Comments to Federal Register: Request for Information To Inform Interagency Working Group on Mining Regulations, Laws, and Permitting

 

Request for Information To Inform Interagency Working Group on Mining Regulations, Laws, and Permitting

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/07/15/2022-15114/request-for-information-to-inform-interagency-working-group-on-mining-regulations-laws-and

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland

It is critical to environmental public works, waste management, and recycling sectors in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coasts that federal lands in the interior west be managed in a way that levels the playing field. For too long our Congresspeople have failed to recognize that subsidies and lack of management of mining, fracking, and timber management on federal lands have direct consequences on recycling programs for metal, glass, plastic and paperstock.

After 150 years, the critical need to reform the Mining Law of 1872 is well documented. As professional recyclers from states without federal mining, fracking, and extraction, it is essential that we convey the importance of mining reform to the investment, job creation, economic realization, and sustainable economy.

When recyclers in cities like Boston, Albany, Baltimore, Burlington, etc. pay people to collect secondary raw materials from urban, suburban and rural waste:

1. We must pay for the value of the material, unlike “royalties” unpaid by virgin material harvests
2. We must pay for the cleanup of sites when we are finished with our recycling work
3. We are responsible for waste effluent and byproducts

Unfortunately, even as we recyclers provide 40% of all of the metals, paper fiber, and plastic used by USA industry, we must compete - unfairly - against wanton waste, crude processing, toxic tailings, and environmental injustice for the “backyards” of indigenous Americans, whose “NIMBY” interests are never paid as much attention to as the urban neighborhoods of our recycling enterprises. Our recycling programs provide raw materials at a fraction of the energy and carbon costs of virgin material extraction. Our children's children will appreciate every ton we conserve by leaving in the federal lands to be used, sparingly, to meet future needs.

Every time serious reforms of the mining laws in North America (by Udall and Bumpers in the 1980s, or Canada in the 1990s) are even discussed or threatened with a committee vote, the free market invests in recycling. Since this committee started its consideration, two of the largest investments in electronics recycling were made by the raw material smelting industry.

As the front-line regulators, investors, workers, and consumers of “Urban Ore” recycling programs, we urge you to recognize and defend our interests in a level playing field and circular economy.

Robin Ingenthron

Founder, Fair Trade Recycling (tradename of WR3a.org)

Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets

Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets

Is imitation the sincerest form of apology?

There is a guilt dilemma in "First World" aka "Wealthy" aka OECD consumer markets.  While there are repair and delayed gratification reuse trends (my company sells about $25k per month worth of TV parts to USA repair shops), there is also a lot of guilt about "elective upgrade", which remains the driver of most new sales.

Organizations like Basel Action Network and Greenpeace made a false assumption about 2 decades ago that "e-waste" was a product of equipment failure and inability to repair. That Americans, Japanese, South Koreans, Germans, Brits and Italians patiently wait for their CRT televisions, flip phones, and Pentium 4s to become hopelessly unrepairable before buying a plasma TV, smartphone, or i-Series laptop. 

The fact that it is patently obvious to nearly everybody that it was not the case, in hindsight, has been a point of reflection of this blog since I started it in 2006. 

Unnecessary elective upgrades, if indeed they are discarded as "waste" (or sentenced to a desk drawer, attic, or file cabinet) are indeed a wasteful use of mined, refined, extracted raw materials. But if they are reused, they create access for poor people to establish a "critical mass of users" to justify investments in TV broadcast, internet cable, and the estimated 170,000 mobile phone towers today that connect the continent of Africa... all financed by secondhand flip phone sim cards, replaced by black technicians on streets like Lagos, Accra, and Kinshasa.

It's a story older than this bad head gasket... sold to a Cummins motor geek in Florida, who re-exports trucks to rapidly emerging markets. Roads were paved in Appalachia and Ozarks by hillbillies like my grandparents, who could only afford vehicles they were smart enough to buy and fix.

Ethical Gravity 4: Moral Moving Targets, Beautiful Gray Markets

Is an "illegal" market, or a "black market", unethical?

