Let's End the Feud with Prison Industries over "E-Waste" Recycling.
I've made this proposal before. But I recently read another company's blog about "e-waste recycling", and noticed they had several posts dedicated to bashing Unicor, the Federal Prison Industries program which makes electronics recycling cheap by using USA prison labor to take apart computer scrap. That is "kinda now, kinda wow, kinda 2003."
There are two arguments against Unicor's prison recycling program.
The first issue is that the workers are somehow poisoned and endangered. This is false. False false false. I don't even want to get into this, except to say that if private USA recyclers want to start a bidding war with the federal government's prison system about who can make a safer facility, they are shortsighted to be kind. The Unicor facilities I have visited have waxed floors which may well have been cleaned with toothbrushes and tweezers. These places are stone cold ISO rule-abiding recycling joints, and the only toxics problems they've had were from early years, when e-waste recycling was new. Comparing a modern private facility to a decade-old Unicor operation just isn't a fair comparison, and it's stupid to make it. It's typical of an immature industry to promote false rumors about competitors.
I've made this proposal before. But I recently read another company's blog about "e-waste recycling", and noticed they had several posts dedicated to bashing Unicor, the Federal Prison Industries program which makes electronics recycling cheap by using USA prison labor to take apart computer scrap. That is "kinda now, kinda wow, kinda 2003."
There are two arguments against Unicor's prison recycling program.
The first issue is that the workers are somehow poisoned and endangered. This is false. False false false. I don't even want to get into this, except to say that if private USA recyclers want to start a bidding war with the federal government's prison system about who can make a safer facility, they are shortsighted to be kind. The Unicor facilities I have visited have waxed floors which may well have been cleaned with toothbrushes and tweezers. These places are stone cold ISO rule-abiding recycling joints, and the only toxics problems they've had were from early years, when e-waste recycling was new. Comparing a modern private facility to a decade-old Unicor operation just isn't a fair comparison, and it's stupid to make it. It's typical of an immature industry to promote false rumors about competitors.
