Combat and Competition and Hope in Age of Universal Electronic Social Media (Thesis)

[Due to a sacroiliac injury and siatic nerve pain it has been several weeks since I've had good REM sleep.  This has made it difficult for me to concentrate and finish longer blogs, and I've turned to shorter statements via Twitter and news content.  Got some different nerve meds and had a long vivid dream last night.  Woke up with these thoughts, which I want to record in over 280 characters]

Universal Electronic Social Media [notification beeps on Facebook comments, or prolonged internet time on Reddit, etc] has created an impression of increasing conflict.  A lot of pundits are concluding that the internet is becoming more hostile, people less reserved or nuanced in their commentary -- or withdrawing altogether, or reserving comment for tighter social circles with less conflict (but also less exposure to genuine dialectic disagreement).

EU E-Waste Policy: Disarming Friendly Fire & Environmental Malpractice (Part B)

In Part A, I gave RecyHub the review they asked for, suggesting they are trying to place themselves in a halfway point between fallacy and fact.   It's a slippery slope, being cozy with a fallacy.

Why RecyHub thought we'd applaud the webpage?  Probably because in Part B, they call for "improving the informal sector".  Sounds a lot like what WR3A called "E-Waste Reform" eight years ago, when we too tried to compromise with the Ayatollah of E-Waste.

B) E-waste is a source of income and an incipient local industry. Metals and plastics can be scrapped out of old electronics and be sold in local markets for smelting and recycling, closing the materials loop. In Ghana families from the North send their kids to work in the dump because they value more the scarce but regular cash they get for the metals recovered than the irregular income from agriculture. For some Western countries it doesn’t make economic sense to manually remove the metals from e-waste, because it’s labour intensive, while for countries with lower wages it’s more suitable. In contrast, components like printed circuit boards can only be recycled in a handful of factories in the global North (and now in India too, by Attero) and therefore could be exported back, following a philosophy called “Best of Two Worlds” (PDF, 1Mb.). Improving the informal sector, including its workers’ health and safety conditions, could result in a local industry of e-waste recycling.

What about the "worst of two worlds"?   In part A, @RecyHub implies that the worst is when Europe fills boats with toxic waste electronics and dumps the waste on primitive beaches.   I don't think that's the right diagnosis.   How about an alternative diagnosis?

The worst of the West is its willingess to assume the worst of the blacks.

The "White Knights" of E-Waste reform accept a comic, rude, and insulting premise.

With less of "the right tools" we can stop shredding value to begin with.  Below is my modest proposal, our proposed model at WR3A:

1. Start with carefully assessing the situation.   Start by asking questions, get a proper diagnosis.
2. Sell Africans what they want to buy - working and repairable displays and computers.  They prefer a 3 year old they can repair to a 6 year old "tested working".   The point is, give African buyers exactly what they want. Ask them why they want things if you are confused, but don't be condescending.
3. Once a price is agreed to (about $7,000 per container), offer the Africans a deal.   Give them back $3,000 of the containerload if they take back used electronics from African cities each time they sell one.  This creates a takeback infrastructure at the used retailers, just as used auto yards are connected to the auto scrap yards.
4. With the other $4,000 buy tools, buy better used equipment, do something to incentivize the proper management of used electronics.
5. Fly your Western staff to work in Africa (as Vermont does with its staff sent to Mexico), and fly African scrappers to cross train with your staff in Europe (as Vermont does with partners in Africa, Latin America, and Asia).

This does not presume a "best" or "worst", or even the geography of "two worlds".

This takes the $7000 which is WASTED in EU WEEE shredders and uses it to finance the simple hand-disassembly which you've already recognized is a darn good job for many Africans.  I don't label this as "inside the box" because the rest of the world doesn't live in the Basel Action Network's box.  This is the same "secondary market" economy that automobiles, ink cartridges, ships and airplanes "waste" comes from.  Waste is almost never generated from the first purchaser in the chain, unless a conscious decision is made to "obsolete" it.  Wealthy people tend not to drive their new cars into the ground, or their cell phones or PCs.

WR3A's Model Improves not just the environment (reuse saves more carbon and toxics than recycling), but the entire Social Progress Index in Africa.  Africa doesn't have to make a choice between barefoot-and-pregnant backwater and brand new product.  They should be encouraged to tinker their way through the same way that Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea did, achieving economic growth by repair, recycling, knockoffs, counterfeiting, reverse engineering and contract assembly.   Africa's got Terry Gous and Simon Lins and Rowell Yangs all over their cities.  They are in their 20s and 30s now.  Give them a chance.

The poor nations growth in internet outpaced the USA's by a factor of ten - using "discarded" CRTs

Education is Expensive, but the Cost of Ignorance is Higher

This expression was shared with my by Ow Yung, Su Fung.  She is VP at one of the contract manufacturing facilities we still work with in Southeast Asia.  She has been primarily responsible for following through on the Contracts and Agreements which Fair Trade Recycling runs on.

The two-party contract relies on Civil Law, not on international police or "competent authorities" of foreign environmental agencies.  The competent authorities can be a part of the contract - our first contract with Ow Yung Su Fung's company required them to have their national Dept of Environment tour their "state of the art" factory four times per year.   Later, she obtained ISO 14001 and ISO9000.

