Status of Retroworks de Mexico

Can E-Stewards identify these parts in a computer?  Hand dis-assembly of CDROM drives yields motors, lasers

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I opened the partnership in Sonora Mexico in 2007, establishing a "maquila dora" company, managed by a women's collective.  Next week I will be travelling there to meet with researchers from Memorial University of Newfoundland, who have won a $469,000 five year grant to vet "fair trade recycling", using RDM as a model.

We will also have a WR3A Board meeting in Phoenix at the Refurbishers Summit, I will post a link.  In the past I was able to edit and post drafts waiting in the draft box during my early hotel mornings, and I have several that I enjoy despite awkward interruptions in the writing process.

The November issue of Scrap Magazine will have some photos of our first trial of CRT cullet (generated in Mexico) used as a fluxing agent at the local mining smelter; we have shipped two loads, and it looks promising.

Washington DC Testimony on E-Waste Rare Earths

I have to catch the 5A Bus to Dulles, and don't have many good pictures of the US Trade Commission hearings.  But I'll mention this:

The last panel of shredders and recyclers said that rare earth metals are not recoverable, and kind of waffled on the question whether hand disassembly provides better quality.

Here is an article by Bloomberg Reporter Adam Minter, who visited our Fair Trade Recycling partner in Malaysia.  They hand-disassemble hard drives there, and sell the rare earth magnets directly back to a company like Seagate in Singapore for direct reuse.  I'll show these magnets in a future post.

Here is an article recently posted by Fair Trade Recycling researcher Adelaide Rivereau, who is in Vermont from Marseilles, France, to study "e-waste" policy.  She has found definitive third party research showing that hand disassembly has greater value, creates more jobs, and has twice the environmental benefit when reuse components are recovered.

So how can someone testify under oath that rare earth magnets are not recoverable and hand disassembly is not preferable?

If you repeat the words "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste" as many times as our shredder competitors said it, you can become entranced.  They made reference to an article from 2008 by National Geographic, talking about the dirty children burning waste computers from the city of Accra.

The photographer, Peter Selleck, ALSO visited the fair trade recycling company visited by Minter, and showed pictures of the reuse operation there.   But there were no children in those photos, so if I say "remember the really great operation in National Geographic?  That's the one where I learned to hand disassemble hard drives for magnets".   No one remembers the National Geographic in that context.

Toxic "ewaste" + Shredder = small pieces of toxic "ewaste" = $$$

European Study Proves Hand De-assembly Superior to Shredding

Thanks to our Fair Trade Recycling Intern Adelaide, who is in Middlebury, Vermont, working on her Masters in Waste Management from France.  Adelaide cites ten separate studies in her morning blog to make the point that taking a circuit board apart by hand - separating copper coils from aluminum heat sinks, steel from plastic -  is environmentally superior to shredding in a lifecycle analysis.

Figure 1. Environmental assessment of treatment of electronic waste, Gmünder (2007).

All Fair Trade Recycling wants to do is to make these hand-disassembly jobs (like our women in Mexico, below) de-criminalized.  Give them the proper tools and protection, stop open burning and other "ten worst practices".  There are no mercury switches, there is no "witches brew", hand disassembly is simply an alternative job to gang warefare in Mexico, pirate boating in Somalia, cocaine growing in Peru, sex work in Kenya, etc.

I've usually written about the Geeks of Color.  But the scrappers, too, have been denigrated and defamed in the American and European media.  There are bad practices by hand, and good ones.  Racial profiling is just not a very effective way of deciding, and the "safe" approach of shredding items before export is not a winning strategy for the environment.

Our company practices disassembly here in the USA.   But I'm opening hand disassembly factories in other countries.  They will recycle their own waste from inside their countries.  But if they can do that well, why not let them also take rich people stuff that can still be reused, which puts an even higher environmental outcome... one which is "off the chart".   Survival is the highest form of "end of life" when you're not dead yet.

Our Chicas Bravas in Mexico take a few extra steps and de-manufacture not just the PC, but the components like CDRom drives and floppy disk drives, hard drives, getting things like rare earth magnets and little gold things.  American companies which export intact power supplies, drives, and other "components" may ship them to a similar fate.  But they are all too afraid of the onus against export to visit and find out whether it looks like this or looks like a child sitting on a pile of circuits.

Most American recyclers don't know what this is on the left.  But they "recycle" them by the millions.  Reuse can get very small.