I'm very grateful for Photos.google.com. There are now decades of photos I can find very quickly. And it includes a lot of digital photos I took of hard copy photos.
And I'm very grateful that wonderful things from artists like Gahan Wilson and Gary Larson and George Carlin (whose comments on the history of the FCC were very topical again, this week. Freedom of Speech should be safe as long as we have volume, channel changing, and other knobs availalbe).
Less grateful that Blogger delists older posts which included hot links that are now dead links. In 2008, if this blog linked to a current story of 2008, and that link (often to a youtube video, which is another google archive topic) is now 404, the blogspot post linking to that 404 effectively becomes 404.
Understandably, this may be a necessary way to prevent AI from generating millions of blogspot posts and billions of youtube videos. But AI will probably have more time to figure its way past the gatekeepers than I will have time for to go back and edit 17 year old blog posts.
This is the reason I'm now entertaining the idea of outsourcing my blog to my own "Deadbot".
So far, the digitization of thoughts and opinions and images and voice has been marketed as a way to preserve a dearly departed "dead" one - hence the term "dead-bot". And that raises questions - would my parents have wanted me to do that? My father Bill Ingenthron worshiped his grandparents - but they instructed him to burn their love letters (he didn't). So it's an "ethics of recycling" topic.
But I'm in a position to recycle myself. I could outsource my engagement with society - which has always been above and beyond the societal mean. There is a big digital record of my thoughts and opinions, starting with articles and editorials I wrote in the trade press (see academia.edu profile), continuing with the blog, and I'm always piping up on Linkedin and Facebook (to the alarm and consternation of my most significant other person in my life).
Ultimately, the test of whether E-Stewards or R2 Certified Recyclers is the right guarantee will not depend on photos of children burning waste. It will not depend a company's unwillingness to pay huge fees to a political group which defames the best and brightest nerds in the business.
False Eyewitness: I can prove that Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network knows the factories he accuses R2 of dealing with are not creating the pollution his organization publicly accused them of last week.
One of E-Stewards own auditors physically inspected one of these facilities (later visited by reporter Adam Minter), and Jim an I had in depth discussion following that audit, much of it written, about his position on the Basel Ban Amendment being inconsistent with even pristine, non-polluting repair (he conceded to me that the Basel Convention itself allows these facilities, but said in his view the Basel Convention, as it now stands, must be amended). The "compromise" was to remove parts in the USA prior to export, rather than what we proved was happening - proper recycling of those parts. He did not like that the focus material circuit boards went with the off-spec and warranty takeback circuit boards back to Japan.
[clarification: Jim's organization specifically accused these factories in the Boston Globe article of March 2010, and last week emphasized the accusation ("inflicting tremendous harm"...) During detailed conversations and disclosures about this type of factory ("California Compromise") the "technicalities" Jim objected to never approached this falsehood (i.e. even if the factory ships electively upgraded parts to Japan for recycling, that technically a "transboundary shipment" had occurred between export from OECD USA and recycling of the removed part at OECD Japan).
"This includes untested and/or non-working equipment exported for refurbishment or reuse, some of which is currently allowed under the R2 Standard. Refurbishment often produces hazardous waste, which is responsible for inflicting tremendous harm on the citizens and environments of these nations."
This makes 3 public accusations specific to "semiknockdown", "elective upgrade", and "warranty repair". One in E-Scrap News (fair trade is not poisoning people), one in the Boston Globe, and last week's, shown above. This is now an open book. BAN says that the Basel Convention, by allowing export for repair at original equipment assembly factories under Annex IX B1110, is responsible for poisoning people, and must be amended and changed. He has specifically said to me that if the Basel Convention is ratified by the USA without the Ban Amendment, that it would be a bad thing.
This establishes that the organization, Basel Action Network, has publicly maintained it is a crusader for international law, but is in fact an anti-globalization organization which believes that trade between 17% of the world and the other 83% of the world is inherently bad. People like me, with backgrounds in international development of Africa and Latin America and Asia, are horrified by this "war on trade". The mystery is how the Press has accepted that EPA is bad, ISRI is bad, recyclers are bad, tinkerers/fixers/geeks are bad, and joined this Salem Witch Trial verdict against the Basel Convention while citing, in article after article, the Basel Convention as the source of ethical recycling.
Injustice: We expect his false accusations, pairing photos of the factory which originally made the monitors with pictures of dirty operations in Guiyu, to have their intended effect. The false accusation from a non-profit NGO will create enough doubt in contractors, and enough opportunity for anti-white-box (off brand) computer remanufacturers, that companies like mine will be forced to sever ties. The factories will either A) remain by buying the product to be refurbished elsewhere (outside Europe and USA), or B) be shuttered like the factories in Indonesia.