It is illegal to sell the Holy Bible in many nations, but who would consider it unethical?  It is important to distinguish ethics from laws passed by authorities to grant - well, more and more authority.

Beautiful, beautiful gray.

It Was 20 Years Ago Today: Good Point Recycling's Eco-Entrepreneurism

Just ran across this photo from 15 years ago (just before we bought the Nissan forklift), at the warehouse across from Agway on Exchange St. The monitors were selling for $7 apiece back then.  Pretty much all we did was to do pickups, pull out the PCs and CRT monitors we could reuse, and load everything mixed back onto a trailer.

5 years earlier, I had announced my resignation at Massachusetts DEP to follow my wife to Middlebury, Vermont, where I'd taken a job running a thrift store while doing consulting work for EPA, MA DEP, New Deal Software, etc.

It was 20 years ago that I took a big chance and left my corner office at One Winter Street in Boston, having successfully instituted the USA's first waste disposal ban on CRT devices in Massachusetts. The consulting work I did for MA DEP and EPA was published in September 2000, about a year after I turned it in. Titled Electronics Re-Use and Recycling Infrastructure Development in Massachusetts, it eventually became the business plan for Good Point Recycling. 

The report was based on interviews with 48 electronic recycling professionals, 176 TV repair shops, 4 white goods (fridges) appliance collectors, 10 thrift shop operations (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc), 2 retailers, 20 computer monitor repair shops, 7 Original Equipment Manufacturer reps (not credited or cited), and 32 used electronic equipment exporters.

OP ED: GPS Tracker Controversy Resurfaces #Monitour

Just a brief update about the 2016 reports (2) by Basel Action Network which claimed that their partnership with MIT Senseable City Lab demonstrated that 36% of USA E-waste is illegally -  and shamefully - exported.  When the first report came out, one year ago, we contacted MIT to question the following methodological concerns in the study.  MIT sent a disavowal and stopped appearing with BAN in the press, but the damage has been done.  BAN unmasked unwitting and unwilling participants and named names - even companies like mine that they know for a fact did not export the device they shipped to us.  Where there's smoke, someone should get fired.

1) 50% of waste - CRT TVs - were not tracked.  Probably because they are almost never exported. If they are never exported, the exported "findings" fall back into the 10%-20% range identified in several other studies.  It's the "blue-eyed basketball player fallacy" (selective sampling).  They tracked 30% of types of devices deemed likely exports, and found 36% of those were exported.

2) BAN covered up destinations which didn't fit their "primitive and shameful" narrative of overseas recycling.  Here is video from April '15, six months before our downstream USA recycler exported a printer we handled, of Hong Kong's legal EcoPark.  We found direct evidence that BAN erased the coordinates for this facility, and shared that on the blog and with MIT.



3) BAN misidentified legal repair and reuse as shameful exporting.  Two CRTs tracked in Pakistan ended up in a multi-story reuse shop a couple of blocks from Pakistan's largest tech university, in the same building that sells CRT analog converters (changing monitors to TVs).  Another data point that "disappeared" in BAN's second report appears to show a large SKD factory in Foshan.  If it isn't this factory, then why did BAN erase the datapoints in its second report?  In Fact, one of the SEATTLE devices exported (under investigation by Washington DEP) was in fact tracked through the site above, and is found in reuse in Tin Shui Wai (a city, not a rice paddy, in the New Territories).  BAN erased the datapoint, but it was shared with us by someone in Seattle, and we profiled the cover up here.

4) Whether or not the tampering and fallacies above were intentional, BAN's participation and funding and sharing data with E-Stewards who sponsor BAN financially are prima facia violations of MIT ethics rules on both conflict of interest and tracking of "unwitting and unwilling" human subjects.  If there was any question whether BAN was just following devices or was targeting unwitting and unwilling subjects in the first report release, that was released in the second, where BAN named me personally and my clients in Somerville, despite knowing that we did NOT export the device they tracked. Oh, and the Somerville site is a commercial office, not a public drop off point... MIT undergrads had to ring a doorbell and get buzzed in to a building with no "recycling" sign.  At that point, MIT assigned its attorneys to the case and MIT Senseable City Lab issued a disclaimer and stopped commenting publicly on BAN's allegations.

