Oxpecker Bird 3: In My Opinion Continued from E-Scrap News

Continued From March

"Oxpecker" birds are the ones which eat mites and ticks off of large animals. They are a beneficial, synergistic species.

And this is what I'm comparing the "gray market" to.  These are not my own photos, but they were posted in a blog back in 2006, and they correctly show what I learned was going on in Guiyu.

The reuse of integrated component (IC) chips in Chinese toys and lower end electronics was, at the time, still referred to as grey or gray market. It's possible that some of them were mislabeled as brand new Samsung, Intel, Qualcom, or Cisco chips. But they are not "counterfeit", any more than a used auto part is "counterfeit".

The "80%" dumping estimate was wildly wrong. And I saw more downdraft tables (for protecting workers from inhaling solder) than I ever saw "acid baths".

I did previously publish these photos with permission of the blogger, over ten years ago... but I hesitate to name the blogger now out of concern Big Tech, Planned Obsolescence, Big Shred, and Charitable Industrial Complex might "go after" her/him/them, the way BAN targeted my partners and clients with MIT planted chips back in 2015. MIT still owes me an apology, but I have given up trying to communicate with Sensable City Lab.

Environmental Injustice vs. Environmental Malpractice: Planes, Trains, Laptops and Automobiles

Ship, Plane, Automobile and Cell Phone Recycling

From EPA research archives, here's a photo found by author Adam Minter (ShanghaiScrap, Bloomberg).  Minter covers the history of Automobile hammermill-shredders in this month's Foreign Affairs (a serious coup for an international relations cultist like me).

If you want to understand the scrap electronics business, you should study the scrap automobile business.  And the hard rock mining business.

1974 by Bruce McAlister

As Minter points out in a recent blog post,

At the time this public domain image was shot, abandoned cars were among the most serious environmental crises facing the United States. Estimates vary, but in 1970 General Motors – theoretically, a knowledgeable source – estimated that there were at least 40 million cars abandoned in public places across the United States. In 1967, New York City reported 70,000 cars were abandoned on its streets, alone. By scale, and seriousness, abandoned cars exceeded any waste disposal problem before or since (including the so-called “e-waste” crisis).