We wanted to address the potential for incidental breakage or bad units in our contract.  I proposed to Ow Young, Su Fung, that they meet with a CRT glass manufacturing company, and provided the contact name we had used to sell USA CRT cullet there (while working on the CRT Glass Test).  At first, she was apprehensive, as the makers of new CRTs generally are not very friendly to companies like hers, which used to buy new CRTs but had not replaced them on the factory line with 'gently used" CRTs from America.   But the meeting went well, and Ow Yung Su Fung obtained the first CRT cullet supply contract for that furnace.  She became the chief supplier of the used CRT cullet, even sourcing the broken monitors from her competitors.

As the years went by, the price for the refurbished CRTs dropped, and the shipping distance to sell the new ones she made increased.   By 2011, she could no longer sell any refurbished CRT monitors in her own country, and had to re-ship 100% of the fully functional working units elsewhere in Asia, or to Africa.  At the same time, the supply of used CRT monitors in her home city increased, and she really didn't need to buy from our Fair Trade Recycling contract any longer.   Because of the relationship, we kept contact.  Today she buys dual core Pentium IV computers, replaces capacitors, and sells complete systems, along with LCDs.

Ow Young Su Fung is just one person.  They have about 100 employees in two countries.  Her boss, Allen, was a Taiwanese engineer who pioneered the system for cathode ray guns to show Chinese and Korean characters on the phosphor screens.

One of the problems I had running WR3A as a "coop" was that there was no incentive for me to personally fly and find other buyers when I had one that was working well, and there was no incentive for me to share my buyer with other USA suppliers when the demand tightened.  I know that there are dozens of other people like Ow Yung, Su Fung, in the world.  But it takes time to develop a relationship, and it doesn't pay to be promiscuous, jumping from bed to bed in the recycling market.

Perhaps my exposure to the world is too narrow, perhaps I focus too much of my writing on a dozen or so friends and trading partners in the globe.  Perhaps I need to get out to Guiyu more, and see the ugly side which scares American environmentalists away from these fascinating tinkerer markets.

Ow Yung Su Fung is a single mother of two kids.  I know her to be a very good mother, as well as a good technician, and right hand / vp.  In China, you see stories of people with a child like this [MailOnline-EpilepsyRecycler], tied to a motorcycle, while the parents scrounge for scrap for recycling.  Fung is educated, a self-made executive, and can afford special schooling if necessary for her kids.  When she says "Education is Expensive, but the Cost of Ignorance is Higher", I understand the depth that this must have in her own personal life.  We want her to do well, and we want her kids to go on to become doctors or pilots or astronauts...

Ethical Education: China, USA Schooling

This week, a delegation of Chinese students came to my home town (Middlebury, Vermont).   And a China Daily article described USA foreign exchange students and their observations at a Chinese recycling plant.

The Vermont article was written by Andrew Stein of the Addison Independent.   "Vermont Awes Chinese Students" sounded potentially exaggerated.   But it turns out Andrew is a returned Fulbright Scholar who taught for a year in Chinese public schools.  I shared the article with Adam Minter at ShanghaiScrap blog (who's returning now, having turned in the final draft of his upcoming book).  Adam said "This is spot on. I've been around a lot of kids who study in the US, and they all come back saying these things. They can't believe it. "

The Vermont article basically says Chinese schools are pounding the kids in a pressure cooker of catch-up-ball education.   They attend class from 7AM to 10PM, often 7 days per week.  The entire education boils down to a single test, the gaokao or "high test" at the end of the senior year which, the kids are told, will define their whole lives.

For the past five years, the Chinese government mouthpiece China Daily has regularly reported that suicide is the number-one killer of Chinese teens.

And Chinese teens don’t have much time to sleep, as 16-year-old Lingyun Zhang, who is staying with Middlebury’s Sarah Kearns, pointed out.

“In America, high school students can sleep in late,” said Zhang. “But in China, since we’re high school students, we have a lot of homework and we go to bed very late and wake up very early every day.”

With little time to sleep, Chinese youth can also forget about extracurricular activities, said Qian.

“American students have a lot of time to play and do extracurricular activities,” she said. “Chinese students don’t play much. They spend most of their time studying chemistry and physics.”

The article observes interesting differences in dating, sex education, and pride.  The China Daily article is more of a puff piece about "American students make polite and inane comments on Chinese food and culture" (it's a VOA type of government paper, after all). 

100 Years Ago, before USA was OECD

Emailed from my mother in the Ozarks.  Great grandfather Freeland bought her property in 1908, then bought a used printing press and started a newspaper (Taney County Republican).

At the times William Freeland wrote his daily news columns, here is what the USA was like.  Today, more people have electricity in the non-OECD than in the USA during my parents childhood.

Here are some statistics for the Year 1910:

************ ********* ************

The average life expectancy for men was 47 years.

Fuel for a car was sold in drug stores only.

Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.

There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower 

The average US wage in 1910 was 22 cents per hour.

The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian

between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME.

... more