And remember, #2 EcoPark is a direct competitor of E-Steward donors!

5) We had direct tracking of exactly how much of our used electronics we qualify for direct or potential export.  It's under 10%.  We provided that information to MIT Senseable City Lab, who provided it to BAN before BAN issued the 2nd report ignoring that data.   The fact we could track that item without BAN's GPS was less interesting to us than the fact that an E-Steward who pays BAN handsomely cancelled our shipments of printer scrap for several weeks while the GPS tracker was in our building.  A source at MIT has privately confirmed the same suspicion, that BAN had active access to "live" devices and that it would have been simple to warn paying sponsors to avoid shipments containing the devices.

If anyone needed a track record for BAN's targeting of me personally, here is a reminder of a paid BAN staffer's characterization of me, personally, to a Chicago Patch reporter two years earlier, and BAN's public admission of the personal attack, and apology to me.

Whether funders like The Body Shop Foundation or researchers like Carlo Ratti of MIT Senseable City lab will ever partner with Basel Action Network again is an open question.   But they would be wise to track the history and reputation of the "watchdog" that barks at companies that don't pay them "certification fees" worth millions of dollars to stay silent, and to fund vicious racist attacks on innocent Tech Sector importers and exporters like "Hurricane" Joe Benson of the UK - the Tom Robinson of UK's witch hunt into fake news about Agbogbloshie distributed by BAN... falsehoods exposed by me months before BAN's report called me out in shameful light.

It's a shame that legitimate concerns exposed by the study can't now be pursued without airing false propaganda.   The fact our Massachusetts printer, sent to Chicago, didn't go to the place in Hong Kong described and approved (#2) and the reasons - legit or not - given to our downstream USA copy machine repair shop who exported it... all legitimate avenues to explore and learn from.  But those could have been pursued without "unmasking" the unwitting and unwilling participants, and without the 5 research fallacies described above.

I'm bringing this up because last week a Vermont Agency of Natural Resources staff person made a claim about my company and the GPS tracking which did not mention the legal R2 certified facilities in Hong Kong or EcoPark (video above), in defense of new Procedures which the Agency admits are directed at one company - mine.

How To Pay For Africa E-Waste Cleanup?

15 years later, let's just ask what he imports

After 2 weeks back in Ghana, the #1 Finding of our research still stands.  E-Waste NGOs made up fictitious numbers about the percentage of imports to Africa that are "waste" and the percentage of waste in places like Agbogbloshie that come from faulty used good imports ("Exaggerations have been made" said Jim P. on our Salzburg panel).  Photojournalists flew to Accra (Agbogbloshie is about 20 minutes from the airport, 9 minutes from Accra's finest hotel), and took close-up photos of Africans in exotic poses.  And EU policymakers got project funding to "save" Africans from e-waste dumping.

Neither the NGOs, nor the journalists, nor the EU Policy funders checked out existing data on Accra stormwater runoff (the water quality at the Odaw Korle lagoon was hideous in the 1970s), the number of households with televisions in Accra 15 years ago, or the number of people employed in the scrap industry generally as compared to the number seen in Old Fadama slum of Accra. They didn't even find it on mapquest, which would show it's at the center of Accra, not a remote fishing village on the outskirts (as should have been suggested by the cab ride from the hotel). They would have found the phrase "Sodom and Gomorrah" appears in a 2002 AMA publication calling for razing the slum to build shopping malls and parking lots.

There was no basic secondary research.  No control group.  No null hypothesis.

Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts (1992, Robin Ingenthron) - What John Tierney Failed to Learn about Garbage

Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts (1992, Robin Ingenthron)

This is kind of a hoot.  Dr. Josh Lepawsky found a paper I wrote my first months in the job at MA DEP, 30 years old, 25 years ago. It got Boston Globe front page coverage because of ricochet.   A loud PIRG vs. Plastic Packaging Industry referendum fight had thrust "recycling" into a spotlight, and the value of "recycling" rather than the packaging policy itself, was occupying the center stage.  Critics of the referendum were attacking state recycling policy, and proponents of the packaging laws were wrapping themselves in recycling like it was mom, apple pie, and the American flag.

