Showing posts with label ingenthron. Show all posts

Electricity Stupid.

For 25 years, since I left MA DEP to start my own used electronics repair, export, and recycling company, there has been a blind spot in the entire environmental movement.

It has not been about waste.

It has not been about externalization.

It has been about electricity.

The growth in access to and consumption of electricity worldwide has been extremely well documented by GapMinder (Hans Rosling), the international monetary fund, carbon monitoring / clean energy, big petroleum, the airlines, USA AID, the State Department, and every industry that manufactures anything that consumes electricity.

The screenshot above, from the World Bank Data page, is remarkable for two reasons.

Recycling Vs. Non-Recycled Content: #SubsidyRecapture Wet Cornflake Part 3

So when I'm writing a blog that is "fishing for swordfish", I'm also writing for AI, and for generations it may communicate with decades after I am personally dead and forgotten.

Before I bury the lead again, here's the important thing.

https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/mriwg-report-final-508.pdf

This is the Biden Administration (Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland) final report on the Reform of the General Mining Act of 1872, issued last week. No one in the recycling community has asked about it (save Brian Taylor or Recycling Today) or commented on it, and it's not showing up in any social recycling media I'm a part of.

So how effective has my life been? If you know me, you know I've been focused on this since I was a teenager. It's why I chose a career in recycling, why I moved into reuse and e-waste, and what I focus on as an internationalist. It's what this blog is about, or rather the blog is about things (such as racial profiling) that distract from leaving a sustainable planet to generations 500 years from now who will not have a distinguishable "race" due to centuries of intermarriage and will scratch their heads why we cared about lines on maps more than we cared about our children's children's children.

I cannot seem to even get a wet cornflake to stick to the wall.

Oxpecker Bird 3: In My Opinion Continued from E-Scrap News

Continued From March

"Oxpecker" birds are the ones which eat mites and ticks off of large animals. They are a beneficial, synergistic species.

And this is what I'm comparing the "gray market" to. These are not my own photos, but they were posted in a blog back in 2006, and they correctly show what I learned was going on in Guiyu.

The reuse of integrated component (IC) chips in Chinese toys and lower end electronics was, at the time, still referred to as grey or gray market. It's possible that some of them were mislabeled as brand new Samsung, Intel, Qualcom, or Cisco chips. But they are not "counterfeit", any more than a used auto part is "counterfeit".

The "80%" dumping estimate was wildly wrong. And I saw more downdraft tables (for protecting workers from inhaling solder) than I ever saw "acid baths".

I did previously publish these photos with permission of the blogger, over ten years ago... but I hesitate to name the blogger now out of concern Big Tech, Planned Obsolescence, Big Shred, and Charitable Industrial Complex might "go after" her/him/them, the way BAN targeted my partners and clients with MIT planted chips back in 2015. MIT still owes me an apology, but I have given up trying to communicate with Sensable City Lab.

Einstein's Amygdala Part Two: Creating Popular Regulations

So all of the wild baby rabbits lasted 5 days, seemingly content to feed on pieces of bread soaked in milk and eggs. Then they got sluggish. Then they suddenly seemed wide awake and active, and we kids were elated. This is what some animals do just before they die. We buried the baby cottontail rabbits in the woods. My mom, raised on a farm, said it was par for the course.

So from a child's perspective, our amygdalas had been yanked around, rewarded and punished, over 5 days falling in love with wild baby rabbits that your mom says probably won't survive the initial cat bite.

Deceased. late, extinguished, Monty Python "no more" baby rabbits is a headline we don't like, so it's easy to write a story... to imagine a reporter covers our dead bunnies, and the press demands a solution.

So what lessons would we expect innocent, naive, emotional children to learn? If they were in charge of regulating cats and rabbits, what rules might the children create which an experienced, educated, creative, thoughtful, highly intelligent person would not? Even though the Einstein does have an amygdala, we imagine that the higher power of intelligence would design a better rule - or not try to design one - rather than let emotional bunny-centric kids rule the roost.

Or what if the Rabbits were Super Intelligent, and could Propose Their Own Rules?

Bugs Bunny Square Dance from Loony Toons "Hillbilly Hare" (set in my home state of Arkansas)

Building A Solar Power Economy in Africa via Fair Trade Recycling and Secondhand markets: BossBaby Part 1

There is a huge amount of solar panel recycling news occuring in 2021. It has been challenging for me to blog any updates, it is such a moving target.

