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...
