Social Strata Recycling: It's the Recycling Economy Stupid

 While I'm certainly not a fan of communism or any system that concentrates authority in a smaller number of bullyboy hands, I do respect Karl Marx's economic theories. Compound interest rewards those who save - who tend to be those ABLE to save.  If you are born to slaves or paupers, and have no choice but to lift your bucket where it is and lift as you climb, you are extremely unlikely to become self-made in a single generation.

It's the Recycling Economy Stupid.

That said, teaching people that it is hopeless to lift their buckets as they climb is cruel and unusual, historically speaking. The empowerment of resentment - Marx's elixer for proletariat revolution - has little evidence of building wealth in society at large. Most people benefit from a smaller slice of a bigger pie than taking away another person's piece and re-distributing it among sharp elbowed bullies.

The Ptolemy-Liability Trap: Simplified Recycling Lifecycle Narratives Tend to Revolve Around You

The Vermont free-mail, coupon-funded newspaper "Hometown" is published and mailed by the Burlington Free Press - which, with its Headliner newspaper, follows the opposite, paywall approach, online. So I'm in a bit of a quandary in presenting the snapshot, below, of the opening paragraphs of the article. Well, it's a fair use claim, and also it's common practice for newspapers to show the "lede" (opening paragraphs), so here's what catches my attention this morning.

Burlington Free Press Thanksgiving "Hometown" Edition

Joel Banner Baird of Burlington Free Press may well have started a "recycling" story for the same reason that @AdamMinter told me those stories normally appear around holidays.... they are easy to write, require little more than a google page one of research, and seem to appeal to everyone. They are not time sensitive, so a reporter can write it a week ahead, and get home for the holidays faster. But at least in the opening paragraphs, Baird bluntly avoids the normal "gotcha" narratives common in holiday journalism (someone made millions of dollars recycling trash was the go-to in the 1980s, your recyclables didn't really get recycled in the 1990s, lather-rinse-repeat for every buyers-market, sellers-market cycle). It leads, but does not bleed.

The opening interview with Michael Noel (nice holiday namesake) of TOMRA, the master-redemption center recycling provider and owner of most supermarket reverse-vendor container machines, avoids falsely choosing between either "It was the best of times."  

...Or, "It was the worst of times".

Which is the most environmentally sustainable Container for my holiday beer?

Michael Noel tells Joel Banner Baird "The short answer is, it's complicated". That is an honest answer to the decades of environmentalists (spoilt brat) privileged demands to "choose" the "best" beer container, vs. the equally misguided alt-right "recycling is Bulls**t" waste-makers. Both camps are uber-susceptible to cognitive dissonance (or perhaps vice versa, those prone to cognitive dissonance probably lean toward extreme positions). The more they choose one answer (only use this one vs. nothing matters, environmentalists are wrong), the louder they both get. Outrage is not Expertise.

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Anti-Anti-Liberals: Moore (In)digestion of "Planet of the Humans"

Renewable energy is only necessary, certainly not sufficient. Planet of the Humans is too harsh on its arguable over-emphasis, but anti-Moore reaction misses an important point... Carbon policy needs to share Earth Day's platform with rain forest action, emerging market litter collection, palm oil plantation reform, and other environmental causes. People don't care about 4 degree average temperature, even if that would be fatal. People care about baby animals, and extinction, and those thinks are disappearing at a rate that 350.org is not addressing.  To boil it all down to a tweet:

Robin I

@WR3A

·

Planet of the Humans? Bushmeat hunting + overfishing + burning rainforest for pastures + palm oil demand + wet markets + shark fin soup adds up to a disaster is more critical than carbon. But none of those crises add to

@MMFlint

@jeffgibbstc

anti-corporation thesis Fixing climate is necessary, not sufficient

That's the best I can do at defending, and de-fanging, Planet of the Humans. As a documentary, it sucks. The reporter is trying to be at the center of his own story. Second, it's a case study in "gotcha-ism", the presentation of anecdotes for the sole purpose of damaging the personal reputations of decent people, not just the flaws in their positions. That's a recipe for bad journalism.

Here is a link to addressing @MMFlint (Michael Moore) and @JeffGibbstc and their army of detractors, harvesting the best arguments from both sides... Followed by my meta-comments.

Bill McKibben Responds to Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs "Planet of the Humans"

As I said in the last blog,  it's a mistake to tell environmentalists not to watch "Planet of the Humans". Scientific Method, and Socratic Method require we rid ourselves of confirmation bias. 

That said, I agree with very much of Bill McKibben's response in Rolling Stone today... that is when he sticks to dialectic. Calling producer Michael Moore (he ignores Gibbs) a terrorist is just as bad as the ad hominem attacks BK complains about. From McKibben's letter to Rolling Stone:

Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.” 

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.”

McKibben goes on to call "Planet of the Humans" a sewer, implying there is certainly absolutely no reason to watch it. That goes too far, and avoids answering important questions raised about the way greenwashing can exploit "groupthink" and "bias confirmation". I would instead suggest Bill hold a public viewing of the documentary, and allow himself to pause and annotate it at will.