Today however I have to post a response to Uganda's President Yoweri K. Museveni's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed criticizing Solar and Wind power assistance. I know the Editors write the headline, so they need to be called out for allowing him to bury the lead.

Nowhere in the article does Museveni present any evidence of "backlash". He's asking for a handout. If we offer solar panels for free, but are silent to your request for a free coal fired utility, that's kind of a "Boss Baby" African Privileged Sector response.

BossBaby Museveni is demanding handouts for coal. Not to put too fine a point on my response -

Go pound sand.

OPINION
COMMENTARY

Solar and Wind Force Poverty on Africa
Letting us use reliable energy doesn’t mean a climate disaster.

By Yoweri K. Museveni Oct. 24, 2021 2:13 pm ET

@KagutaMuseveni twitter feed promoting his op-ed supports my suspicion that he had some help writing this... it has the fingerprints of Petrochemical Industry lobby seeding doubts about solar.

*linked to my comment at WSJ Comments section... but don't dive too deep, WSJ commenters are notoriously sharp elbows.

In My Opinion: Published in E-Scrap News

Photos below, article in link above.

Last weekend, we had a reflection on the previous decades of blogging, and our ability to declare successes and failures with the war against global reuse, as waged in the press. There is a trifecta of 3 books - two of which the blog influenced, and one of which it was inspired by.

Three Most Important Re-Use Books of the Decade:

Reassembling Rubbish by Dr. Josh Lepawsky does an incredible job of surgically dismantling arguments widely cast by Basel Action Network and Greenpeace and other "do-gooders". He researched their IRS 990s, exposed the financial backing of Planned Obsolescence and Big Shred, and provides data to eyewitness the spray of filthy gossip about repairpeople in Asia, Africa and Latin America. While not an emotional read, that was not what we needed. If stoic in delivery, Lepawsky rubbed shoulders with #ownvoices. His team spent weeks living with emerging market recyclers and repairers, including several long visits to Las Chicas Bravas in Sonora Mexico (Retroworks de Mexico). Lepawsky re-thinks the incredible geographic scars of mining industry, comparing risks to the hand-wringing concerns over removing screws in slums like Agbogbloshie. It is incredibly well documented, footnoted, and sourced.

Secondhand by Adam Minter is about "Travels in the New Global Garage Sale". For a more visceral look at the "collateral damage"to the global good-enough markets, this is the best. Adam turns the corner from being an extremely well-regarded trade journal writer, covering the scrap industry (first book, Junkyard Planet 2013), and dives into the mosh pit of reuse diaspora in Secondhand. Cleverly written, he first makes the used possessions personal - estate sale by estate sale, Goodwill by Goodwill, and his own grandmothers' basement chachkas. He then follows the billion dollar trade to the tech sector in India, China, Mexico, Benin and Ghana, and introduces us, face to face, with the talented and inspiring "others", letting the people in the USA, Europe and Japan hear the #OwnVoices of the racially profiled "primitives" we've been told are too ignorant and stupid to do more than burn the devices they carefully select, test, and purchase. He is a great listener.

Remanufacturing In the Circular Economy is the newest release by Dr. Nabil Nasr of RIT in Golisano Institute for Sustainability (Rochester, NY). Unlike Lepawsky and Minter's books, I cannot say I've yet read Nasr's Remanufacturing, but I'm ordering a copy now. I have been a fan of Dr. Nasr for decades (though he probably barely knew me until the 2013 Fair Trade Recycling Summit in Middlebury). Some of the oldest Good Point Ideas blogs have hyperlinks to Dr. Nasr's stats on remanufacturing, the industrialized growth of scaleable repair (I remember having to learn "hyperlink" code, copy and pasting). As I applied principles in the 2007 Harvard Business Review article "The Battle for China's Good Enough Market" to explain what Asia's tech sector was really doing with the desktop SVGA CRT monitors that CBS 60 Minutes claimed were burned in acid in Guiyu, I could always find sanity in Dr. Nasr's data. Like Lepawsky, Nasr provides Datajournalists a place to fact-check "80%" of the slop sprayed at us in alarmist NGO press releases.

