CRT Glass Resolution: An "Own Goal" In Slow-Mo

The path of least resistance is to trust our environmental regulators, trust the watchdogs, and assume that profit-driven industry is the villain, the fox in the henhouse.

The path of least resistance is to assume that people questioning environmental enforcement are "apologists" who care less about environmental pollution than the enforcement proponents.

Sometimes those assumptions are 100% right.  I'm not a carbon climate causality denier, and I'm proud of my 9 years of service as a Massachusetts recycling regulator.


But as a former regulator, I can attest regulators are not always right.  Regulatory agency lawyers tend to be more risk-averse than private sector attorneys, for example.  Regulators understandably want to hold themselves to "the highest environmental standard".  But when there is doubt and uncertainty - an engineering problem for example - the regulator can become obfuscated and defend his own reputation.  That is to say, when in doubt, the regulator has to act - in doubt.  And saying "yes" or "no" sometimes boils down to the regulator's own insecurities.

And these lead to unintended consequences.  #OwnGoal

Let me again state that what the agencies do, for the most part, is great.  I'm suggesting an environmental police chief should look at community concerns the way any police chief looks at protest.  You can stonewall and deny mistakes, claim 100% effectiveness in your policy.  Or you can learn from a mistake and adjust your policy.

CRT Recycling Primer: Update

E-Waste Made Simple!

Taking a break on the "Term Paper" project which explains the "good enough" markets among the world's urban poor, I found some broken links on this 2010 post "CRT Recycling Primer".

I updated a broken link and added a few lines, and it occurred to me that this was kind of a gem in the light of recent buzz about CRT glass recycling stockpiles and glutted markets.

The ugly, the bad, and the Good Enough Market connect between bans on the West Coast, sellers markets on the East Coast, piles of CRT glass, and a surge in internet by young people in emerging markets, as profiled by EMarketer (covering research by Google and Booz)

O! What a tangled web we weive when first we practice to deceive!  It all started with a bogus, raunchy, cynical, made up statistic by Basel Action Network which said that 80-90% of CRTs exported were burned in primitive and polluting conditions.   Not only has BAN stopped distributing the stat, they have refused to ever say where it came up with it in the first place.  Combined with pictures of poster children, this stat sucked in CBS Scott Pelley, Terry Gross, Frontline, and entire "E-Steward" enterprises.

The outcome?  Shortages of monitors, dictator crackdowns on internet hardware, worse supply chains, high taxes, and a big stockpile of CRT glass cullet (and higher prices to recycle it).   Now California companies are asking for permission to landfill it, which means not only were California taxpayers asked to take the monitors taken from Egyptians, the CRT glass was not even recycled.

1.  California subsidizes companies to break CRT monitors.  This created a sellers market for working CRT exports on the East Coast, and created a simple "big shred" system of companies in California who live off the breaking subsidy (planned obsolescence in hindsight).