Happy Earth Day. If you have all day to read environmental blogs, I suggest a revisit to 2010s "Capacitor Heroes". If you don't understand the last decade's capacitor plague and the good enough markets that replace bulging caps, you won't understand the economics of the export market. IFIXIT gets it. StEP and Interpol, I'm afraid, may not understand how supply and demand work, at least not well enough for a good cost-benefit analysis on exports.
What drives demand in Guiyu? Chip harvest and reuse. You can "externalize pollution costs" much closer, in Haiti or west Texas. Externalized pollution is real, and is a concern, but it's almost never the economic driver of the person paying for the product.
We need to listen to demand, and study it.
