Recycling and "The World For Sale: The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard Of"

This Freakonomics Episode, "The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard of"  interviews authors Javier Blas and Jack Farchy about their book "The World For Sale" with of the same subtitle.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-most-powerful-people-youve-never-heard-of-update/

This really tells the history of how the raw materials BUSINESS - the virgin raw materials mined and cut and pumped out of the ground - runs.  How they are bought and sold, and WHO they have been bought and sold by since the 1930s.  Mark Rich, original creator of Glencore, features, as does Trafigura which this blog covered 15 years ago as an actual case of Basel Convention dumping of industrial waste on Cote D'Ivoire in 2006 - by a virgin raw material mining and extraction company.

They don't use poverty porn. They have interviews of retired commodities traders who passed bags of cash (and thumbdrives of bitcoin) to trade copper, lead, gold, oil, bauxite and other non-recycled virgin raw materials for decades. Recyclers, this is our competition.

No need for me to recap it.  But if you are in the recycling business and don't know about Wagner Group, mining nationalization, bribes (historically deductible as a business expense in Switzerland), and how the Curse of Natural Resources works, then you are missing out on the main reason to keep doing what you are doing.

Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity. In this updated episode from 2025, journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy help us shine a light on the shadowy realm of commodity traders. You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-... FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV

 

Help Us Update Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of Retroworks Mining Factsheet

I could use some help updating this 2003 Retroworks Mining Factsheet.

Circular Economy of Digital Reference Cycles

While the fundamentals of the Retroworks Mining Factsheet remain in place, it has not been updated since 2003. For example, it needs carbon emission reference points (a great grad school paper next semester? I promise to review it).

Here is a link to the "American Retroworks Mining Factsheet", first published 1995, and last updated 2003. Needs help.

A Refreshing "Victimless, Villainless" Assessment of E-Waste in Chennai India: Naveed Ahmed Sekar

Mobile Consumption and Disposal in Chennai Metropolitan Region India (2017 Naveed Ahmed, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany)

This short analysis of "e-waste" phones in the rapidly emerging market of Chennai (Tamil Nadu), India, is the kind of abstract approach that could make a good model for other products and other cities.  

Once again, it shows the "circular economy" is heliocentric, and does not revolve around Europe.  Telephones sold to families in India (4 phones average per household in Chennai) are not thrown into the sea.  The secondary market is not "competing against" the legitimate scrap market.

Instead, Naveed shows the issue is reluctance to let go of devices. When people remember the purchase as a great sacrifice, they hesitate to believe it is eventually worth only the sum of its raw materials.  This leads to the same "hoarding" documented by Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s.

Bullyboy 5: Urban Waste is a "Story of People"

Human Waste is Generated by Humans (Silent Spring)
Human Consumption is consumed by Humans (The Waste Makers)
Human Racism is Human-on-Human Crime (To Kill a Mockingbird)

URBAN SHARE OF POPULATION

This is not the "Story of Stuff", it's a "Story of People".   Fair Trade Recycling is an effort to see other humans for what they can do, not for what they cannot do, and to make the exchange of goods and services, driven largely by urbanization, as constructive as possible.  Call it Alter-Globalization if you will, call it "reform".   It's not about exploitation and victimization or waste externalization when the African cities and Chinese cities are paying for the goods and transport... it's economics of urban geography.

China has been buying scrap.  Egypt has been buying used computers. Nigeria has been buying used TVs.   All three are "non-OECD", but they buy different things.   Look at urbanization, and you will see that industrialization correlates with smelters, internet cable correlates to computers, and electricity correlates with TVs.  China, Egypt, and Nigeria have cities, and cities are full of people.


The Urbanization Trap - Short article in the Economist (2013)
Economic Development, Industrialization, and Urbanization, Australia Treasury Economic Roundup (2012 Report on Global demand)

Corrective and Preventative Action (CAPA)

Our company just went into an environmental "Surveillance Audit" for R2.  Some advice for people who are getting certified, or thinking about getting certified...

The temptation is to think that on the second audit, you've done this before.  You got the initial certification, you think that's the hard part.  No.   Joining the Army is the easy part.  Staying in the Army is the hard part.

When you think about it, there aren't too many economic incentives to keep someone out of a certification, whether it's E-Stewards, or R2, or ISO, etc.  What the company is signing up for is a process.  It's like joining a church, it's not about your past sins, it's about your commitment to being better.

