of the goods sold or repaired in Accra or Lagos originated in New York. I'm afraid that "boycott" attitude has not been very effective, driving entrepreneurs into back alleys to find the computers and televisison Africans need but cannot afford to buy new.

Robin Ingenthron

So that's my "open letter" to Jack Caravanos. I hope I didn't burn any bridges. I still correspond with Charles Schmidt, who unfortunately cannot get an editor interested in exhuming the bodies for DNA tests.

more->

Vermont Ilsley Public Library: Vermont Child E-Waste Tinkerers

Today (Friday March 15, 2013) is an "In-Service Day" in Addison County, and the Middlebury public schools are closed. One of those days that's not a holiday for parents, and we schedule little things like tonsillectomy (my son, 8:00AM), or trips to the dentist (my 16 year old twins) if we are thinking far enough ahead.

If you are in Middlebury Vermont today, and you didn't plan that far ahead, here's another opportunity. Good Point Recycling and the Ilsley Public Library are putting on a Special Event for Kids. In the spirit of the "maker movement", "yankee ingenuity", and can-do tinkerer blessing, we will exploit ... 'err.. hold on, I'm getting an urgent call from our PR office.

Imagination Vacation: Tinkering With Technology

Event:: Imagination Vacation: Tinkering with Technology
Start:: March 15, 2013 10:30 am
End:: March 15, 2013 12:00 pm
Category:: Kids
Updated:: March 1, 2013

Venue:: Community meeting room
Address:: Ilsley Public Library,Middlebury

This hands-on workshop allows school-age children the freedom to explore the art and science of ”how stuff works” in the spirit of the popular “maker movement.” Library staff and re-use experts from Good Point Recycling will help you use hand tools to explore the mechanics of a variety of technologies from computers to telephones. Bring your own hand tools, such as screwdrivers and pliers if you have them. Adults and welcome too.

Term Paper V (5): "E-waste" Export, Geog of Env Justice

Back to the "Term Paper" (for those following). Here is how I overlay the "regulated areas" of "environmental justice" and "property value" on an actual case of "non-OECD".

(You may need to go back to "Term Paper 1-IV"). This is an academic post, which goes well with a video, but we also want these accessible in nations which csor videos, so here's a link to a "geographic" song, Rue St. Vincent, sung by Yves Montand. Open and listen in another window...

Case Study: Singapore and the Malay Peninsula

Malaysia, the nation, also includes huge rain forests in Borneo and Papua New Guinea - home to both the most biologically diverse and unstudied rain forests on the planet, disappearing orangutans, and the OK Tedi Copper and Gold mine (#evil). Where it is green, Malaysia is very green. But it's easier for the purpose of the case study to look just at the Malay peninsula, which Malaysia shares with the city-state of Singapore (at independence from the British empire, they were both part of Malaysia, but Singapore won independence fairly peacefully).

First, the "eyeballs diagrams" are NOT drawn to scale. Singapore is 704 square kilometers, Malaysia has 338,550 square kilometers. After a couple of years of co-governance, Singapore became independent in 1965; it still had not rebuilt from Japanese occupation during WW2. From Wikepedia 13.01.08:

Facing severe unemployment and a housing crisis, Singapore embarked on a modernisation programme that focused on establishing a manufacturing industry, developing large public housing estates and investing heavily on public education. Since independence, Singapore's economy has grown by an average of nine percent each year. By the 1990s, the country had become one of the world's most prosperous nations, with a highly developed free market economy, stronginternational trading links, and the highest per capita gross domestic product in Asia outside of Japan.^[1]

Peninsular Malaysia has 131,598 square kilometers, so even eliminating the islands Borneo and PNG, it dwarfs Singapore.

Chevron Agrees!!!! With Chevron!

The Poster Child has so many uses. Who needs a vetted "certification" or standard when you can take a picture of earth's most inexhaustible resource - brown kids under the age of 18?

