2008 R2 Version 1 Is a Public Document. Certify That You Conform To It

The original Responsible Recycler Version 1 was a public document. EPA in Washington DC paid a professional mediator, John Lingelbach, to host a series of meetings with environmental stakeholders and experts (myself included) to get a standard that ANAB and ANSI could ok various professional auditors, such as Orion Registrars or Perry Johnson Registrars to certify.

Here is a link to the original R2 V1 document, which is now very difficult to find online. I had to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (and I left them a donation, it's a really cool utility).

Conforming to a public standard is something a small recycling business can do without any legal third party, such as SERI or E-Stewards, taking a financial cut. You cannot claim to be certified BY that third party, and you don't get a certificate with a gold star. But you can pay for the exact same person, the exact same auditor, to come and audit your status as certifyable to your conformance to the 2008 standard. 

The Versioin 2 of the R2 standard arguably made no changes at all to the Version 1 other than make it a non-public, copyrighted standard. And that was more than arguably due to the financial interests of the certification organization that John Lingelbach formed in order to make a living and hire people to "maintain" the standard. And they do "Maintain" it, and ANAB and ANSI may or may not add value that ISO (which you have to also adhere to in order to get R2 certification) doesn't give you anyway.

Blemished Smartphone Screens - Exported To Smarter People than You

Was reading a certification program's "rules" about "ready for reuse, ready for repair", and the great white bosses who are ready to save Dark Techies from buying something they want.

The ad above (from Mobile Centrix) links to a video explaining "Grade A, B, and C" of "Blemish Screens".  Grade A has just some bad pixels (like you'd take your phone back to the shop you bought it from yesterday, dissatisfied, for replacement).  Grade B has "bleed" discoloration at the edges. Grade C has visible chip-out black spots on the edges and corners.

A Rich Person's Broken Thing (Chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand, after an explanation from my Grandpa Clarence Fisher) is the smartest thing a poor person can buy.  I've seen absolutely cake-smashed screens in everyday use in Africa.... no one is without a smart phone, but no one is paying $250 for screen repair, either. Instead, they buy these from their cousins who run the kiosk for phone repairs out of your local shopping mall.

Three Truths and a Lie at SERI - Is R2 Certification the Enemy of the Good?

Most followers of the Good Point Ideas Blog already know that the R2 (Responsible Recyclers) Certification program was developed over a decade ago by US EPA.  EPA's Clare Lindsey and Bob Tonetti hired a professional consensus mediator, John Lingelbach, to moderate the development of agreed upon standards that would achieve better results in reuse, repair and recycling of used electronics. Lingelbach later incorporated the Sustainable Electronics Recycling International organization to "house" the new standard. SERI realized that the original standard developed by EPA would be a public document, not copyrightable... so SERI tweaked the R2 Standard in order to establish a way to earn revenue.

SERI's R2 Standard gives prescriptions for electronics recycling practices.  The practices are developed by the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC, the ongoing advisor team from the industry). The TAC standards, if passed by the SERI Board of Directors, create new rules (red tape) for Certified Recyclers to follow.

Without even a formal change in the rules, SERI can issue guidance to reflect a change in interpretation of the original rules.  That's right, a TAC can act like a radical Supreme Court, with no tether to precedent. A clear example of this took place during this year's audit of Good Point Recycling, which passed 99% of the Audit with flying colors. However, the auditor called foul on a trade which passed R2 audits the previous 9 years... a trade that has taken place with the same downstream vendor for 17 years. A new "interpretation" of the old rules may cost my Vermont company $356,000 dollars per year, while achieving zero environmental benefit.

This is messed up. The rules have not yet been changed, but the "interpretation" of the old rules has.

WR3A is Fair Trade Recycling - 10 Years

The World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association, doing business as Fair Trade Recycling, was legally incorporated in Vermont a decade ago.  How have we done, and what it the status?

The group originally had great success by finding very very large import orders (places like Malaysia's Net Peripheral) and working as a collective to supply those orders from USA companies willing to export to the right people.  It was financially interesting to both the buyer and seller.  However, this model created a disincentive to add more members (increasing supplier members diluted USA members, recruiting demand members diluted vetted overseas companies).  Membership reached a critical mass it could not grow from.  We added more USA suppliers, the price of exported goods went down, etc.

The coop model severely imploded in 2012, when a copy of one of our audits of the Malaysia company was sent by a USA Big Shred investor to the Malaysia Department of Environmental Conservation.  The import letter was valid, Malaysia officials said, but they also visited the factory and took away the import permit.

