Poison Apples 3: Uptick in Lithium Battery Fires & GPS Ewaste Tracking Devices

Our company sends about 30% of the used electronics we receive to "big shred"... companies that invested in labor-saving mechanical shredders with eddy-current-separators, magnets, optic sorters, etc., to turn things like printers (notoriously low reuse value because the dollars are in the ink cartridges, not the device) into streams of raw material.

Those shredding companies are our friends.

We offer to take back stuff they can't shred responsibly - like display devices.  Ideally, we'd be taking back, ton-for-ton, the 30% stuff that should be hand-managed, like CRTs and LCDs, Plasmas, OLEDs, etc, for every ton of shreddable e-waste we send.

Our friends at the shredders have a problem. One friend, ECS of California, went out of business this year. I've known the owner, Jim Taggart, since my Massachusetts DEP days in the 1990s. He was not the first "big shred" investor to get sucked  under.

This video doesn't show you any specifics about why, but it does show a big, big problem for Big Shred.  It features our old pal Scott Pelly of CBS 60 Minutes (the guy who impugned our geek pals based on Jim Puckett ewaste statistic "fakenews").

Does Spotify Turn Pandora into MySpace?

I have been an absolute lover and fan of Pandora Radio for years.  The music service is free, and you enter in an artist you like.   The artist may play, but as likely you will hear some other artist which people who liked the first artist are likely to also appreciate.  If you don't like a song, click thumbs down, and that gets factored into the future of your playlists on the station.

I love Neil Young, discover Greg Brown.  I find out that my dad's not just weird, that people who like Gordon Lightfoot also like Uncle John's Band by Grateful Dead (without liking other deadhead tunes quitesomuchthanks)... You can't choose what song to play next, but absent that choice it's like a radio station, background music.  I discovered some of my favorite songs during the past 5 years via Pandora.  Became a paid subscriber in January for my birthday present.

Now Spotify:  Similar to Pandora, but also like limewire or napster in it's display and order-by-artist-by-song selection, but legal and supported by ads.

(Note:  Recording Industry was a dumb idiot for not immediately embracing the technology and creating Columbia Record Club for big-value-teaser-downloads in the 1990s, the industry could have been Facebook now but chose to fight the last tape-recorder war over copyright.  ITunes finally kind of caught on but does kind of a lousy job in my opinion).

Love Spotify so far.  But would I have discovered MIA Paper Planes (a gem I discovered on Pandora) or Avalanches Frontier Psychiatrist (Boy Needs Therapy)?

(Note: savvy commenter already suggests grooveshark.com)