Federal Stimulus: Quick Guide to the Payroll Protection Program

Payroll Protection Program - Here. (always be careful and check the https, there are reportedly already fraudulent websites collecting financial information).

"It's Going To Be A Mess" is the headline at Fortune Magazine.

As a recycler / junkyard operator, I'm in a rare position of having experience (as a regulator of 9 years at MA DEP) reading Federal Register rules, and know that this morning the "FINAL" Rule on the PPP - Payroll Protection Program - is not going to change. We started the application early, and had applications ready for submittal by last Thursday. But we've had to redo the application twice already.

But now it's final.

Here's what makes this blogworthy. My company has 30 employees (positions, some are vacant or seasonal). This program will lend my company money to continue payroll, and the portion of the money actually used / documented to be payroll will be eligible in ~6 months for forgiveness.  Even the portion not forgiven will only be 0.5% Changed to 1% APR to the feds plus whatever the Lending Bank adds.

Here is the link to the loan application.  I have been pursuing it NOT JUST FOR MY OWN COMPANY.  I am making calls to any company we carry an A/R or A/P with, as my future income and future required services requires THOSE companies remain in business as well.

Oxbow Incident: Lord Chris Smith, Interpol and BAN vs "Waste Tourists"

We have met the enemy, and he is us. Walt Kelley's Pogo comic was set in the deep south.

Here on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer protests of Mississippi, a 52 year old from Arkansas is working to free Africans wrongfully accused of being "waste tourists" by a well meaning, but culturally tone-deaf, set of environmentalists.

• David Higgins of Interpol
• Lord Chris Smith of the UK Environmental Agency
• Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network

Higgins had assigned a very young Dutch cop, Emile Lindemulder, to set up a task force to make some arrests of people accused of buying toxic e-waste to be burned by children in African city dumps.  This blog shows some of the history, and chronology, which led to the sentencing of Hurricane Joseph Benson in June 2014, and which fuels the momentum of Project Eden...

Project Eden.  Let's return Africa to its innocence, to a time without e-waste.  Here is the chain of events which led to the seizures and arrests and plant closures, stopping people reprocessing CRTs for Africa (Net Peripheral), repairing computers for African internet cafes (MediCom) or selling televisions which 6.9 million Nigerians were using to watch the World Cup in 2006.

Here's how good white people became involved in a modern Oxbow Incident, accidentally profiling the geeks of color I've been fascinated by since I lived in Cameroon, Africa 1984-1986.  The week I left Ngaondal, the first Cameroon television broadcasts in Adamoua Province showed the miniseries of Alex Haley's "Roots".  My landlord showed it in the adjoining house, his livingroom packed, children leaning against the windows outside his house.  He had purchased the first used CRT television in the town of Ngaoundal, a used RCA.

Sometime between December 1986 and now, I'm sure that TV wore out and created the first "e-waste" in my former village.   Some think that makes the person who sold it to my landlord, Sgt Ndjang, somehow guilty of a wastecrime.  As Graham Pickren pointed out in his doctoral thesis, the guilt of the white person who once owned the RCA seems attached, as if a fetish, to the RCA when it is discarded in Africa 15 years later.  What if we sell something to an African which will eventually become waste, VT ANR staff asked my clients?  By that measure, new product is also banned, and Africa will never gain access to the  tree of knowledge, remaining as "Eden" forever.

Making Statistics Up as We Go: Philippines ewaste

Typical Video Pronounces Export Data, MIT Announces Data Research Effort.

During the past decade, whenever someone was asked what percentage of "e-waste" is exported to "poorer nations" (the 6 billion people in non-OECD), they could pretty much say whatever they wanted.  It didn't even seem to matter that the same person asked gave a different number each time.

In an interview, Ted Smith of SVTC says 90% is waste.   BAN says 80% in other reports, but in this video BAN is quoted at 50%.   The video elsewhere says 30% of used electronics exported are "e-waste"...  (Perhaps it sets up the title, as ewaste goes from 80% to 50% to 30% before our eyes...)

Video "The Vanishing E-Waste"Complete video is below the fold.  I'm finding that video embeds are blocked as many institutions and offices.  When I put something from Youtube, even documentary, it causes the whole page to be blocked for some readers.  So here's a hotlink above, and the video is now embedded "below the fold".youtube 11:15

Actually, I like the video, it's fair and moves the conversation forward.   Would like to talk about the "las Chicas" and Fair Trade alternative with the producers.   The video documents that most of the "e-waste" comes in for reuse (the "bad" are residuals or exhausted after years of use), and that the USA and EU are far smaller a percentage of imports than Asia-to-Asia trade.  Unfortunately, it dwells entirely on the bad apples, and therefore arrives at "prohibition" conclusions.

This hospital-via-morgue (start at landfill) is typical of activist image management, and the images this video captures are not atypical of what I saw in China in 2002.  Of course, I also saw extremely good EOL recycling and reuse operations, and took photos of both.  The concept of Fair Trade is not to ban exports, but to build financial incentives into the trade so that the legitimate sales leverage the creation of a proper end-of-life recycling stream.   This video tends to concentrate on the bad side, what it calls the 30%, which everyone knows I'm fatigued by.  And the worst shots are still better than metal mining and smelting.  But this is what we need to clean up with Fair Trade Programs like ours in Mexico and Asia.

As far as data and diagnosis over the statistics (vs. poster children), how can we move the dialogue forward?

EPA and MIT [correction will SOON release] have released a plan to research and obtain real data.   What will be difficult is to get exporters and importers to share what they are really doing during this period of "green scare", Senator Joe McCarthy, rabid accusations.   Even E-Stewards and R3 certified companies have accused each other of exporting plastic from shredding to the "wrong" places in China.