Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit Update

Earth Week Event:  Fair Trade Recycling (of "e-Waste") Summit in Vermont

copyright robin ingenthron

There is considerable interest in our April 16 Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit, a free conference paid for by Middlebury College, Memorial University, and WR3A.   In fact, we are out of seats already.

The good news is that the Summit will be broadcast via Live Streaming throughout the day.  We are preparing a number of videos to fill the gaps between sessions.

I'll post a list of speakers and presenters and panelists this week.  We are immensely honored at the number of Guests who have chosen to attend in person rather than via the Skype options offered to the presenters.

Fair Trade Recycling Summit Nations Represented (confirmed participation to date)

• Angola * Burkina Faso * Canada * China * Egypt * Holland  * Indonesia
• Malaysia * Mexico *  Peru *  Switzerland * USA

more

The Competition for Used TV Supply

In the Peru blogs, I described how used TVs from China were found in the markets where I used to sell used USA CRT televisions.

The people who used to buy USA used repairable / working TVs now buy Chinese repairable / working TVs.

Is the solution a ban on exports of used TVs from China to South America?  Or does that just mean that South America will have neither USA nor Chinese used (affordable) TVS?

First we ban USA "e-waste" exports, then we convince China to be afraid of brown children who receive ewaste...?

thanks to Adam Minter at Shanghaiscrap.com  for the link to the photo above, from an article at Southern China Weekly. 

"E'Waste" Repair: They Took the Road Most Travelled

Agriculture in developing worlds can mean starvation.   There are a lot of things better than starvation.  Perhaps they shouldn't have to make that choice.  But they do.

Roll up the window, you're letting the air out

• Bush meat, hunting of endangered species.

• Gold mining and gold panning, using mercury from USA's recycled lamps

• Cutting rain forests.

• Soldier.

• Sex worker.

• Kidnapper, pirate, and thief.

There are many paths once the starving leave the rural fields and move to the slums.

There are not as many ways out. (World Bank: Informality & Productivity in the Labor Market in Peru)

Scrapping and repairing are not on the lists of Ju-ju professions.  The strong concentration of scrappers in China and Africa is not a sign of exploitation.  These are good people who are trying to thread a needle, who are trying to create wealth in the most honorable way they can.   Scrap and repair is the road most travelled for the smartest kids in the slums.

Jorge is still fixing TVs.   Choma was not replaced.  See them in action in the 2008 video below

They cannot all be taxi drivers, cooks, and teachers.  There has to be a way to add value.  Entire economies are supported on the multipliers from scrap and reuse.  The money they bring in makes another career, like teaching or taxi driving, or pie baking possible.

Earth Day: Pre-Apology to EWaste Watchdogs

I've been working all week on a formal apology - or rather, a "Separate Peace" letter for Basel Action Network.   I'll never try anything like the California Compromise with them again.  Whether the "outing" of the Indonesian SKD factory was the direct result of my sharing the information about them with BAN, or not, they were callous at best and continued to not lift a finger to help my friends...

But I learned last week that the Indonesians are shrugging it off.   They appreciate my attention to righting the infamy.  It hurt, the stupid anti-reuse policy cost them tens of thousands of dollars and forced shutdown of a recycling operation for Indonesia-generated e-waste.

But they are getting over it.  Seeing them calm and laughing and making do reminds me of what I loved about my years in Africa.   People didn't hold grudges so much, didn't take themselves all that way too seriously.

And so the point has come that I need to move on.  If USA wants to keep thinking Egyptians are burning the computers they bought for $30 in a landfill and that Egyptian authorities in 2008 were concerned about the environment, well, we think plenty of stupid things and that's number umpteen on some list.

The trick writing-and-rewriting an apology is that it has to be done well.  If you are not really ready to apologize and are going to work in some blame-deflection, then don't do it yet.

This was my family's hostess, a really beautiful young South American woman.  She used to import used USA electronics, and built a business with 6 employees.  Then she bought used Chinese TVs as Chinese cities all moved to flat screens.  Then she bought cheap Chinese-factory refurbished flat screens.   She'd like to start a factory making new product in Peru... but for now she's helping her brother open a restaurant in the shop they used to sell CRT monitors in.

Sssssssssssssssssss.........

RIP: Choma, Lima TV Repairman 1946-2011

Choma, Peru Tech, 1946-2011

As we wind up our re-tour, revisit, and update of the Peru reuse market, we need to share some sad news.  Choma was a TV repairman and longtime employee of ACETV, a women-owned Peru electronics importer (one of our hosts).   

The import business had slowed.  Jinex's brother's monitor resale shop has been converted to a restaurant, and her repair business, while still plugging away, is smaller (one of her 6 employees now does repair).  Choma, one of her older techs, passed away at age 65 about a year ago.