To defend recycling as a policy, I tried to explain that there aren't "good markets" and "bad markets".  There are "buyers markets" and "sellers markets", and from an economic perspective, the paper mills, glass furnaces, metal refiners, etc. were adding more value than "waste diversion" from landfills.  So I got some secondary data on the recycled paper mills etc. that I'd supplied as a recycling collector, added up their employees, and explained the multiipliers.

The paper doesn't do so explicitly, but buried in it was my first realization that paper mills might be worse "neighbors", environmentally (odor, water effluent) than an incinerator or landfill, but they created so many jobs that the neighborhoods surrounding those mills were advocates.  Environmental enforcement was linked, geographically, to real estate value.  Likewise, those same jobs, which would disappear in Massachusetts if the tissue paper had to be made from trees, were far more important economically than the value of a ton of paper at a recycling center.

I was initially accused of writing the paper to influence the referendum (and threatened, professionally). I responded that the paper mill employees and those like me who'd been driving paper recycling trucks were kind of bemused... I might next leak the number of laundromats in MA and see if that got in the Globe.  And four years later, this paper was called upon to rebut John Tierney's "Recycling is Garbage" rant, which in part arose out of the very anti-recycling statements being made during the Packaging Referendum Wars (which employed many Bottle Bill Battle generals... history for another blog).

Anyway I long ago lost track of the paper, Josh found it at the MA State House library.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets 7: The Rusty Radiator Awards

Although I had a degree in International Relations, had spent a semester at the UN, and made a career in the science of development, I racially profiled someone in Singapore in 2005.    I know it now.   I deserve a rusty radiator for racism.

On my way back from Guangzhou, where I had gone for a second visit to see the second-hand shops of Foshan and the "Big Secret Factories" of CRT reuse, I stopped in Malaysia and Singapore for a couple of days.   Armed with my camera, I decided to hunt for some "exotic photos" to prove that I too, like Jim Puckett of BAN.org, had "been there".  Now, Interpol is trumpeting their act. with a project to describe their efforts to arrest "criminals" I refer to as the "geeks of color".

I understand where David Higgins' group at Interpol is coming from.  E-Waste is in the news, and we want to show our credibility, show we have been there, walked the streets, and have seen the problem.  We work for the (world) government, and are here to help. 

The shop below I presented in a Powerpoint slide at a NERC.org conference as an example (an olive branch to Puckett and Westervelt) of clearly bad imports.   I had stayed on the street, waiting for the man who owned this shop (Mr. Teck Recycle) to roll up the metal door.  He had a ladder on the inside, which he needed to physically climb up to the ceiling to start to descend items for resale on the street. 

I acted like I knew where this guy's material came from.   I didn't.

It seemed the guy had packed this 4M x 10M street shop "to the gills" with imports, and was never going to be able to reuse it all.  I represented this person as an example of "toxics along for the ride", of being an example of the primitive importer, and contrasted him with the SKD (semiknockdown or semi-knock-down) factories I wanted to "reform", in our view.

I confess that I assumed this was all recently imported material.  I had absolutely no evidence of that. We now know that the 6 billion people in the "non-OECD" generate far, far more used electronic scrap than the OECD does.

Lets teach them all the missionary position, put them in top hats, and certify them as non-primitives.

Was Mr. Teck Recycle importing at all?   Singapore, though not "OECD", was already as wealthy then as California.   It had become wealthy via the "Tinkerer's Blessing", the reuse and refurbishment trade, which evolved into contract assembly, then into ODM (Original Design and Manufacture).  Sure, some of this material may have been imported, but I had no idea how long before Mr. Teck Recycle got it.   What percentage came from residents of Singapore, which at that time had a higher percentage of engineering degrees, and higher percentage of online high speed bandwith, than the USA's Silicon Valley?   Why did I immediately assume the Singaporean shops were filled with USA "toxics along for the ride" (a phrase I pounded at the NERC audience?)