"No good deed goes unpunished."


"Poverty was not created by export of used goods. Wealth was created by import of used goods."

Our Political New Year's Resolution: Ebony and Ivory

It's 6AM and I'm packing the car for another annual cross country road trip from (red state) Arkansas to (blue state) Vermont.  I was hired as a cross cultural trainer for new US Peace Corps volunteers arriving in Cameroon in 1987, and sometimes feel I never stopped.

Can't resist posting my note to the AirBNB host where we stayed in lovely Leslie, Arkansas.  She was the child of a hippie who grew up in the Ozarks and now lives in Seattle.

Finding yourself in liberal Seattle must be like me finding myself in Vermont. Generally I'm very relieved to be away from "ignorant and proud of it" politics here in the southern midwest. But also I find myself very aware of my coastal liberal friends and our own confirmation bias and "profiling" of conservatives, and attributing to 'denial' what may be legitimate skepticism over 'solutions'. Consider yourself a Peace Corps volunteer from a red state.

ebony and ivory stripes (wikipedia chain gang)

Confirmation bias. Profiling.  I'm not immune to it.  None of us can be. But when you walk a mile in another man's shoes - as I've done for a long time with the WEEE export entrepreneurs in emerging markets - you can sit on their jury.  The blindness of NGOs to the studies that show nuance is nothing new.  It's Captain Ahab.  It's Scarlet Letter.  It's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  It's in To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's Huckleberry Finn's crime.  These great works are all about people who start a mission based on justice (like environmental justice) and consider themselves jurists and agents of conscience, but are deafened by their own conclusions.

We need to keep it simple. If I'm skeptical of your trade ban on used electronics as a "solution" (to what? poverty?) that does not make me a "denier". Let's find something else to agree on, a simple message that might appeal to rural and urban and OECD and non-OECD.

Real Time reporting on BAN Report - Dell Reconnect Fallacy

Click BELOW for Real Time Analysis Blog on Controversial NGO + MIT Allegations #trackingewaste.

- NGO False Claims Act Rebuttal
- Methodology / Fallacy in Sampling Data
- False Claims vs. Goodwill Industries, Dell ReConnect
- EStewards Accusations vs. Total Reclaim / Seattle
- Alternative Explanations for "conclusions" reached by NGO
- Research leads, links to vetted data.

Unlike normal blogs, this one is being updated with information about the "scandal" of alleged e-waste exports to Hong Kong and other countries, made to support NGO's claim that it's paid e-Stewards certification, or national legislation, would cure environmental problems overseas without resulting in collateral damage (impugning reuse and refurbishment operations, boycotting geeks of color, sacrificing tradeable commodities covered under WTO "cores" law, racial profiling of recycling operations, false attribution of Basel Convention standards Annex IX B1110, fallacy in sampling data, sampling bias, etc.).  The chief counterpoints to this blog (the story we are debating) can be found at the links below.

http://kcts9.org/programs/circuit

BAN Web page (just going online) http://www.ban.org/trash-transparency

MIT SenseAble City http://senseable.mit.edu/monitour

Like every one of these blogs, the views here are only my own and do not represent my company, any research or journalists I cooperate with, or the not-for-profit Fair Trade Recycling group (WR3A). The views are put forth in belief in debate, rebuttal, and defense of a trade which has received exaggerated and hyperbolized accusations, often against Emerging Market Tech Sector businesses who have little ability to respond to "profiles" created in the Western Press.

For ten years the Blog has told everyone that the NGO was making up the "80% Export" e-scrap myth out of whole cloth, and knew it was misleading reputable journalists in an "e-waste hoax" campaign that benefited the NGO financially.   For ten years we have documented that the NGO uses photos of poor people, implying it benefits them, but never spending a single penny to assist or aid them in any way.  For ten years this blog has alerted Interpol, EPA, trade associations, university researchers, interns, legislators and journalists of misleading and incomplete information being generated about the import and export of second-hand and secondary market commodities.

I do not know how long I will update this piece on the NGO's accusations against Goodwill Industries and certified and non-certified electronics recycling companies, and the overseas markets they may or may not trade with.  My passion for this is driven by victims in developing and emerging markets who are a) recycling material their own country traded in to them in upgrade, b) refurbishing newer second hand equipment imported from the USA and other "rich" nations, and c) general disgust as an environmentalist that organizations seeking to benefit from "strategic metals retention" or "planned obsolescence" or "protecting shredding investments" may be funding a propaganda campaign against the people I called (over ten years ago) "Geeks of Color".

MORE
MORE
MORE