Smoking Gun: BAN specifically knows that this factory is not "inflicting tremendous harm" on the citizens. This is a clear case of BAN leading the public to believe that the very best of the non-OECD 6 billion people is the same as the very worst, Guiyu.
Motive: This non-profit sells its influence for cash. While claiming to be an ethical e-waste recycling advocate, BAN knowingly makes false witness against the best and brightest in the converging and emerging markets. BAN has accused sustainable factories which replace bad capacitors (Capacitor Heroes) of being a significant source of pollution. BAN takes money from manufacturers who use non-recycled, mined content, from pollution hellholes like OK Tedi PPG and Kabwe Zambia. They use that money in a cynical campaign to shut down reuse facilities which create high tech repair jobs in cities which desperately need those jobs. They are succeeding at shutting down sustainable, clean factories, which sell refurbished computers in democracies like Egypt and India and Indonesia... with money from mining to produce tablets and high end computers which those countries cannot afford.
Part III of 4: Does it really matter whether the pollution in Guiyu China came from E-waste, or from iron mining, or from textile mills?
If we are responsible for the Stewardship of our own upstreams and downstreams, as seems reasonable, why take any risk at all?
Isn't it appropriate for us to use our buying and selling power to procure the best available services, providing the best possible standards?
If so, why shouldn't our society, in essence, assign a liability for bad consequences to corporations we buy from? Why shouldn't we ourselves remain legally liable for anything we once owned? This concept is behind the "precautionary principle", championed in Europe:
The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. [wikipedia 2011.11.20]
If the individual making the purchasing decision suspects risk, and there is a vacuum or absense of scientific consensus, the burden of proof (liability) might dictate we should "avoid bad neighborhoods". In the "absence of scientific consensus" we have reputation, news reports, green fingerpointing upon which to formulate our cognitive risk. EPA enforcement cannot happen (in the USA) in absence of science. Perhaps we need Watchdog organizations to boost our collective sense of liability. Whether or not what we did was responsible for the watershed pollution in Blackstone, Louhrajang, OK Tedi, or Guiyu rivers, perhaps we need watchdogs who bark falsely, to keep us on our toes.
Or so said the lawyer for the boy who cries wolf...
Populist Cognitive Risk: The "suspected risk" of the precautionary principle has boiled down to racial profiling. Reputations of Africans for "waste tourism", "organized crime", burning computers they purchase for thousands of dollars after spending thousands of dollars to ship them over the ocean and through customs... Given most Americans command of language and geography (most would place Mauritania next to Malawi, Madagascar, and Mozambique...), a photo of a sad child or sandalled woman elevates the "suspected risk". A friend of mine in Massachusetts, a recycler of conscience, said to me that if there was even a chance that a computer exported wound up in Guiyu, that she couldn't sleep at night if a computer her town collected might wind up there.*
I've been from Perpignan (France) to Barcelona (Spain) to CDG Paris to New York City JFK airport, where I sit now, waiting for the flight to Burlington Vermont. Boingo wireless, wifi in France, it's been nice to post photos to Facebook rather than send postcards. redemtech
During some slow periods in the vacation, I read my blogs of Christmas past, starting in 2006. They were very journal-like, too wordy, and rather introspective. I also read some more famous blogs of note, with thousands of daily reads.
This set of posts is incredibly specific, dealing with specifics of a recycling issue which is controversial in its time. The theme is that students of environmental policy can learn best from our mistakes (mine or yours) if we chronicle the dialogue, subtext, and controversy. Again, I could be wrong. But when I read my past posts, it's pretty clear that I'm sincere in my approach to recycling. Recycling beats mining, so improve it without shutting it down.
In the Good Point Ideas Blog, I chronicle trips to overseas markets, apply economic theory to my practical insider vision, and have tried to honestly disclose my own biases and self-interests. The blog boringly but logically explains our company's processes. The point is to write honestly about what I have seen. The worst recycling practices. And the very best recycling practices. In the same countries.
It's therefore fascinating to read blog posts by another "owner-operator" of another e-waste recycling company. On my visits overseas to my end markets, his company's material was being unloaded side by side with mine. There was nothing wrong, in my opinion, with his company's exports. I asked the guy who was buying them, and while he was not too happy with the ratio of P3s to P4s on this load, he was ok with the Ohio supplier. As he was ok with my product.