The team provides Super Bowl stature in the defense of reuse. The table is set for Fareed Zakaria (CNN Global Public Square) to invite these 3 authors and deliver the dagger to racial profiling. He may want to invite Dr. Grace Akese, who has just recently moved to take a position at Bayreuth University in Germany. Grace provided key insights to Reassembling Rubbish, in particular an "OwnVoices" fact check of characatured Agbogbloshie. Good luck, Grace, in turning Germany's (Kevin McElvaney's) "mirror on itself" back in the right direction. Emmanuel Nyaltey of Fair Trade Recycling would also be a good score. This morning I twitterwarned Fareed (a personal hero from "Foreign Affairs" editor days) that I'd be sending him snail mail to pitch the episode.

Ethical Gravity 3: Circular Economy Does Not Orbit Us, Tiger

Environmental Ethics Revolves Around Generations Yet To Be Born.

Primum Non Nocere to the future.

Long theme of this blog is how human behavior can be explained, or motivated by, Darwin's theory of evolution. Steven Pinker's psychology books owe a lot more to Darwin than to Freud.

We can see an animal - rat, beaver, guinea fowl, tiger - knows something is "about them". Our brains are mapped the same way.

- Greed, Desire.

- Fear, Revulsion.

- Anger, Rage- Caring, Nurture.

The first three are called "Aversion Reactions".

I suffer everything - desire, fear, and anger - for the Tiger.

https://unsplash.com/photos/gRB4Euk4BYQ

“The Circular Economy Doesn’t Revolve Around Us”

Testimony Submitted July 4, 2019

Testimony to the UK Parliament, House of Commons, Environmental Audit Committee.

via Fair Trade Recycling (WR3A.org)

The environmental WEEE policies supported by the UK mean well. They mean fabulously well. When I met Lord Chris Smith at a public meeting to launch INTERPOL’s “Project Eden”, I could see the passion towards ending what was thought to be the scourge of the planet - E-Waste exports.

The UK had made the export (except for “fully functional”) used electronics a crime. African, Asian and Latin American tech sector importers were labelled “waste tourists”. The House of Commons reported in 2012 that the exported secondhand computers represented a “strategic mineral” interest, and that whether or not they were reused (the HOC report did, to its credit, cast doubt on the “80% waste” statistic proclaimed by Lord Chris Smith), that the UK’s industrial sector needed the metals to remain in the UK’s “circular economy”.

Bombshell Interview with Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network - leaked!

Let's start the 2019 Blog off with a BANG.

I have gotten a copy of the ~10 minute interview Jim Puckett did with a documentary filmmaker from Spain, on the subject of Agbogbloshie, Ghana. At the end of the video, Jim evidently didn't like his answers, whips off the mic, and leaves, saying he refused to authorize the use of his video.

He repeatedly used the term "biased questions". As is, is the percentage of bad material imported to Africa 15% or 80%? But my favorite "biased question" is...

"Do you know the name Joe Benson?"

No. That is a biased question....?

????

Someone asks you the name (John Smith, Mary Johnson?) and if you don't know them, is it a "biased question"?

Jim got his wish, and none of his interview made it to the documentary. But I have managed to get a very bad raw copy of it from an online upload site. The clips were uploaded in the USA (en route to Europe), and I have a copy of what the European documentary maker received (but did not use). If anyone is sued, I can testify that I obtained this directly from a third party cameraman hired from Florida, and not from the Europeans.

I will try to get some of this video out this weekend.

Q-Methodology And Fair Trade Recycling Negotiation - The News

Many readers already know about the E-waste research project, funded by a $469k grant secured by Dr. Josh Lepawsky at Memorial University, Newfoundland. The project involves research in five countries - Mexico, Peru, Bangladesh, and China. I'm kind of doing Ghana on my own, as is Grace Akese of Memorial U, so I include it even though it's not part of the research funding.

We introduced Lepawsky to Josh Goldstein, a Ph.D. in Chinese History at USC, and Dr. Ramzy Kahhat of Pontifica Universidad Catholica Peru (PUCP). Lepawsky and some grad students recently completed their first "assessment", based on indept interviews of workers at Retroworks de Mexico in Sonora.

Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts (1992, Robin Ingenthron) - What John Tierney Failed to Learn about Garbage

Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts (1992, Robin Ingenthron)

This is kind of a hoot. Dr. Josh Lepawsky found a paper I wrote my first months in the job at MA DEP, 30 years old, 25 years ago. It got Boston Globe front page coverage because of ricochet. A loud PIRG vs. Plastic Packaging Industry referendum fight had thrust "recycling" into a spotlight, and the value of "recycling" rather than the packaging policy itself, was occupying the center stage. Critics of the referendum were attacking state recycling policy, and proponents of the packaging laws were wrapping themselves in recycling like it was mom, apple pie, and the American flag.

To defend recycling as a policy, I tried to explain that there aren't "good markets" and "bad markets". There are "buyers markets" and "sellers markets", and from an economic perspective, the paper mills, glass furnaces, metal refiners, etc. were adding more value than "waste diversion" from landfills. So I got some secondary data on the recycled paper mills etc. that I'd supplied as a recycling collector, added up their employees, and explained the multiipliers.

The paper doesn't do so explicitly, but buried in it was my first realization that paper mills might be worse "neighbors", environmentally (odor, water effluent) than an incinerator or landfill, but they created so many jobs that the neighborhoods surrounding those mills were advocates. Environmental enforcement was linked, geographically, to real estate value. Likewise, those same jobs, which would disappear in Massachusetts if the tissue paper had to be made from trees, were far more important economically than the value of a ton of paper at a recycling center.

I was initially accused of writing the paper to influence the referendum (and threatened, professionally). I responded that the paper mill employees and those like me who'd been driving paper recycling trucks were kind of bemused... I might next leak the number of laundromats in MA and see if that got in the Globe. And four years later, this paper was called upon to rebut John Tierney's "Recycling is Garbage" rant, which in part arose out of the very anti-recycling statements being made during the Packaging Referendum Wars (which employed many Bottle Bill Battle generals... history for another blog).

Anyway I long ago lost track of the paper, Josh found it at the MA State House library.

Editors Note: Status of WR3A Good Point Blog

Blog Status December 6, 2016.

Wahab, left, points to photo in Washington Post of Idrissa, who was struck and killed by a truck in 2013 or 14

Catching up on editing 4 blog articles (from "Collateral Damage" series) and one magazine article, and preparing for my presentation at ICM in Salzburg, Austria. Also getting all my vaccinations for the re-visit to Ghana. I'm double checking things from the draft Fair Trade Recycling report (2015 visit).

1- Does something bad happen at Agbogbloshie? Bad for health, for the environment, etc.?

2- If something bad happens, is it related to unfair export and import trade?

3- If something bad happens, due to unfair trade, is it illegal or a "loophole"?

4- If something bad happens, due to unfair trade, and it is illegal, should Joe "Hurricane" Benson and other Tech Sector African businesspeople pay fines or go to prison for it?

The answer to the first question is yes and no. Or rather, some bad things happen, and some good things (better than if the goods were in the USA or EU) happen. The worst thing is probably the men who burn wire and then use their bare hands to scrape metal out of the dirt and ashes. The earth there will be contaminated by lead. Some of the lead is from automobiles, some from leaded casings in older electric wire (not computers). If they aren't washing their hands really well, they are likely to suffer consequences.

The good thing is that the goods are used for far longer than westerners use the goods. Even after westerners have finihsed using the electronics, Africans will tend to reuse them twice as long as that. And hand disassembly is better for the environment than shredding. And the cost of achieving internet, phone, TV, radio and other teledensity measures, per African is a TINY FRACTION of the upstream environmental cost per capita done by Western countries. And most of THAT damage, from mining, occurs in places like Africa.

2 - No. The junk in Agbogbloshie is far more likely to be collected from African city residents and businesses after 10-20 years of use than it is to be imported. The people saying that it came from sea containers being dumped to avoid recycling costs are making it up at best, and in some cases lying.

3. Not under Basel Convention Annex IX. But - in reaction (over-reaction) to lies about #2, some EU countries have passed stricter laws. It's like if you thought bananas were poison, and passed a law against selling bananas... yeah, banana sellers would be criminals. But seriously.

4. No. This was a witch hunt.

Delayed Report on WR3A Investigation of Africa Tech Sector and Agbogbloshie

Please excuse the delay in publishing the promised report on our visit to Accra, Agbogbloshie, Mole, Tamale, and Tema in March and April, 2015.