We've seen the success of an "anti-ewaste" campaign which never had a number or statistic or even a proper interpretation of Basel Convention Annex III or Annex IX... they had something better, photos of children and the word "toxic" to describe something vaguely electronic and complicated which we all had in our basements and could feel guilty about.

Success breeds imitation.

Now Big Oil is into the act. Take pictures of the kids, then make a demand for something you just so happen to already be doing (donating money to schools). You co-opt the protest zeitgeist, steer it to your lightning rod, protecting your house.

The big difference between these two campaigns?

Probably the kid got some money from Chevron. No kid ever got a dime from Basel Action Network. They take jobs away but don't even write a thank you note.

And as long as we are making stuff up, here is a "hypothesis". You know, that's an alternative to just stating something bogus as fact (like, 80% of the electronics exported are burned, or 80% of the e-waste collected is exported, or that Guiyu is "the most toxic place on earth", or that arsenic in Guiyu's river came from ewaste recycling rather than from the textile dyes, which are the source of arsenic in other rivers...).

Ahem, hypothesis, here goes...

"Jazz originated in New Orleans because poor families in close quarters encouraged music."

I've got a 15 year old on piano and an 11 year old on trumpet, right here, right now. Practicing.

"Winning" the War on Diversity, Alabama Style

Howdy, I growed up in Arkansas, and am always keeping an eye out on our state ranking. Alabama has usually kept out of the fray in the fight between 49th and 50th rank between Mississippi and Arkansas. But, as The Economist observes, a new Immigration Law in Alabama may succeed where teenage pregnancy and ignorance has failed. FTA

ALABAMA’S immigration law, boasted Micky Hammon, an Alabama legislator and one of its co-authors, “attacks every aspect of an illegal immigrant’s life. They will not stay in Alabama…This bill is designed to make it difficult for them to live here so they will deport themselves.” It is not, however, designed to introduce visiting executives from Mercedes-Benz, which employs thousands at its factory in the state, to the pleasures of Alabama’s jails. But that is what happened to Detlev Hager, who was caught in November driving in Tuscaloosa with only German ID on him.

The article describes how the Alabama legislator "shrewdly included a severability clause, ensuring that if a court strikes down or prohibits one part of the law, the rest remains in effect." My God, it's Brilliant!

...Mr Hammon’s fond hope—that illegal immigrants will leave—seems to have come true. Anecdotal reports suggest that thousands of Latinos, legal as well as illegal, have left Alabama. Farmers complain of rotting crops and building companies of rising costs, both because there are too few workers. Samuel Addy, an economist at the University of Alabama, estimates the law’s total cost—taking into account productivity declines, increased enforcement cost, and declines in aggregate consumer spending and tax revenue since so many workers have left—in the billions.

The Chicago Tribune reports Addy's estimated cost to Alabama at $10.8 billion. This is similar to the outcome expected from another "good theory", about e-waste recycling, championed by a group of shredding companies in support of the Green Thompson anti-export bill. Their idea is that if we eliminate exchange of goods and services, the USA will create jobs.

The idea may or may not have a certain local merit (if you work at a shredding company in California). But shredding money generally doesn't increase payroll. Like the anti-immigration bill in Alabama, the economic theory won't pass the straight-face test on its economic merits. But it nevertheless finds political fuel from the basest American instincts, as it becomes tinged with the latent passions of jealousy and racism. Some people think that money coming into their state is not the answer - that their boats will only rise if they vote other peoples' boats to sink.

The theory is, if you stop trading with 83% of the world, and in particular the 3 billion people who are getting online internet at ten times the rate of the developing world, using used display units and other "non-obsolete" surplus which doesn't obey "Moore's law" of obsolescence, USA jobs will result. All you have to do is turn $100 billion dollars of repairable IT equipment upgraded every year into $1 billion dollars of scrap. Sit back and watch as the jobs arrive faster than Alabama White Collar Cotton Pickers.

55872223

It's an old lesson, retold from a letter in 1865, written by a former slave to his former Tennessee slave owner (republished on the web this week, e.g. Huffington Post).

