The Best Mining is Worse Than Worst Recycling

Rereading some articles in The Atlantic by Adam Minter (whose ShanghaiScrap blog is down for maintenance, see opinion pages at Bloomberg), and I was stunned by the negative comments about recycling by "trolls" in the follow up.

There's an overwhelming bias, not just about Asian and African recyclers, but an undercurrent of distrust of American recyclers as well.   If an American recycler sells bales of copper wire to China, and if the Chinese are making Christmas lights into slippers (from the insulation) and electric-grade copper, it must be wrong.   People comment, knowingly, that it must waste energy (shipping Christmas lights all the way to China), or that the toxics released (by older insulation) make it a better idea to landfill them.  Or that the Chinese are taking shortcuts to take the Christmas-tree-light-recycling-jobs away from Americans.

The trollish comments on mainstream articles about recycling are missing the point of recycling.

The world is consuming raw materials.

Raw materials come from one of two places:  from waste or from the earth.

Recycling is not a form of "waste disposal", it is a form of urban mining.

Government and Recycling International

"Avoided disposal costs" economics, which I helped pioneer in the 1970s and 1980s, has turned "toxic".

Normally, economically developed economies throw out more and more waste (garbage) as consumers gain confidence, buy new, and discard things of marginal value which take effort to maintain.  When your neighborhood is wealthy, no one wants your "free" black and white television, and it goes into an attic or basement or garage.

Hong Kong Modern Lined Landfill SE New Territories

As my generation became aware of population growth, finite resources, and habitat consumption, we were alarmed.  We wanted to save trees, to avoid mining, to save endangered species, preserve habitat, and conserve energy and carbon.  Recycling was a concrete, conservative, karma yoga way to do all of those things.

It seemed risky to say I'd get a job "recycling".   At the time, Recycling was akin to dishwashing. I didn't know anyone wealthy doing it (unless you counted the same mills switching to using virgin material according to price points).  The economics of making more money collecting scrap were at odds with providing the scrap more cheaply, which is what the Big Picture wanted.  Recycling needed to be plentiful and cheap to win over mill consumers, and not owning a mill, I was at the collection end of that equation.

Is E-Waste Hazardous or Universal Waste? Not Yet...

Following last weekend's surreal blogging into the mind of Jesus, it's time to focus on recycling regulations and law.  EPA is about to tinker with RCRA definitions of used electronics, purportedly to close the "loophole" of calling something reused a "commodity".  It appears EPA wants to follow China's lead, and declare reused metals "wastes".   This will help complete the snatch of authority from Department of Commerce by the Environmental Protection Agency, once again leaving horrific mining of raw virgin ores "commodity" and relatively clean scrap metals will be "hazardous wastes."

I've written previously about the "rights" of states to form rules which are stricter than federal rules - so long as the federal rule agrees that the substance is in fact "discarded".  But the state environmental agency cannot charge into your house to find a "working" unit, and whether something "works" is a silly test if the non-working P4 is worth much more than the working P2.

What if a state wants to regulate an item which is excluded from "solid waste" as a "universal waste"?  Can an item which meets commodity exclusion rules still be hazardous?  Can it be universal, and hazardous, but not a waste?  Earlier this year, we looked at the "chicken or egg" problems which arose in one state which tried to make e-waste "universal waste" without classifying reuse as waste.

EPA and "universal waste" is something I'm very familiar with, going back to my days as recycling director for the Massachusetts DEP Division of Solid Waste (and later Consumer Programs division director).   EPA ultimately sided with Mass. DEP in deciding that scrap metals should not be treated much differently from mined ores.  If the ores were hazardous, then so should the scrap, but when the ores were not treated as hazardous, making scrap "hazardous" merely because it was secondary material was a mistake we didn't make.  Why another refresher course on universal waste and RCRA?

EPA has just proposed major changes to this, which I'll write about later.  

For now, since so many are confused about what RCRA says in the first place, is a refresher course in USA waste vs. commodity law.  The current USA law treats recycled scrap as the equivalent of mined ore.  That was smart.  The perfect should not be the enemy of the good, and if recycled content is the only alternative to virgin content, and the production of virgin content is more toxic than recycling, recycling is the good.  14/15 largest Superfund sites (which bankrupted Superfund more than a decade ago) are "hard-rock" metals mines.   RCRA as written saw that the worst recycling is better than the best mining.  Thanks to "Recycling Watchdogs", that is about to change.  But for now, here is the way recycling is governed by federal law:

Related Posts

• Are CRTs Regulated?  An E-Waste Compliance Primer
• Toe Tags - We Agree - Now Let's Communicate
• "Not Discarded" Label - Made in Vermont
• Short Factual Posts on Haz Waste and "E-Waste"

First, here is the language in § 261.4  of RCRA