Instead of Reading About E-Waste, Read Something Important

The Price of Precious, by Jeffrey Gettleman, will shock you back to the reality between Tinkerer's Blessing and Curse of Natural Resources.

"The first child soldier pops out of the bush clutching an AK-47 assault rifle..."

The article is about the "wild eastern edge" of the Congo... an area near Bukavu, where I spent my first weeks in Africa in the summer of 1984.   I've been a fan of Gettleman's for several years, ranking him with Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman as mainstream reporters who "get it".

It's the mining, stupid.

Nothing I've written below here is as important or as well written, or as insightful as the National Geographic article.  I urge you not to read further.

The article is profoundly sad.  But its also sad to me that I began this trek into reuse and recycling "e-waste" from the very same ground as Gettleman walks, eastern Congo, Rwanda and Uganda border zones... a frequent theme, and digression, in the blog.

more???...

The Best Mining is Worse Than Worst Recycling

Rereading some articles in The Atlantic by Adam Minter (whose ShanghaiScrap blog is down for maintenance, see opinion pages at Bloomberg), and I was stunned by the negative comments about recycling by "trolls" in the follow up.

There's an overwhelming bias, not just about Asian and African recyclers, but an undercurrent of distrust of American recyclers as well.   If an American recycler sells bales of copper wire to China, and if the Chinese are making Christmas lights into slippers (from the insulation) and electric-grade copper, it must be wrong.   People comment, knowingly, that it must waste energy (shipping Christmas lights all the way to China), or that the toxics released (by older insulation) make it a better idea to landfill them.  Or that the Chinese are taking shortcuts to take the Christmas-tree-light-recycling-jobs away from Americans.

The trollish comments on mainstream articles about recycling are missing the point of recycling.

The world is consuming raw materials.

Raw materials come from one of two places:  from waste or from the earth.

Recycling is not a form of "waste disposal", it is a form of urban mining.

Memorial Day: Fear and Greed, Part 2

EPA tried to simplify things a few decades ago with a "Solid Waste Hierarchy".  The first was "recycle, then incinerate, then landfill".   That drew an environmentalist backlash, and the "new hierarchy" in 1990 Earth Day was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle".  Neither hierarchy anticipated the international trade issues and controversies.

Reuse and repair beats recycling.  Ghettos and barrios are the best places for that work... Just as auto and engine repair is no longer done in Manhattan.  But that collides with a social fairness "tab" we have open, and in the late 1990s "Environmental Justice" became EPA's forray into social issues.


Definitions from wikipedia 2012.05.27

The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines EJ as follows:

Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. EPA has this goal for all communities and persons across this Nation [sic]. It will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.^[5]

In other words, this environmental outcome concerned the human perception of environmental risk... people who were poor had the same vote on EPA attention as the rich people.  A clean and safe environment was seen as a human right, a protection of people.

The attention of government regulatory staff was to be divided equally, to protect us all.  This shifted the radius or loci of EPA from protecting high property values to protecting humans equally.

In this paradigm, the value of protecting the environment is utilitarian.  How many people are in contact with the environment being protected?

This is not a song for the woods, or rain forests.  It's only the giving that makes you what you are.

"E'Waste" Repair: They Took the Road Most Travelled

Agriculture in developing worlds can mean starvation.   There are a lot of things better than starvation.  Perhaps they shouldn't have to make that choice.  But they do.

Roll up the window, you're letting the air out

• Bush meat, hunting of endangered species.

• Gold mining and gold panning, using mercury from USA's recycled lamps

• Cutting rain forests.

• Soldier.

• Sex worker.

• Kidnapper, pirate, and thief.

There are many paths once the starving leave the rural fields and move to the slums.

There are not as many ways out. (World Bank: Informality & Productivity in the Labor Market in Peru)

Scrapping and repairing are not on the lists of Ju-ju professions.  The strong concentration of scrappers in China and Africa is not a sign of exploitation.  These are good people who are trying to thread a needle, who are trying to create wealth in the most honorable way they can.   Scrap and repair is the road most travelled for the smartest kids in the slums.

Jorge is still fixing TVs.   Choma was not replaced.  See them in action in the 2008 video below

They cannot all be taxi drivers, cooks, and teachers.  There has to be a way to add value.  Entire economies are supported on the multipliers from scrap and reuse.  The money they bring in makes another career, like teaching or taxi driving, or pie baking possible.