It's a lesson Alabama is re-learning, as the immigrants walk away from the fields and leave crops to rot. It's a lesson Basel Action Network brought to us when they wrote letters to Malaysia objecting to Samsung Corning using USA CRT cathode ray tube cullet to make new recycled CRTs... Malaysia decided they could get all the CRT cullet they needed from Japan and Korea, thanks much. And it's a lesson BAN brought to us again when BAN attacked contract manufacturing factories. Remember, those are the "big secret factories" which upgrade CRT displays by the thousands per day for affordable use in the mideast and Africa (CRTs withstand heat better than LCDs). The factories are still there, and still buying... they just are not buying from the USA. Thanks. That's going to create more jobs here in Vermont when I turn the $200K we used to get from reuse into -minus -$30K in CRT glass cullet.

There is something in Jourdan Anderson's letter to confederate Colonel P.H. Anderson, which seems to repeat itself in the history of trade between immigrants in Alabama and Geeks of Color in overseas refurbishing and recycling markets...

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

To Kill an Indonesian Mockingbird

"Republik Indonesia" is the third largest democracy, and the largest population of muslims (India is second, with more Muslims than Pakistan). The country shares stewardship of the tropical islands of Papua New Guinea and Borneo. It's the 4th most populated nation, stretching over island and archipelago... about three times the size of Texas. It has some of the most densely populated cities, and some of the most sparsely populated forests.

Indonesia could go either way.

It could succumb to the "resource curse". The same volcanic history that brought the tidal wave tsunami disaster of 2004 has also left copper, gold, and rare earth metals. The rain forests are being systematically cut down, like the Amazon, to plant commercial crops - like timber and palm oil plantations.

Indonesia could also follow the path of the "Network of Tinkerers". Like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, Indonesia's economy is building on the "geeks of color", the repair and refurbish and shanzhai knock-off economies. Contract manufacturing has a leg in the economy.

Revisiting Blogism: Naked Juice

I've been from Perpignan (France) to Barcelona (Spain) to CDG Paris to New York City JFK airport, where I sit now, waiting for the flight to Burlington Vermont. Boingo wireless, wifi in France, it's been nice to post photos to Facebook rather than send postcards. redemtech

During some slow periods in the vacation, I read my blogs of Christmas past, starting in 2006. They were very journal-like, too wordy, and rather introspective.   I also read some more famous blogs of note, with thousands of daily reads.

This set of posts is incredibly specific, dealing with specifics of a recycling issue which is controversial in its time. The theme is that students of environmental policy can learn best from our mistakes (mine or yours) if we chronicle the dialogue, subtext, and controversy. Again, I could be wrong. But when I read my past posts, it's pretty clear that I'm sincere in my approach to recycling. Recycling beats mining, so improve it without shutting it down.

In the Good Point Ideas Blog, I chronicle trips to overseas markets, apply economic theory to my practical insider vision, and have tried to honestly disclose my own biases and self-interests. The blog boringly but logically explains our company's processes. The point is to write honestly about what I have seen. The worst recycling practices. And the very best recycling practices. In the same countries.

It's therefore fascinating to read blog posts by another "owner-operator" of another e-waste recycling company. On my visits overseas to my end markets, his company's material was being unloaded side by side with mine. There was nothing wrong, in my opinion, with his company's exports.   I asked the guy who was buying them, and while he was not too happy with the ratio of P3s to P4s on this load, he was ok with the Ohio supplier. As he was ok with my product.

Personally, I kind of think the other CEO seems willing to push his Malaysian buyer-friends under a bus to gain BAN's accolades. I don't compete with him directly, he doesn't much touch the residential/municipal material we manage. He goes after corporate suppliers who are risk averse and wealthy, willing to pay a lot to have very repairable and valuable material taken care of. We have a lot of hair on our meat, and more crap to remove. In a way, my company should be defending BAN's vision of no "toxics along for the ride", and he should be explaining just how nice commercial e-scrap is to the developing world's high-tech remarket.