Regulatory Gymnastics: Officials' Time Out for Recycling Waste Offset

Hey, just a quick note to those of you who have been asking what the latest is with the Fair Trade Recycling Offsets.  I remain really excited about this.  But we had a little setback which has stalled the project.

Here's the history, the latest roadblock in RED.

1. Fair Trade Recycling started with Purchase Orders and Fair Trade Contracts.  When we wrote down what overseas buyers DID NOT ACCEPT, it became pretty clear very quickly that they were not buying stuff to burn it or to operate a "Pollution Haven".  Someone paying us 10 times more for a CRT than it's worth in scrap, but paying ZERO for the same make and model which has damage (disqualifying it from the purchase order) is presumed to be a good actor.

regulatory gymnastics (Labadi Beach Accra, Ghana)

Fair Trade Recycling invited to present at IERC Conference in Salzburg, Austria

"Writing export rules for used electronics without consulting Africa's Tech Sector is like writing health rules without ever talking to a doctor." - Emmanuel Nyaletey, 2018 IERC Congress

One week ago, one of Fair Trade Recycling's representatives and board member, Emmanuel Nyaletey, presented on a panel to address European Union representatives on their e-waste export policies, especially the ones directed at Africa.

How To Steer Environmental Movements: 15 Year Quarterbacking

I was rather concerned 15 years ago that the Al Gore - led carbon global warming movie was gathering so much steam that it was cannibalizing the "Rainforest" focus of the previous decade. I was concerned that, tactically, it was recruiting people away from Rain Forest action more than it was attracting non-environmentalists (though I conceded it was doing both). My suggestion then was that Gore, McKibben, and cohorts make habitat preservation as a "carbon sink" more front and center than energy generation.

About 10 years ago, a reporter friend, Ingrid Lobet, who had worked on NPR's Retroworks de Mexico coverage let me know she was going on assignment to Indonesia, where the burning of the rainforest was exposing so much peat and carbon sequestered (deep organics under trees) that it was turning the geography (former rain forest) from a "sink" into a top emitter of carbon.



Here's news about an agency making dead rain forest carbon a top issue. https://eia-international.org/our-work/ecosystems-biodiversity/forest

Ducking the Dunning–Kruger Effect (Part 1)

Dunning-Kruger Effect describes a lot of activists on the right and left. The only cures are hindsight, skepticism, humility, and listening. Duck.

We slowly learn that "e-waste dynasty" is really not that special.   It has been a good ride. It brought something new for career recyclers like myself to get excited about, after the goals of universal curbside recycling, recycled content, household hazardous waste collections, and landfill capping and closure became yawn-ho-hum.

And it is indeed important not to squander the carbon embedded in the manufacture of gadgets.  Vital to respect the enormous burden of mining on Earth's habitats. Our demand for copper, silver, gold, zinc, palladium, rhodium, tantalum, and other minerals and metals to make our chips, capacitors and circuits is crushingly important.  

But the "impact" of discarded electronics on landfills and foreign beaches has been overplayed.   The associated toxics are far less newsworthy than "a-waste" (automobiles), original mining of the metals, original manufacture, or even the use and disuse of the electronics during its life.

What "the great e-waste crisis" offered was illusory superiority.  In a vacuum of data and definition, we became our own titles.  We announced ourselves as "non-exporters", or "professionals", or "stewards", or "certified".   We became "Good guys".  Our companies were "Creative", and "Synergistic" and "International" and "Solutions", all competing (for attention and investment) in "solving the e-waste problem".

A new cause is an opportunity to claim expertise as the journalists come looking.  But what were we "experts" in, really, except the "topic" of a new category of scrap?

What do you know, really, about the oldest Texas Instruments calculator in your house?   You've owned it 30 years.  Are you an expert about its end-of-life?  Does the fact that you own it, and the prospective buyer (in China) does not (yet), make you the expert on e-waste?

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.^[1] Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding."

"Where Unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority..."  How well does the Dunning-Kruger effect describe rallies to the cause of electronics recycling?

Everyone in the developed world, and billions of people in the emerging world, have something electronic which was worth a lot of money once and now isn't.  It's the "wealth" of "e-waste" haves.  You are a "have",  I'm a "have".  Six billion out of seven billion - the "non-OECD" - have been defined as the "have-nots".   Yet 80% of them are actually "haves" as well.  But if you are looking for a 30 year old "waste" item, like a TI calculator, you better look first among the "haves" of Christmas Past.

We have evolved to save things which we procured at cost.  Our ancestors survived on the reuse of spear-heads, and scavenging biproduct bones.  We are programmed to get value back out of things we have invested in.   But if there's nothing economic to do with it, it just manifests itself as guilt.

Solutionism and Doubt in Solutionists

Taking a break to edit the lined up "Bullyboy blogs".  The character assassination of Africans who provide the ONLY affordable supply to the demand for television and internet in rapidly urbanizing nations is bad enough. Spending tax money and diverting limited Interpol resources from Transfigura dumping and ivory and big cat poaching is despicable.   But I need a cool-down, to focus and edit the blog.

