#Ewastetracking Project by MIT and NGO Discovers Analog Television (exists) in Pakistan

According to the opening page of Massachusetts Institute of Technologies Senseability City Lab's expose on second hand electronics, transboundary movement demonstrates likely environmental harm.

A joint project between the Basel Action Network (BAN) and the MIT Senseable City Lab has led to the discovery of previously unknown international electronic waste routes departing from the United States.

Printer, and LCD and CRT monitors were embedded with GPS trackers capable of remotely reporting their location from overseas locations. These trackers were then delivered to recyclers and charities around the country. 65 of the first 200 trackers deilvered as part of the Monitour/e-Trash Transparency Project went offshore, mostly to Asia. 

On-the-ground investigations in Asia by BAN produced a clearer picture of these trade routes. Results of this study can be found here on this site in graphic form and will also be released in a series of reports by BAN. These can be found at: www.ban.org/trash-transparency. 

While legitimate e-waste recycling helps reduce landfill contamination and raw material extraction, the export of hazardous electronic waste is most often illegal trade under the Basel Convention and moreover, the management of toxic electronic waste in the informal sector damages human health and the environment. 

The Monitour/e-Trash Transparency Project demonstrates how relatively new technology can generate unique data needed by civil society, law enforcement and enterprises to better track what until now have been hidden flows. Since the time of our experiment, the UN Organization on Drugs and Crime has confirmed that the Mong Cai border is a primary corridor for e-waste flowing from the US and EU into China, part of an estimated US $3.75 billion market for illegal e-waste. 

Learn more about e-waste tracking here: Video.

- MoniTour E-waste Transparency Project, MIT

"On the ground investigations in Asia by BAN produced a clearer picture of these trade routes."  Really, MIT?  Just how clear?  Analog or high definition?  Seriously, this is from Media Lab of all places?

As I showed last week, the screen shots of the MIT's tracking project are difficult to see at proper resolution; you can't zoom in.  Instead, you must copy the longitude and latitude and paste it into google maps, or rely on whoever is writing written descriptions of the sites on MIT's website.

Then you find places like the Hafeez Computer Center in Faisalabad, Pakistan.  It's near the center of a dense city, blocks away from one of Pakistan's largest universities.  It is a long way from the port.  Screenshot below.

We are writing to MIT to offer to assist them in interpreting several tracking devices locations.  In particular, I'm focusing on CRT devices, which are governed by USA EPA law.  That law does not ban export for reuse, or even export for recycling, but requires that export to be declared and investigated by EPA prior to export.

The reason for EPA's restrictions stem largely from the Basel Action Network (MIT's "joint partner") declarations in 2002 and 2005 that the "vast majority" of CRTs are not recycled, but are dumped overseas to avoid high USA recycling costs. Overseas, BAN announced, the CRTs were most likely going to be beaten by children with hammers to remove "valuable copper".  It is certainly true that CRTs are the most expensive type of electronic waste to recycle, and it's true that any which are diverted for continued use represent an avoided fee.  It's also true that working display devices have been in high demand for reuse and repair markets.  Billions of people owe their "teledensity" (mass media, internet, etc.) to used and rebuilt CRTs sourced from wealthy nations.

JTouch: Long Live the Hardware Kings

Americans (and everyone else) loves the touchpad screens on HTC Evo, IPhone, Samsung Galaxy, etc. i-Everyone is aware of i-something and e-waste.  What does J Stand For?

No, Steve Jobs didn't e-invent the i-touchscreen.  Apple saw the beauty of the nice, tight little Asian displays, and quickly worked to design an operating system to implement them.  But now Google Android and Microsoft have caught up, and I don't know how long it will take for someone in Asia to start making software.

JTOUCH... Only 2,400 employees.  CEO Yeh Yu Chou, his phone number is still listed on the web.

J Touch Corporation is principally engaged in the manufacture and distribution of touch panels. The Company's major products include resistive touch panels, capacitive touch panels and traditional touch panels. The Company's products are applied in the manufacture of smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable navigation devices (PNDs), commercial point of sale (POS) tools and business applications, among others. During the year ended December 31, 2011, the Company obtained approximately 99.68% of its total revenue from touch panels. The Company distributes its products primarily in Asian markets. - Reuters

Find the Taiwanese Executive.  I see Japan, I see South Korea, I see China... Working together to produce films and cultural cooperatation.  Because these guys don't want a stupid war in Asia, not over Sino/Japanese islands or the Taiwan straight or Korean "unification".  They even avoid patent wars, at least better than Americans do.