Perhaps his company no longer ships to the processors we shipped to together - the ones who care less whether a power supply is "tested working" (as they will replace it anyway for 220v clients), and care more about the speed of the processor and raster of the cathode ray tube. But there is a certain introspection lacking, given the apparent conversion.   If I stop shipping good units to buyers in Jahor Bahru, KL, Jakarta or Penang, where we both shipped in the past, I will tell you I used to ship there and will tell you why I stopped.   I will NOT post wire-burning monkey photos and act like I never shipped the capable technicians there, as I like to sleep at night.

(Video removed by viddler.com 2014)

I used to ship CRTs to China. They were good factories. But the Chinese government owns virgin-CRT manufacturing capacity, and does not want "grey market" or "second hand" products competing with their CRTs. They made it illegal and took away all the import permits. So I moved to countries - Indonesia and Malaysia, which had similar factories but still issued import permits. Other USA recyclers still ship to the Chinese reuse market, either via Hong Kong or to Viet Nam for overland shipping to Kunming. There are Chinese CRT refurbishers operating in special "import-export zones", like maquilas, that appear to have valid permits. But we chose not to play cat and mouse with the Chinese Communist Party.

Details, Details: The more specifically honest my posts, the longer they get. The CEO promoting e-Stewards is more succinctly written. But his experience with both good export markets and the USA front companies which exported his CRTs "less transparently" would add flavor to the blog. He and I were both invited to process our CRTs through a USA company. I inspected the company and found it to be a sham recycling operation, and when the EPA and China enforced against the sham recycler, I could tell our clients they had nothing to worry about. And even if most of the CRT monitors visible in 60 Minutes Hong Kong fly-over were going to good factories, I can write the truth about those factories AND assure our clients we DID NOT SHIP CRTs to Hong Kong.

As a forum to market his company, the Other CEO takes a simpler route. His advocacy of BAN and E-Stewards probably serves well. Explaining his personal experience with the export market would produce longer, less accessible posts.

I'm sure my blog fails to win new risk averse clients, though it may help retain the long term clients served since Earth Day 2000. If in 20 years, only profits we made now matters, he will have cleaned my clock. If, as I believe, the Singapore-azation of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Egypt makes them tigers, BRICKs, economic and development successes, then his participation in the denigration of their capacity to refurbish and recycle - given fair trade economic incentives - will be shameful.

While Singapore reached better-than-OECD status on an economy based on imports an refurbishing, that door is being slammed on Egypt, Kenya, and other nations with a "ban on imports" of western (working and repairable) CRTs.

Oh, yeah. While I was on vacation, I got news that Indonesia drank the BAN Kool-Aid and took away the import permit for the big secret factory. The one described by NRDC as a primitive wire burning operation. NRDC has never been there.

If you are one of the students who reads this blog - my favorite audience - I hope you will research Singapore and the "repair and overhaul". I'm generally handicapped in disclosing the specific, proud, hands-on refurbishing factories for fear their import permits will be taken away.

Ok, anti-export campaigners, I dare you to shut this down. Here is a really big operation importing Western Goods for repair and refurbishing, which replaces and recycles a lot of electronics. Rolls Royce has an aircraft "repair and overhaul" or R&O operation in (gasp!) non-OECD member Signapore. Western countries send our Boeings and Airbuses there to be completely overhauled. Under my (and EPA and UNCTAD and others) interpretation of Basel Convention Annex IX, that's a good thing. BAN, I invite you to explain whether this operation is legal and if so, what is the difference between Singapore overhauling a jet and overhauling a CRT monitor?

I probably need to at least prioritize the more substantive pieces, like "Top 10 Myths", "We Shouldn't Have to Make that Choice," "Big Secret Factories", some of the critical posts on certification, 60 Minutes, and "Proud to Be an Exporter". I'll work this week on a "Top 10 Posts", and start the painful process of cleaning up some of the redundant and derivative posts which may dilute the facts about ethical e-waste recycling and fair trade recycling.

I hope to just get a good night's sleep tonight.