"Something Must Be Done.
X is Something....Therefore, X must be done."
Like the blacksmiths and coal miners of old, the scrap recycling and secondary products industries touch everyone. Every consumer, in the lowest of middle classes, discards something, and the poorer the generator, the more concerned they are with the value of the material.
So far, that's pure economics, not ethical philosopy. But because recycling saves trees, and preserves energy and resources for future generations, recycling companies attract more than our share of do-gooders. I am one of those people who entered this field out of a desire that future generations would consider I made my best effort to be environmentally sustainable.
Little did this recycler realize what a social ethical economic puzzle it would turn out.
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| Who reads this junk? |
The ethical scrapper and agent of conscience looks at social and environmental policy. He finds and magnifies a crack in the morality play, using the commerce in used electronics as a lens.
The Ethical Scrapper coins new terms. Environmental Malpractice, accidental racism, e-waste hoax, and so forth.
For 2015, here's the debut of "Guilt-Staining". It is the polar opposite to "greenwashing": when big corporations shout their environmentally contributions (using advertising budgets) to create green impressions. out of all proportion to their net environmental effects. Guilt-staining is the allegation of "dirty little secrets". It leverages already-activated "agents of conscience" (a term coined in high school) into anger, and threatens to take something ACTUALLY green, and stain it with guilt.
Like all recyclers, the ethical scrapper already does much for the world by saving energy, carbon, and finite resources... by reducing the toxic mining of rain forests and coral reef islands.
All recyclers do that, at all levels of a company. An entire company contributes as a team to win one for the environment. People running the payroll, or maintaining the fork trucks, or filling the balers all earn a moral share of diverting the burdens of man's consumption of finite resources on the planet. The recyclers are a team of village blacksmiths, or blackleg miners, working far harder than any regulator or average consumer, in dirtier and more hazardous conditions. We do much just by being focused on our jobs, collecting material, and recycling it. Politics would seem to add as much value to recyclers as it adds to mining, agriculture, or laundry, or radio repair.
"Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose".