They are not "outsourced".  They ARE the Source.   Let's hope they make enough money to buy beef and cars made in America, because the genie ain't going back in the 1955 Display Device catalogue.

Now you can find $40 pads in Shenzhen (see "Death of Hardware").   I researched this, because the "death of hardware" headline looked to me like another case where we think that because "Polaroid Died" and "Eastman Kodak Died", that the headline is that "Cameras Died".

Hardware isn't dead.   JTouch is a company you never heard of, and they are making a billion dollars a quarter.  And they can produce the hardware cheaply enough now to sell it to people earning $6,000 per year.  That's a lot of people, a big market, a market bigger than a USA patent lawsuit can leverage.

In fact, the entire story of screen display technology "outsourcing", by Apple, or by whomever, as told by Romney and Obama, is a completely hysterical fiction.  IBM stopped making CRT monitors in NY in the early 1990s.  And that, my friends, was because Asia already owned the CRT business by then.

"Hardware is Dead"?   The king is dead, long live the king.  Incredibly good, profoundly useful, and shockingly cheap gadgets are going to change our industry.  They won't stop.  The question is whether the idea to make them non-repairable is ingrained in the industry now, and whether they will become like light bulbs, produced too cheaply to fix first, then re-designed to fail faster... or whether, mercifully, buyers in the $6000 income bracket won't put up with that.  In the USA, display panels are already becoming the new ink cartridge, and we barely finished breakfast.  But in Guangzhou, you can buy printed reverse-engineering books which tell you how to repair (or remanufacture, or counterfeit) every electronic device on the market, and if one gets a reputation for being "all glue and no screw," they may find USA and Europe to be their only market.

JTouch to increase revenues in 4Q12 from tablet product orders

Siu Han, Taipei; Alex Wolfgram, DIGITIMES [Thursday 4 October 2012]

Taiwan-based touch panel maker JTouch is expected to see fourth-quarter 2012 revenues hit the highest quarterly level of the year due to increased orders for touch screen panels used in tablets, according to industry sources.

The company is seeing increased orders mainly from international companies such as Samsung Electronics for its 10.1-inch tablets and is increasing its overall proportion of production of touch screen products used in small- to medium-size devices, added the sources.

JTouch has also been improving its production capacity throughout 2012 and is increasing the number of customers from China, added the sources.

JTouch's revenues for the third quarter are estimated at NT$1.4 billion (US$47.7 million), up 40%...

See Digitimes for more

The Toxic Immunity of Russian Pussy Riot

The Globe and Mail's Elizabeth Renzetti has an immaculately written editorial on the Russian government trial of a girl punk rock group for "hooliganism".   What they did was made a very funny video, taking on both Putin's thuggish censorship and the complicity of the Russian Church.

It's really far better than anything I have to write about today.  It can pass as something silly, but Renzetti makes it clear that in the age of communications, a belly laugh can topple a dictatorship.  Laughter grants us immunity.  The more dictators try to stamp it out, the more attention they draw, and the faster the sparks fly.

Since Russians are already wired by television and internet, Putin can't take away the devices that people watch funny stuff upon.  In African dictatorships, they are very afraid of display devices - very afraid.   And the fear has far more to do with potential for a tinderbox of laughter than with witches brews of toxic wires.

Put Yourself In the World's Shoes

I got some positive feedback on the slide I put up two days ago (from my "Fair Trade Recycling" presentation, which has been given at CES and Colleges in 3 countries during the past 6 months).

Here are a couple of other slides from the same presentation.

The first shows the relative size of the market for computer displays.  People earning $3K-12K per year are getting online at 10 times the rate of growth of wealthy nations since 2001.  But the "boycott the poor" advocates shows pictures of primitive dumpsites to describe 6 billion people.

And even the poorest of the poor deserve a bit of a break.  Recycling isn't THAT bad a job for the very poorest people in the world.  If we control the three worst practices - burning wire (little of which comes from computers anyway, that will not be affected by the HR2284 boycott), dumping broken CRTs, and aqua regia acid baths for circuit boards (another rarity), then recycling stacks up pretty well with other choices - like sex worker, miner, Somali pirate, child soldier, etc.

The term "parasites of the poor" and "accidental racist" are a little tough.  But the longer this stupid idea of boycotting poor people and shredding metals into smaller un-fixable pieces goes on (without any intelligent comment or response to people like me), the louder I have to get.