Personally, I kind of think the other CEO seems willing to push his Malaysian buyer-friends under a bus to gain BAN's accolades. I don't compete with him directly, he doesn't much touch the residential/municipal material we manage. He goes after corporate suppliers who are risk averse and wealthy, willing to pay a lot to have very repairable and valuable material taken care of. We have a lot of hair on our meat, and more crap to remove. In a way, my company should be defending BAN's vision of no "toxics along for the ride", and he should be explaining just how nice commercial e-scrap is to the developing world's high-tech remarket.
Perhaps his company no longer ships to the processors we shipped to together - the ones who care less whether a power supply is "tested working" (as they will replace it anyway for 220v clients), and care more about the speed of the processor and raster of the cathode ray tube. But there is a certain introspection lacking, given the apparent conversion. If I stop shipping good units to buyers in Jahor Bahru, KL, Jakarta or Penang, where we both shipped in the past, I will tell you I used to ship there and will tell you why I stopped. I will NOT post wire-burning monkey photos and act like I never shipped the capable technicians there, as I like to sleep at night.
(Video removed by viddler.com 2014)
I used to ship CRTs to China. They were good factories. But the Chinese government owns virgin-CRT manufacturing capacity, and does not want "grey market" or "second hand" products competing with their CRTs. They made it illegal and took away all the import permits. So I moved to countries - Indonesia and Malaysia, which had similar factories but still issued import permits. Other USA recyclers still ship to the Chinese reuse market, either via Hong Kong or to Viet Nam for overland shipping to Kunming. There are Chinese CRT refurbishers operating in special "import-export zones", like maquilas, that appear to have valid permits. But we chose not to play cat and mouse with the Chinese Communist Party.
Details, Details: The more specifically honest my posts, the longer they get. The CEO promoting e-Stewards is more succinctly written. But his experience with both good export markets and the USA front companies which exported his CRTs "less transparently" would add flavor to the blog. He and I were both invited to process our CRTs through a USA company. I inspected the company and found it to be a sham recycling operation, and when the EPA and China enforced against the sham recycler, I could tell our clients they had nothing to worry about. And even if most of the CRT monitors visible in 60 Minutes Hong Kong fly-over were going to good factories, I can write the truth about those factories AND assure our clients we DID NOT SHIP CRTs to Hong Kong.
As a forum to market his company, the Other CEO takes a simpler route. His advocacy of BAN and E-Stewards probably serves well. Explaining his personal experience with the export market would produce longer, less accessible posts.
I'm sure my blog fails to win new risk averse clients, though it may help retain the long term clients served since Earth Day 2000. If in 20 years, only profits we made now matters, he will have cleaned my clock. If, as I believe, the Singapore-azation of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Egypt makes them tigers, BRICKs, economic and development successes, then his participation in the denigration of their capacity to refurbish and recycle - given fair trade economic incentives - will be shameful.
While Singapore reached better-than-OECD status on an economy based on imports an refurbishing, that door is being slammed on Egypt, Kenya, and other nations with a "ban on imports" of western (working and repairable) CRTs.
Oh, yeah. While I was on vacation, I got news that Indonesia drank the BAN Kool-Aid and took away the import permit for the big secret factory. The one described by NRDC as a primitive wire burning operation. NRDC has never been there.
If you are one of the students who reads this blog - my favorite audience - I hope you will research Singapore and the "repair and overhaul". I'm generally handicapped in disclosing the specific, proud, hands-on refurbishing factories for fear their import permits will be taken away.
Ok, anti-export campaigners, I dare you to shut this down. Here is a really big operation importing Western Goods for repair and refurbishing, which replaces and recycles a lot of electronics. Rolls Royce has an aircraft "repair and overhaul" or R&O operation in (gasp!) non-OECD member Signapore. Western countries send our Boeings and Airbuses there to be completely overhauled. Under my (and EPA and UNCTAD and others) interpretation of Basel Convention Annex IX, that's a good thing. BAN, I invite you to explain whether this operation is legal and if so, what is the difference between Singapore overhauling a jet and overhauling a CRT monitor?
I probably need to at least prioritize the more substantive pieces, like "Top 10 Myths", "We Shouldn't Have to Make that Choice," "Big Secret Factories", some of the critical posts on certification, 60 Minutes, and "Proud to Be an Exporter". I'll work this week on a "Top 10 Posts", and start the painful process of cleaning up some of the redundant and derivative posts which may dilute the facts about ethical e-waste recycling and fair trade recycling.
