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| Hoover halts TV sales pending "ewaste" recycling infrastructure? |
China's modern history of communication devices includes a small chapter on "e-waste". Here is an interesting link to a terrific website, TVHistory.TV, on the first 75 years of TV technology. I hope to do a similar site with the history of "e-waste" policy. It will include a day in the near future when China made ewaste imports legal...
Desperate for growth in the 1980s and 90s: The Communist Party lost face as technical and economic development rocketed in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. To catch up, they were willing to close one eye to pollution, toxins, etc. Corner cutting occurred in all stages of production, from mining to quality to disposal... even capitalist investment by Taiwanese in Guangdong... Anything that made up the lost ground. And reuse and recycling, which had been a huge factor in the growth of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc., was welcome.
But what was to become the key to economic advancement across Asia was repair, refurbishment, knock-offs, and contract manufacturing: Activities perhaps best described by Yuzo Takahashi in his treatise on Japanese economic development, "A Network of Tinkerers: The Advent of the Radio and Television Industry in Japan". Geeks of color, working in resource-poor nations, used their "yankee ingenuity" to add value to gadgets. When there's no gold to mine and no oil to pump, smart poor people produce value out of textbooks, schematics, and cerebral cortexes... fixing Stuff.