4 E-Waste Categories (Taiwanese Geeks Are Awesome)

Another Hypothesis:  There were basically Four Types of USA Computer Monitor / Electronics Recycling in the decade past:

1. Honest companies with under 5% reuse.  They don't do the homework on the testing and reuse market, they shred everything ("good idiots")
2. Companies that ship for refurb off-site, like mine, which achieve 25% reuse and are proud of it.  (honest and good)
3. Companies that ship for refurb off-site, like mine, which achieve 25% reuse, and claim testing and everything is done in the USA ("good liars")
4. Companies that ship enough good stuff that the export market forgives the crap, allowing them to ship 65% overseas... (bad exporters)

Inventor of Chinese character display from CRT

California was an example of Good Idiots.  There was little incentive to export good monitors to good companies when California taxpayers were shellling out 48 cents per pound to break them into pieces to put on the ground. 

There were companies I know of that were maximizing "TAR" or Toxics Along for the Ride.  They were willing to earn less for the good monitors in return for forcing along TVs and bad monitors.   I knew about them from the Taiwanese buyers.  Some of the worst exporters were - get this - Pledge of True Stewardship Signers!

The majority of e-waste recyclers in the past decade - About 50% of companies - were doing what I was doing (#2 and #3)...  The number who were transparent and proud began shrinking under BAN's scorched earth campaign vs. reuse.  And the buyers, who I visited and met with, were teaching me just about everything I know about display reuse and recycling.  I go to Africa as the "American expert" and talk about things I learned in China.

The Taiwanese were the earliest investors in Guangdong.  They have been enormously helpful in Mexico, South America, and Africa.  I keep running into Taipei Geeks all over the world, and they deserve a huge shout out.  Anyone who says "manufacturer takeback" and describes Taiwan as Guiyu is a certified laughingstock.

GAO Report on Electronic Waste 2008

Back in 2008, I spent some time with General Accounting Office staff (Nathan and Arvin) who were researching NGO allegations that EPA was not doing its job enforcing against exports of junk electronics to poor nations.  "Why We Should Export our Electronic "Waste" to China and Africa" gives the background which is missing from GAO's Report.   But what about the report itself?  For people who never visited the big secret factories that buy and refurbish monitors, did Arvin and Nathan use forensics to capture the failures in the system?  Or did they simply pose a hypothetical - buyers WANTING broken and non-refurbishable junk - and inadvertently lead people to assume that was the norm?   Here's a blow by blow of the conclusions outlined in the report.

The Report, "Electronic Waste", had three conclusions, described in the Executive Summary (below).  My annotations below are intended as a crib sheet for researchers using the GAO Report to evaluate claims about E-Waste Exports.  What it failed to do was even consider the case that exports of used equipment are mostly good, sustainable, and better than not exporting at all.

• Existing EPA regulations focus only on CRTs. Other exported used electronics flow virtually unrestricted—even to countries where they can be mismanaged—in large part because relevant U.S. hazardous waste regulations assess only how products will react in unlined U.S. landfills. 

This is largely true.  EPA's CRT Rule does describe printed circuit board scrap as "scrap metal", using the same logic that recycling needs to be governed more like mining if secondary materials markets are to develop in competition with less regulated virgin mining.  But other electronics do flow unrestricted, to nations where they could be mismanaged.   The Report correctly states that TCLP governs disposal in landfills and little else.

Whether EPA should govern other electronics is a tougher question.  I do agree with the report that the focus on display devices seems arbitrary.  But there is also a slipperly slope into regulating cell phone refurbishing factories, plastic markets, wire recycling,etc... If EPA cannot get CRTs right, is expanding the mission to other fields of battle really part of the solution?

• Companies easily circumvent the CRT rule. GAO posed as foreign buyers of broken CRTs in Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, and other countries, and 43 U.S. companies expressed willingness to export these items. Some of the companies, including ones that publicly tout their exemplary environmental practices, were willing to export CRTs in apparent violation of the CRT rule. GAO provided EPA with the names of these companies at EPA’s request. 

I agree with the first sentence, but it is because EPA does not collect the three years of data demonstrating actual reuse, as required of exporters under the CRT Rule.  The rule does not only say one time notification, it also requires 3 years of records.   I've got detailed and explicit records of our shipments, and tried to build WR3A around enforcement of that clause.   But EPA never knocked.