In the meantime, I thought I'd coined a new word, but found it exists in the dictionary.

Noun[edit]

solutionism (uncountable)

1. The belief that all difficulties have benign solutions, often of a technocratic nature.
2. The providing of a solution or solutions to a customer or client.

Related terms[edit]

• solutionist

I was responding to an "Upworthy" post on Global Warming "debate", which is sharing a ConsensusProject graph.  The graph seems to say that a majority of people are not as smart as informed scientists are, which is no doubt true (almost to the point of being tautological.  If everyone knows what a scientific researcher knows, it kind of doesn't speak well of the pursuit).



Still, I was then struck by the Upworthy punchline:

You might know people who fall in the black part of the first graph. Maybe you could show this to them?

You know what, I do.  I know conservatives.  I myself believe it's obvious the world is warming, slightly less obvious what the primary reason is, but obvious that carbon emission doesn't help.  So far, I'm ok with my liberal friends here.

But I also notice this (as I commented on the Upworthy Facebook post).

Robin Ingenthron I think response to public surveys reveal dissonance between "is warming real" and "I buy into carbon trading schemes and social engineering designed to fix it". Given the choice between "yes or no" surveyees tend to look past the yes-no dichotomy and anticipate the way the results will be used. I'm sure there are a heck of a lot of deniers out there, but am also sure that the 55% would include people who are skeptics of the "Solutionists".

I've seen it over and over, and I observe it in myself.  When I'm being polled, the first question I ask back is "who is paying for this poll?".   There are some genuine polls out there.  But it seems like most of the polling I'm subjected to has a funder with a confirmation bias.  A political candidate, a party, or some other agenda.

Solutionism, like most other 'isms', is something a lot of us want to "step away slowly" from.

Why Recycling Coordinator Title Trumps Sustainability Coordinator

College and university recycling staff (CURC etc) kept in touch durint the Fair Trade Recycling Summit (Earth Week in Middlebury).  Some have confided that recycling is old hat, "sustainability" is in, and that energy and carbon are at their peak for "prestige" positions at their institutions.

Have always said our goal is for recycling to be taken for granted, to be as boring as laundromats.   But at the same time, if you are truly motivated by green, and ever have a chance at a career in recycling, grab it.

Here's why recycling is the best thing.

First things first, forget all about "waste management" and "zero waste".   We hitched the recycling wagon to the "waste management" pony for one reason.  No, it was not to preserve landfills, or avoid construction of incinerators.   Scrap and recycling has only one competitor - virgin material.

In order to compete with the mining and forest subsidies (e.g. the General Mining Act of 1872, passed during the Apache Indian Wars under the Ulysses S. Grant administration), scrap needed to compete with raw materials by claiming avoided disposal costs.

Recycling, reuse, repair.  They are ultimate environmental impact measures.  Don't quit your recycling job.

My Contribution to EPA CRT Cullet Discussion

This was my comment to the organizers and regulators in the meeting about CRT Cullet Markets (see agenda at bottom):

We were involved in the sale of CRT cullet from an alleged "pile" in the southwest which was widely speculated to be non-moving.

Cullet from the pile was sold (not through us but using our smelter's same trucking company) to a lead smelter in Mexico, which paid 7 cents per pound.

After the 2010 SEMARNAT border controls on the CRT cullet, the Mexico lead smelter said the material was a "headache".  They changed in 2012 to charging 7 cents per pound instead of paying 7 cents for the exact same material.  That is a change of 14 cents per pound based on nothing but "diligence" which equated (to the mining/primary smelting company) as "risk".

This discussion is inadvertently creating justification for companies which speculate on whole tubes, avoiding the cutting and washing.   EPA needs to clearly distinguish between diligence on whole unprocessed material and companies which have turned that material into saleable commodity.

A shredded toaster (steel pieces) should not carry a label of "toaster waste".  It's ferrous metal.  The CRT glass which has been processed should be treated as leaded silicate, and governed by MSDS and DOT etc. according to its properties, not as a "waste".

When we exaggerate the risks of "waste" (attributing more weight to the risk of human-generated secondary material) compared to the risks of identical or higher-risk "virgin" material, we set up bad regulation.  The regulations we have established for "Cathode Ray Tube" glass penalize a smelter if they try it as a feedstock.

The culprit, ironically, may be the word "Stewardship".

lead mining of yore

When we mine gold, copper, tin, iron, tantalum, silver, etc. from mountainsides and Indonesian coral islands, we do massive damage on several scales.  Endangered species are exposed by access roads.  Children mine coltan to fund warloards.   And the number one and number two sources of mercury in the USA are not mercury mining - they are gold and silver mining.   The mountainsides release radioactive uranium, leaded dust, mercury, etc.   Fourteen of the fifteen largest Superfund Sites in the USA have been hard rock metal mines.   But the mountain is not a "Steward".

We still govern mining based on the General Mining Act of 1872.   How can recycling compete with standards of yore?