Right To Repair During Pandemic

This morning brings an astute opinion page article by Adam Minter of Bloomberg, about how we are more vulnerable today to anti-reuse and anti-repair (planned obsolescence) strategies today than we were a couple of months ago. Apple has closed its "authorized" repair hubs, and the crackdown on trade in Asia during the pandemic has made replacement devices much more difficult and timely to order.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-28/apple-s-rules-make-iphone-repairs-hard-to-get-amid-coronavirus?srnd=opinion

This excellently explained column may give Right To Repair legislation the push that it needs in Vermont. I will certainly be sending it to my legislators in Addison County.

Adam Minter is a swordfish - a reader who is interested in, understands, and re-conveys messages better and more broadly than you can. The meta-blogger should not be interested only in the number of readers (the most widely prescribed blogging strategy) or page rank, but in the ability to draw in a deeper intellectual with the capacity to make change. Of the three books of 1960 which influenced me deeply - To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper), Silent Spring (Carlson), and The Waste Makers (Packard) - the third is perhaps most under threat by big manufacturers. It is getting cut out of school books. More below on why that matters...

Fishing for Swordfish

(This blog is both about a personal history on the subject of interest - right to repair - and also a commentary on "meta-blogging" which is a strategy of writing dense blogs that attract fewer - but more influential - followers)

Earth Week Academia: Reading Fair Trade Recycling Summit

Nalanda University India ruins:  A-Waste?

The Fair Trade Recycling Association has been asked by professors at Memorial University and Middlebury College to suggest a "reading list" for students preparing to attend the Fair Trade Recycling Summit.  The Summit will be streamed online from Middlebury College on April 16, 2013.

Colleges and universities outside of Middlebury are watching, from classrooms in the faraway reaches of Africa, South America, and California.  I thought I'd post the readings which have been discussed and may be assigned to the classes at Middlebury College.  It's a great bibliography for a serious term paper in environmental studies or international economics or political science.

Big Works are from 1960.  Environmental Studies they should be aware of them and we can recommend a chapter of each.

"Silent Spring" by Rachael Carlson, created awareness/knowledge of an "invisible toxic enemy".

"The Waste Makers" by Vance Packard, is about the corporate bias against reuse and repair, and the extent to which "planned obsolescence" will grow.  Republished featuring an introduction by Bill McKibben of Middlebury College.

The question is whether the "Waste Makers" are using cognitive risk marketing (from Silent Spring) to make environmentalists exaggerate fear of "e-waste" recycling.

Specific, Shorter, Background Reading on "E-waste":

Term Paper II: "e-Waste" Export, Geography of Environmental Justice

Yesterday's thesis about the relationship between land value, environmental enforcement, and pollution, used a map from http://scorecard.goodguide.com/env-releases/land/,  showing toxic release sites on a map of the USA, and a chart from the same website showing the relative amount of toxics generated in specific localities.  When the releases are charted as "an occurance" and each release is given a single data point, the map shows the "superfund sites" to be concentrated in urban areas.

The sites, when weighted by actual tons of pollutions, are 83.75% in the top 20 / 100 sites (suggesting the 80/20 rule or Paretto Principle may apply).  The top 10 sites are in Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Missouri (Doe Run area), and Orange Florida.  Each of these sites has a "drilldown" function for data at Scorecard.Goodguide.com  Orange County Florida, the one non-western, non-mining area on the top ten list, has a NASA, USA Department of Defense, WR Grace, Dupont, Department of Energy, Chevron industry, etc. on its list of "potentially responsible parties" for lagoon pollution.  The nine sites above it are raw material extraction industry sites, none of which, my thesis states, could function economically inside a high-property value area.

1.	NORTHWEST ARCTIC, AK	481,382,100
2.	HUMBOLDT, NV	350,591,683
3.	PINAL, AZ	248,792,746
4.	SALT LAKE, UT	138,824,328
5.	ELKO, NV	83,494,740
6.	GILA, AZ	57,220,938
7.	EUREKA, NV	43,572,135
8.	OWYHEE, ID	28,887,324
9.	REYNOLDS, MO	27,313,480
10.	ORANGE, FL	24,032,977

The enforcement and likelihood that a site is identified as a threat is proportionate to its proximity to a landholder complaining about it.  For this reason, the "superfund" target sites on the USA map above are concentrated around cities and population centers.  This "NIMBY" or "Not In My Back Yard" dynamic is part of a normal democracy.  The spotlight on "environmental justice" in the USA focused on the difference the likelihood of enforcement correlated to race of neighborhoods;  that's an overlyer, according to my thesis, for economics and property values.  As I pointed out in one of the Slums Blogs last spring, 5th Avenue in Manhattan had auto repair shops a hundred years ago... but these relocated to Queens because it's easier to do repair work on an area with lower property value.

The Diagram Below generalizes the relationship between property value, wealth, and awareness of pollution. People live in rural villages, forests, and plains, but their population density is lower, and enforcement of all types is less likely in these areas.

The difficulty or unlikelihood of an enforcement paradigm outside of a population center is why emerging market city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore are more likely to achieve OECD-like status sooner than an emerging market like Malaysia or Indonesia or Brazil... the most recent nations admitted entry into OECD have been small.   Large nations admitted to OECD tend to have gained entrance early on, because of their econmic power (like the USA).  The USA was admitted into OECD while the pollution in Orange County was occuring, but as one of the "founders" of the OECD, the USA benefitted from a simpler formula - wealthy and white.  Not even Japan was not on the first OECD list.