What happened prior to our Surveillance Audit was that I took two trips to the Southwest (things are heating up at Retroworks de Mexico, despite the snow down there) and left people I trust in charge.  They have earned my confidence, as in confidence to do what I've trained everyone is our culture to do.

Efficiency, Good Work, Value, Accountability.  Get 'Er Done, combined with Know-How.

In that vein, everybody at the plant was motivated, without me telling them so, to make the place ship-shape.  We were proud of our company, and open to the audit with open arms.  A special clean up crew was assigned room by room to make sure everything was swept up and ship shape.

Well, we do "batch work" a few times a year.   Like we let the projection tubes build up until there will be enough of them to actually fill barrels with ethyl glycol.  If you do them as they come in, a few per day, you tie up more floor space with 1/8 full barrels which are actually more susceptible to spills than the projection tubes they were stored in.  So it makes sense, operationally, to store up 30 gaylords of the projection tubes when things are busy in the summer, and to keep people employed in the winter by draining them in a batch.

LCDs are similar.  In the first batch, you test working.  In the second batch, of the ones not working, you examine for capacitors and other "easily" repairable problems (for those in the know).  In the third batch, you leave for last the de-manufacturing of the busted-up-beyond-hope LCDs that need demanufacturing.

You are proud of the quality of your reuse.  We are led to believe, and it's true, that a lot of companies will sell the LCDs "as is" in a mixed lot.  Economically, you can "externalize" the cost of the LCD demanufacturing if you use the reuse value of the working and repairable to make the other LCDs tag along, as "toxics along for the ride".   So we haven't been doing that, we are proud to be tackling the hardest part of the work during the R2 winter surveillance audit.

So you've got a couple of people doing something new, something they aren't as experienced in, in the "batch work".  And you have a crew of eager clean up guys, circling around, trying to make the place look neat and orderly before the auditor arrives.

Crack.

That was the thin ice.

"E-Waste" Policy: NGOs Living in an RCA World

"A broken calendar is not as good as a broken clock." - Robin Ingenthron

RCA Emblem - Nipper ponders Obsoete Victrola Waste Stream

Catching up with electronics trade publication reading.  In Slashdot, I saw this article about the possible deathbed watch for Sharp Electronics.  Sharp is still a big producer in the display device field.   From ComputerWorld:

"Japan's Sharp, a major supplier of LCD displays to Apple and other manufacturers, has warned that it may not survive if it can't turn around its business, an admission that caught few off guard.

"The Osaka-based manufacture said there is "material doubt" about its ability to continue operating in its earnings report filed Thursday. Sharp added, however, that it still believes it can cut costs and secure enough credit to survive. Its IGZO technology for mobile displays is likely to be a key element of its business strategy.

"Companies with credit trouble must warn about possible concerns over their survival as part of their disclosure requirements."

Intelligent observers generalize on the decline of Japanese "Big E" - Sony, LG, Sharp, Panasonic, etc., and the rise of Samsung and Korea.  Korea is feeling its oats, in car production and electronics and music.  But how significant is this?  Time for a history lesson on Japanese and American transistor manufacturing.

Scrap Metal Fraud: Diary of Export Heart Attack

Dear Diary,

This is a story of a scrap dealer, who has to make payroll while meeting Responsible Recycler standards in an international marketplace.  This is all true, all happening in the past two weeks.

China 2005

Monday... We are still dealing with the aftermath of a missed wire transfer from a USA client.   We took the wire (about $60K) for granted and wrote some big checks against it.   Someone at the sender's local bank claimed to be asleep at the switch (though I think it should be investigated whether the money was withdrawn from the client account on the day of the wire, and the bank was kiting it for 24 hours).   Bank fraud can mean the bank's fraud.  We were hit with about $1600 in bounced check fees and panicked phone calls with our own payees.  I took screen shots of our account showing the wire was late and the correspondence from the client sending us the money that their account had cleared it the day earlier.

Rachael, our CFO, makes the case that the wires are outrageous, taking $20-30 from the sender client and then $18 at our receiving bank... wonders whether we should use more paper checks to avoid the accumulated bank fees.

Tuesday:   To make up for the panic among our suppliers for the bounced checks the previous Friday (one of our loads was actually held and not unloaded until we sent another wire to cover the bad check, truck idling), we issue more checks to get the payables under 30 days.  To do that I need to sell some of the $150K in scrap metal that we have processed in the building.

