Vik Muniz "Waste Land" (2010)

This week, I'm organizing a slew of information about the Vermont "E-Waste" Program, for a series I call "Muleskinner Blues".   I cannot just write it in anger, I'm gonna try to be very objective.  But there is a point at which the reputation of a state for beauty and environmentalism can get in the way of sustainability.

How important is what we do in Vermont?  Well, it's just a dingy little scrap company.   We aren't very profitable.  And the reuse, the reuse I pride myself in, is sharply declining.

Valter: [talking about the importance of recycling] People sometimes say "But one single can?" One single can is of great importance. Because 99 is not 100, and that single one will make the difference.

99 não é 100

That quote is from Waste Land, a documentary I watched this morning with my wife and daughter.  It's by the Brazilian born artist Vik Muniz.   I won't go into a "spoiler" about the film, I want everyone to see it.  Or at least watch the interview with Valter, posted from youtube at the bottom of this blog post.

How E-Stewards Made Me Rich?

Confessions of an Exporter on "America Recycles Day"

Well, rich is a bit of an overstatement.  But here's why I should be happy about BAN being around for the past decade, if not as happy as other exporters they made even richer.

Robin Ingenthron, Caught in the Act of Reuse, 2004

A decade ago, the SKD (elective upgrade) factories in Guangdong Provice (China),  Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia were buying hundreds of thousands of CRT computer monitors per week - mostly from California.  BAN's first video, showing primitive recycling conditions in Guiyu, led Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and other non-profits to believe that anyone Chinese who buys monitors is burning and breaking them.

This led to a system of subsidies on the west coast, where consumers are taxed to break (cancel) monitors so they cannot be resold in Asia.  California CRT monitor supply disappeard from the market, almost overnight, or had to be smuggled in a replace-CA-address-with-AZ-product campaign (see Monkeys Running Environmental Zoo, my most-read post ever).

Tested Working Monitors, back in the day

The Asian factories still had very high demand for remanufacturing display units in emerging markets like India, Egypt, and Indonesia.  Reluctantly, they raised prices and offered to pay higher shipping costs from companies like mine, on the East Coast.  California's shortfall brought booming demand to New York, Boston, and even floated boats in Vermont.

In my defense, I declared the good things going on and tried to bring BAN on board, but the pictures of good geeks of color doing good things with exported displays complicated BAN's message.  It was easier for most recyclers to tell American consumers that the importers were "poisoning children", rather than make the effort to distinguish between good and bad reuse and recycling.