I have to catch the 5A Bus to Dulles, and don't have many good pictures of the US Trade Commission hearings. But I'll mention this:
The last panel of shredders and recyclers said that rare earth metals are not recoverable, and kind of waffled on the question whether hand disassembly provides better quality.
Here is an article by Bloomberg Reporter Adam Minter, who visited our Fair Trade Recycling partner in Malaysia. They hand-disassemble hard drives there, and sell the rare earth magnets directly back to a company like Seagate in Singapore for direct reuse. I'll show these magnets in a future post.
Here is an article recently posted by Fair Trade Recycling researcher Adelaide Rivereau, who is in Vermont from Marseilles, France, to study "e-waste" policy. She has found definitive third party research showing that hand disassembly has greater value, creates more jobs, and has twice the environmental benefit when reuse components are recovered.
So how can someone testify under oath that rare earth magnets are not recoverable and hand disassembly is not preferable?
If you repeat the words "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste" as many times as our shredder competitors said it, you can become entranced. They made reference to an article from 2008 by National Geographic, talking about the dirty children burning waste computers from the city of Accra.
The photographer, Peter Selleck, ALSO visited the fair trade recycling company visited by Minter, and showed pictures of the reuse operation there. But there were no children in those photos, so if I say "remember the really great operation in National Geographic? That's the one where I learned to hand disassemble hard drives for magnets". No one remembers the National Geographic in that context.
Toxic "ewaste" + Shredder = small pieces of toxic "ewaste" = $$$
The last panel of shredders and recyclers said that rare earth metals are not recoverable, and kind of waffled on the question whether hand disassembly provides better quality.
Here is an article by Bloomberg Reporter Adam Minter, who visited our Fair Trade Recycling partner in Malaysia. They hand-disassemble hard drives there, and sell the rare earth magnets directly back to a company like Seagate in Singapore for direct reuse. I'll show these magnets in a future post.
Here is an article recently posted by Fair Trade Recycling researcher Adelaide Rivereau, who is in Vermont from Marseilles, France, to study "e-waste" policy. She has found definitive third party research showing that hand disassembly has greater value, creates more jobs, and has twice the environmental benefit when reuse components are recovered.
So how can someone testify under oath that rare earth magnets are not recoverable and hand disassembly is not preferable?
If you repeat the words "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste" as many times as our shredder competitors said it, you can become entranced. They made reference to an article from 2008 by National Geographic, talking about the dirty children burning waste computers from the city of Accra.
The photographer, Peter Selleck, ALSO visited the fair trade recycling company visited by Minter, and showed pictures of the reuse operation there. But there were no children in those photos, so if I say "remember the really great operation in National Geographic? That's the one where I learned to hand disassemble hard drives for magnets". No one remembers the National Geographic in that context.
Toxic "ewaste" + Shredder = small pieces of toxic "ewaste" = $$$