Neither side of the e-waste/e-scrap/e-reuse debate is immune from overstating our case, or of using people as pawns in our war of imagery.  I've used Choma's photo a lot during the past 5 years.  I hope not to become a "parasite of the poor" myself.  This blog shouldn't try to exaggerate the technicians in the emerging world as being some kind of a lavish success story.  The shops are dirty, the work is hard, the workers are poor.  Choma died of stomach cancer, we can't know what difference more money would have made.

Trade, as opposed to the "business" of stopping trade, is by definition something we want to go on and on.  We want to continue to meet the people we do business with, again and again and again.  Success for a fair trade recycler is coming back and making another trade.  Success is when the exchange goes well, both sides make a little more money and get something they would not otherwise have gotten.  But no business is immortal, and as cheaper new (and refurb, and gray market) products arrive in Peru from China, careers like Choma's may pass away, as the TV repair business has in the USA.

When you take pictures of technicians in shops overseas, you are hoping to see them again.   When they pass, like Choma, you have a chance to remember them and be sad for their families, but happy to have worked together, even if you never spoke the same language.  I think there's a distinction between the photos of relationships, and the drive-by photos meant to impart shame, which raise money without ever sharing the names, much less the dimes.   But recycling tourism is also borderline exploitation, and with humility I can say only that I know who Choma was, and I know whom he worked for.  I cannot say he knows me or that I was his friend.   I'm glad for him to have had a sustainable career, and I hope his family knows the respect which some of us feel for the Geeks of Color.

I do have film of the younger (and one older) generation of TV and monitor repair geeks here in South America.  There is still another decade of tinkering to do.  The Tinkerer is Gone, Long Live the Tinkerers.

The theme of this recycling-oriented graffiti-mural, photographed yesterday, seems to be, to take our causes seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.

Undisciplined blogging on "e-waste" arts

James Joyce chose his path.

Maybe he was only discovered by a future group of readers.

Maybe he wrote for them and didn't care about his hit counts in the meantime.

You don't want to aggravate and alienate a current reader (though artists have done so).

But if they were attracted to you originally for being what you are being, maybe trying to be someone else to keep them isn't the right response.

I can't personally respond to comments from the future, though.  And I thrive on dialectic.  So I have to get my dialectic dialogue fix from the people spitting on my tinkerer friends.

My belief is that I cannot possibly write anything to change the hearts and minds of the planned obsolescence and shredding industrial complex.  They are money making tiger robots, burning bright.

But if I manage to penetrate a spouse or son or respected elder, someone with a soul and a personal connection to the people pulling the trigger of friendly fire, that I may, as one person, have an effect.

I'm taking my family to meet these men and women in South America next month.  They previously met geeks, tinkerers, techs, and good-enough debrillards in Egypt and Mexico.  My 3 kids don't have a hint in their minds that Africans or Asians or Latinos are lesser intellects.  They've seen engineering techs best me in trade and haggling, fixing things I couldn't, winning like friends across a tennis court.

That's finally it.  The Watchdogs kids will get images of primitives.  My kids have images of equals.  Stuff that in your turkey.

Veolia, EPSI... Mercury Export Consequences

Product Stewardship Policy Question:  Which is worse, Mercury Recycling (required) or TV export for Repair (proposed to be prohibited)?

John Fialka's WSJ seminal reporting (2006) on the "mercury recycling" trade revealed that not all environmental laws result in environmental justice.   There are some things that shouldn't be recycled.    If recycling mercury from lamps and thermostats recovers mercury, and mercury has been eliminated as an ingredient in new products, here's what to expect:

A) mercury sales to primitive, toxic, conflict gold-mining operations in Congo
B) billions of dollars of mercury recycling costs in the USA  

Description of where the mercury is sold, and how it is used:

While most of the gold is produced by major corporations, tens of thousands of people work independently in smaller, artisan operations, in some cases illegal. In Ghana, for instance, the galamseys are estimated to number 20,000 to 50,000.^[7] In neighboring francophone countries, such workers are called orpailleurs. In Brazil, such workers are called garimpeiros.

The high risk of such ventures was seen in the collapse of an illegal mine at Dompoase, Ashanti Region, Ghana, on 12 November 2009, when 18 workers were killed, including 13 women. Many women work at such mines as porters. It was the worst mining disaster in Ghanaian history.^[7]

In order to maximize gold extraction, mercury is often used to amalgamate with the metal. The gold is produced by boiling away the mercury from the amalgam, a hazardous process due to toxicity of mercury vapour. Mercury is effective in extracting very small gold particles, but should be reclaimed, instead, in an effective and safe process.   (wikipedia 2010.12.09)

The EU and USA responded by banning export of hg mercury as a commodity.  The USA ban on exports begins in 2013.  This is an export ban I really like, and Basel Secretariat should focus on this "recycling export" WAY more than it should focus on electively upgraded parts during used computer repair.


Alluvial mining is basically the ONLY market demand for the mercury.  When it is banned... expect mercury recycling companies in the USA and Europe (like Veolia) to have a tough year.