10 Year Green Entrepreneur: Good Point Recycling Decade

My January 2002 Purchase (home equity loan)

In January 2002, I drove this rusty blue used Penske truck through the snow, across Applachia, from Memphis to Middlebury.  I always remember seeing myself in the mirror the morning after I signed the papers, a chill feeling of ice water in my abdomen.


On the road that night, I had hours to think about what I'd just done with my home equity, my wife and two young twins in the small car trained in my headlights ahead of me.


1.  We have good ideas.
2.  We do them.
3.  We tell the truth every day.

Among Green Entrepreneurs, "good ideas" are plentiful.  Successful, sustainable, self-sufficient environmental programs are one in a dozen.  Recycling passes the tests so well, it has become taken for granted, like laundromats and gas stations.   Few remember the challenges of setting up the recycling infrastructure, the net to capture subsidized extraction and keep it in the loop of consumption.  I've tried doing this as a protester in my twenties, as a regulator in my 30s.   For the past ten years, I've been putting my own silver, sweat, blood and tears into this, and its time to assess.  I was not by myself on the front lines, in the foxhole, but I was in a place somewhat unique among advocates, lobbyists, regulators, policymakers, and corporations.

Postscript: Entrepreneur E-Waste Recycler 2

January 2, 2012:  It being the winter break, I've tinkered with and re-edited yesterday's post on Entrepreneurism several times.  It's better, if not yet shorter, than when it was first posted.  I left the crazy long Mad Man title as kind of a warning that it would be difficult to skim.  The post centers on an essay by Kentin Waits, published in OpenForum.com

Five Essential Characteristics of the Entrepreneural Mind. 

1.  Creativity
2.  Suspicion of Predictors
3.  Comfort with Uncertainty
4.  Openness to Experimentation
5.  Functional Humility

This morning, I thought about people who are really looking to get into the recycling business, people who are thinking of becoming entrepreneurs.  For that audience, my own shanzai essay is a little one sided.

There are of course other true entrepreneurs who have entered the "e-waste" business on completely different terms than I have.  It takes creativity, suspicion, comfort with uncertainty, and experimentation to design an automated shredding and chopping and grinding machine, and to take a chance on not exporting when everyone else is donig so.   I don't look down on any of the companies which established the USA's domestic recycling infrastructure.  In fact, companies like mine NEED them to keep from sending toxics along for the ride, and for improving the junk in loads from 30% to 15% and better.

I can't even blame those who helped to fund the insulting and racist campaign that turned my Egyptian friend Hamdy and his brother Essam, both with medical degrees, into "waste tourists" and criminals.  Or at least, they were suspicious dark skinned exporters who no one felt comfortable trading with.  And the other recyclers can't blame me for taking credit for my own risk.  My ewaste company was on Hamdy's side when their friends twittered down the dictators regime.   If some of the 30,000 computers I sold there since 2001 played a part, I'm glad.

If some of those computers wind up in a Cairo dump 12 years later, with wire yokes scavenged by Zaballeen recyclers, the monitor would still have served its purpose 5 times as long as if it had been shredded after it was upgraded.  And it will have helped 5 times as many people.  And it did something besides play "Doom" or "Second Life".   Heck, the computer itself lived a second life.

EWaste Entrepreneur Mad Man Meets Primitive Wire-Burning Robots

i for one welcome primitive robot recycling overlords

Here is an excellent article on OpenForum.com on the Five Essential Characteristics of the Entrepreneural Mind.

1.  Creativity
2.  Suspicion of Predictors
3.  Comfort with Uncertainty
4.  Openness to Experimentation
5.  Functional Humility

Some of these come more naturally to me than others.   But the article helps explain our success with Fair Trade Recycling [FTR].

Making connections is how I bind my Creativity to the rudder of reality.   Seeing people (Geeks of Color) for what they can do rather than for what they cannot do is the Key to numbers #2,- 3, -4.   Number 5 is the most challenging.  For humility... how long will this FTR opportunity last before there's more "new escrap" coming out of China than we can supply from here... and how long will personal computers even be "a thing??

The "Essential Characteristics" is a good paradigm.  This is about creatively solving an "e-waste" problem through more and better trade, seeing a market opportunity, connecting solutions (quality, accountability) with the "ewaste" events in developing world, and having fun.   The other suggested viewing for this post is the Mad Men Series episode "The Fog".  The opportunities, predictors, uncertainty, and experimentation were all around fifty years ago... except the "emerging market" wasn't overseas.  It was women and minorities, markets ignored and impugned right here in our own country, back in 1962.

Suspicion of Predictors:  Look at how self-assigned Watchdogs have characterized the six billion people in converging markets.   They have successfully gotten the Mainstream Press to buy into their Predictor - sell a device to an African or Chinese and beware the "toxic consequences".

Look at how the non-OECD "Geeks" are depicted.  Now remember past marketing campaigns, which tried to marginalize other groups, like women (50% of the world).  Imagine running a "femine trade" marketing campaign in the 1950s.   As an entrepreneur, you might get beat up. But when previously excluded women become accepted decision makers in the market - as Africans and Chinese are bound to be - money which competitors spent on denigrating campaigns will become a liability.  By being open to partnerships with "excluded class" members, you may get an inside track.

Ratio of OECD to non-OECD

Comfort with Uncertainty, Openness to Experimentation:   You must experiment with these markets - sell to them - in order to get admitted into their factories where you can know them, and then you reduce Uncertainty load by load, trade by trade.  How can an entrepreneur stay comfortable going against the "E-Steward" current, ignoring dire predictors of primitive, wire burning, incapable buyers?



The "excluded market" of non-OECD is huge.  Big, like "women" in the 1960s.  The better-off half of non-OECD, about 3 billion people, is getting online at 10 times the rate of growth of OECD nations... but they earn $3,500 per year, one tenth of OECD per capita income.  Like women who were getting increasing purchasing influence in the 1950s, but were yet to be treated as equals, its a market opportunity in the rough.   It seems crazy and rebellious (to your clients, lenders and sponors) to treat Geeks of Color as equals.  But FTR won't have these sneering Madison Avenue Mad Men Ads to be ashamed of  as this market opens up with blistering, lightning speed.  Douala Cameroun became high speed bandwidth this month.   Open the bottle, the genie is knocking...