More concerning is the Report's methodology, posing as buyers from different nations in trading websites I had alerted Arvin and Nathan to.  The test was a good idea.  But here's where it failed in methodology - they advertised they buy BROKEN CRTs for high prices.   That does show that many people will sell based on price alone.  However, it creates a false impression that anyone buys broken things at high prices.  The actual postings by ACTUAL geeks in those countries explain the age, testing, and other requirements for display devices, and do NOT pay for the broken ones Arvin and Nathan offered $10.   I wouldn't call it entrapment, but if there is an allegation that Chinese American students are paying Anglo American students to fail, and government finds that Anglo Americans are willing to fail grades for money, that does not mean that Chinese American students actually have any incentive or are in fact paying white students to fail.   Posting the "finding" without that disclaimer turned out to be reckless.

• EPA’s enforcement is lacking. Since the CRT rule took effect in January 2007, Hong Kong officials intercepted and returned to U.S. ports 26 containers of illegally exported CRTs.  EPA has since penalized one violator, and then only long after the shipment had been identified by GAO. EPA officials acknowledged compliance problems with its CRT rule but said that given the rule’s relative newness, their focus was on educating the regulated community. This reasoning appears misplaced, however, given GAO’s observation of exporters willing to engage in apparent violations of the CRT rule, including some who are aware of the rule. Finally, EPA has done little to ascertain the extent of noncompliance, and EPA officials said they have neither plans nor a timetable to develop an enforcement program.  

GAO assumes the 26 containers seized in Hong Kong were mismanaged waste.   WR3A was affected by that multi-container enforcement in Hong Kong, as many of the containers were diverted to other countries with contract manufacturing capacity - as China had.  The Hong Kong officials clearly say that tested working monitors are "waste".  They do so to protect new Chinese manufacturing, possibly in violation of the Doha Round of WTO on cores, remanufacturing, and reassembly.  China never claimed the CRT containers were "half full" or "half empty"... China bans perfectly working monitors.

The Chinese factories no longer really buy working CRT monitors from the USA.  Some of the factories are still operating, on a smaller scale, but they largely refurbish monitors sourced less than an ocean away, in China, Korea, and Japan.

What is central is that GAO did a fairly good job in this report of narrow criticism of EPA, TCLP, and enforcement practices.  But GAO was caught in the passion whipped up by photos of poor children, used to describe Geeks of Color who were running huge remanufacturing and white box equipment factories.

Yes, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Indonesians, and Africans buy used equipment.  Yes, Americans and Europeans throw away used equipment after a couple of years of use.   We need data, how much of this equipment is burned or repaired.  The studies so far, in Peru and Ghana, show that Geeks and tinkerers in emerging markets are willing to take only so much "toxics along for the ride", and are a lot better than the primitive wire burning villages which have been mythologized by angry liberals.  History needs to record that 80 percent of the exports of CRTs were proper.  The glass was 80% full.

It makes more sense to ban abortion if you can show that 80 percent of abortions end in death of the mother.   But posing as a bad doctor does not prove the statistic.  Recycling should be safe, legal, and transparent.  Visiting the factories in China was just not convenient for GAO, and posing as a stupid factory that cannot write a purchase order did not work as a short cut.

2011 Display Device Price Freefall

Market Report on Used and Refurbished LCDs

The used CRT display device market has been on a slide for some time.  We have one of the only, and best, CRT refurbishing factory account purchase orders (which includes certified recycling of incidental breakage and parts recycling).  But the orders there have been cut from 180,000 units per month in 2006 to 5,000 units per month in 2011.

Part of that pressure comes from supplies from within Asia itself.   Office buildings in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, and Jakarta were replacing their working CRTs in mass between 2008-2010.   Even steady demand in Africa, South America, and the Mideast was fulfilled cheaply by Asian supply.  Shipping from the East Coast of the USA through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific, for refurbishing in Indonesia, and shipping back to Egypt... that was more expensive than refurbishing locally for export.

That, by the way, was one of the big factors to the "California Compromise" collapsing a year ago this month.  While BAN and California explored the idea of setting high standards for Asian Refurbishers to meet, the Asians decided it was too little, too late.

Now, the same thing is happening with used LCD prices.   Below is an excerpt from one of my favorite, Taiwan-based trade journals.  Today there is oversupply in the large (new) LCD market causing layoffs and work stoppages, and some factories are going back to cutting LCDs into smaller sizes and targeting the same emerging markets as refurbishers.