Sure, it was a sound theory.  Maybe some of this stuff did come "along for the ride".  But I had no proof, all I had was a need to position myself not-too-distantly from Basel Action Network's "80% Primitive Recycling" export statistic, which we now know is no more true than 80% of Los Angeles black teenagers are gang members and high school drop outs (BTW that's said tongue in cheek, it's obviously untrue, but the fact I have to apologize and point that out shows the root of whitey's problem).

Ghana TV repair 2014

Profiling.

My Life In Footnotes: Value Added Recycling Jobs '92

"Value Added by Recycling Industries in Massachusetts" was an article I published in July 1992, in my first few months of my appointment as "Recycling Director" at Massachusetts DEP.  Footnotes to the report live on, and I feel sure I must have a hard copy somewhere, but I cannot find it online any longer.

Drive around the parking lots of your competitors.

Count the cars.

Use the cars to estimate the number of employees.

Some staff may be absent, some may have carpooled, some processors may be more efficient than others. But generally, if you circle 100 paper recyclers parking lots, the ones with just a few cars are less likely to be baling the same amount of material.  The larger ones will actually bale more per employee or more per car perhaps (due to larger, higher efficiency balers), and the smaller ones may employ more people per ton.  But you have a point of reference.

Found Background (while cleaning my office)

I, too, was a poster child.

Found this "Mass DEP Retirement" poster today, while cleaning my office.  From the Apple Macintosh SE in the background, the photo would have been my first year at DEP, or just before I got the job there.  I think I was still at Earthworm Recycling, but moving to DEP at One Winter Street soon after.

While waiting for my hiring package to go through (a process which took months, and which I personally made an effort to shorten by running my own paperwork for new hires), I was writing a novel.  A short time after my retirement party here, my apartment in East Boston was broken into and someone stole the Macintosh.

It was like having a file cabinet stolen.  The computer was worthless, it was obsolete at that point, as far as resale value.  But I was unable to find the novel in the floppy disk drives, and had since moved to Microsoft.

Started the novel again recently, about 15 years later, from memory.

I got too busy to finish the novel when DEP work got going.   Later, a few months after the party here

This, by the way, is the same desk today.   I originally scavenged that wooden desk out of a dumpster at the JFK Building in Boston - where EPA offices were.  I vividly remember tying up the loading dock while I positioned the paper recycling truck I was driving to where I could leverage the wooden desk out of the dumpster.  I finished my masters using this desk, and then it was my home office desk until about 2002.

Now it is a monitor demanufacturing table.




I wonder how many novels we destroy.  It's the same desk, swear.  EPA - Robin - deman.  If you are retiring from EPA, take a look, it may be yours.  No one ever, ever worked as hard on it as it is worked on today...

Massachusetts Bottle Bill - Redemption Centers

A brief history of how government programs to collect deposit containers failed to keep up with the times, and what it means for e-waste and health care.


See Boston Globe on Struggling Redemption Centers...

I don't understand how people failed to grasp this when I was at Massachusetts DEP, and still don't seem to grasp it.

The bottle bill was an anti-litter campaign before it was a recycling campaign.  It somewhat arbitrarily went after "carbonated" beverages and not juice, and failed to anticipate bottled water.

Most of the bottles and cans returned for deposit are single-serve.  Most of those are consumed away from home, at the office or in the car.

Most of those are collected by janitors, custodians, and pickers, and brought to redemption centers (not to retail stores).   The redemption centers, in 1996, were 2% of the locations but handled 40+%  of the total volume.  They haven't had a handling fee increase since the 1980s and some of the distributors stopped collecting from them, making them drive out of state to deliver the containers for no additional fee.

Janitors and park-pickers need the redemption centers.  No one wants people with 600 cans and bottles inside the retail supermarkets.  And curbside programs don't do office buildings and parks (though that could change with my Tomra recommendation below).

So here are some recommendations....  15 years later