Wednesday:  We re-double sort the green board to eliminate the "jelly bean" boards (yellow, purple, red, and blue boards typically made in China and typically having much less gold content), to get a better price than our last load sent to the R2 compliant buyer.   That takes extra staff time, and it's part of the reason we have so much metal value in inventory that I now desperately need to cash out.  The high grade printed circuit boards had been processed by our USA buyer for sale to Umicore or Boliden in Belgium or Dowa in Japan... it takes 90-120 days for our buyer to get the reconciliation on their load, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They evidently got some loads back with way less gold than they expected and were told that the culprit was "jelly bean" boards.  They factored their loss over average loads going forward, and my company took a $6,000 hit.  They admitted they didn't know whose boards had how many jelly beans, it was an average spread out to cover their losses.

Environmental Justice in a Pixelized City Slum

Fences around slums, to keep out the rich? 

   Last weekend, "Useless Lists of Jobs", was about pixelized slums, a bookend to the "Rich City, Poor City" UN Pixelizes World blog from last January.  Each describes just how much wealth is in cities inside "poor" countries.   Following our Fair Trade Recycling trips to Africa and South America, I'm thinking about specific encounters with relative poverty and relative wealth.

IFIXIT and TechTravels have made also made pilgrimages to "recycling slums".  We all have great photos, but need better research and statistics (like this from World Bank) about the jobs that are realistically available in this neighborhood of Lima.  The photo of the multi-colored walls on the Useless Lists of Jobs post is a little too pretty... when you see the slum from the air, colored only by the brown dust on the roofs, it's a little more textured.

View of neighborhood from the sky... less colorful..  No yards, pools or streets.

Not all of Lima is like this.  But a lot people live here
   
Environmental Justice via Ban on Trade?   Environmentalists have made a very strong case that exports of computers for recycling should be taken "off the table", made illegal, either through an amendment to the Basel Convention.  Recycling jobs, they argue, are so intensely hazardous that even export for repair (clearly asset, not waste management) should be illegal.   If the factory that made your monitor replaces a bulging capacitor, they say, it's a slippery slope to recycling harm...  So they would have us build a wall around the slums, to keep rich peoples' used equipment out.

These restrictions may keep rich people from Europe and America out.  But cities like Lima, Rio, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai and Guangzhou are also places of tremendous wealth. Outside the OECD, and in Lima itself, people are on high speed internet, replacing CRTs and LCDs with bigger and better gear.

Copper Factbook

Is disposal (landfilling and incineration) the opposite, or competitor, of recycling?  Nope.  Recycling raw material (scrap) feedstock has only one true competitor.  That is mining, or virgin feedstock.

Therefore, if you really want to be an expert on "e-waste" or "e-scrap", you need to take the time to stay up on the raw materials markets.   I've often linked to US Geological Survey as an excellent source of information on raw materials and scrap material demand and production.   But if you want to drill down deeper, research the metals industries.  Here is a copy of the 2010 World Copper Factbook, produced by the ICSG (International Copper Study Group).

2010 World Copper Factbook

Policy analysts, protesters, regulators, trade journalists, and academics do of course need to follow logic and understand the psychology (cognitive risk) behind law and policy.   But they also need economics, current events (recent history), etc., to know the "competitor" backwards and forwards (ref: Sun Tzu).   If poverty and cost externalization is the key factor behind "e-waste exports", then one would predict Haiti is a major importer.  Of course, smelting capacity and finished copper demand are far better predictors of where e-scrap travels.  The smelters and mines are also, surprise, surprise, the source of pollution in Southern Chinese rivers - NOT the reuse or recycling.   Surgeons removing the wrong organ... it's generally frowned upon.

The maps in this ICSG publication refer to raw material trade (imports and exports) only, but they also distinguish between raw copper cathode and refined copper. Poverty does have one advantage - they can sort, by hand, various grades of copper wire in order to distinguish between these different markets.  Automated shredders, to my knowledge, don't know communication grade electric copper from a bathroom pipe.  Sorting these coppers by hand, and recovering reuse (added value) like copper heat sinks that can be directly reused - that is a win win.  Metal sorting isn't just environmentally good (bravo to the housewives with blue bins), it's also a moral good, as well as a good wage, for women in China. It creates affordable recycling, well paid jobs in the importing nation, avoids mining and refining pollution, etc.