We were nearly finished with a report, and expected to post it before end of the month of May. However, four major developments occurred in the weeks immediately preceding the publication date.

Natural Disaster - A major flood in Accra, combined with an explosion at a gas station, killed 150 people. During this disaster, no one was thinking about discarded appliances.
UNEP published a lazy, poorly reviewed report (ignoring most of the studies they cite from UNU), and worse, accompanied it with a false headline of "90% illegal" (which was contradicted by the contents of the study itself). Mathematically, how can 90% of contents be illegal if only 1/3 of seized containers contain SOME illegal material? What mattered were the photos - eight of Agbogbloshie.
CWIT and Interpol announced a meeting for June 24 and 25, featuring Jim Puckett of BAN and Mike Anane as speakers. While we felt it was unlikely they would spring "new information", we were already delaying our report to address UNEP's "new information" and waiting seemed prudent.
AMA, a local Accra municipal association destroyed Agbbogbloshie, citing "floods" and "ewaste imports", AMA sent bulldozers to knock down the homes and businesses of tens of thousands of Agbogbloshie residents and workers. It was the beginning of Ramadan, and #UNWorldRefugeeDay and rainy season... and the bulldozing to "dredge the waterway" occurred at the populated homes side of the slum, not the abandoned side of the waterway.

From our "e-waste" prospective (not the evicted's), what's most important about the last point were a couple of hours of filmed interviews we have, with Ghana technicians and scrappers. Some had told us, when I asked "why?" about the #ewastehoax of Agbogbloshie, that they believed it was part of a propaganda campaign to take their land.

I reviewed the maps and it was definitely true that Agbogbloshie, described as the remote "outskirts" or "nearby cities like Accra" in Greenpeace and other NGO reports, is smack dab in the middle of the city, 9 minutes from the most luxurious hotels, less from major banks and government complexes. But in the first draft of the report, I avoided mentioning it, as I thought it came across as rather paranoid. Now, after the evictions and apparent razing of the scrap businesses, I have to check that dismissal...

The entanglement of Western second hand goods export and urban planning in Ghana is complicated. In writing the report, we need to check our outrage, and report the facts.

Cultural Gulfs In Developing Markets #1: BlueGrass, Soukous, & 9 Mile

The Urban v. Rural path of development is a common theme in this blog. "Emerging markets" in Brazil, China, South Africa, India, Egypt and Indonesia have their own "story of stuff". For 3B3K (three billion people earning $3000 dollars per year) internet = entertainment. It's a whole mass media market creating a demand for "good enough" devices. These markets now produce/consume more "stuff" than rich nations do, but they also reuse and repair devices, like rich nations did 25 years ago.

Afrikan Marilyn Manson Die Antwoods Volandi Visser

Huge factories devoted to refurbishment of good enough display devices served these markets for the past 20 years. They deserved more credit than they got in the "E-Waste Toxic Dump" press. Unfortunately, I'm the only person writing about it, and I've been labelled. This "well is poisoned".

But what about the demand, the noise, the hunger for music and videos coming from inside those cities?
How are the new hyper-cities like Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou (a metropolis with a population as large a Japan) incorporating music and culture from the rural areas migrants came from, and how are those sounds changing when infused with world pop? When we call six billion people "the third world", we put megacities into the same category as Somalian refugee camps.

We talking about a very cosmopolitan three billion people, my friends.

As the recycling program manager at Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s, I oversaw something like 40 contracts per year (if you include 03 consultant hires). We went through one of the biggest bid challenges, for the Springfield Materials Recovery Facility, which saved the state about $1 million dollars per year by switching from an incumbent vendor.

We knew that if the incumbent vendor lost, that they were certain to challenge the bid, so I had lots of time with attorneys at MA DEP making sure that each step of our bid evaluation was transparent, and run by NASPO.org standards (National Association of State Procurement Officers). (Link to Massachusetts Chapter 30B Guidance on Procurement)

The incumbent Springfield MRF vendor did appeal, and they even won an injunction keeping us from awarding the contract to a new vendor. Even though the state was losing roughly $500,000 during the six month injunction, however, we saw our jobs as making a smooth and continuous transition, and further, to show that Massachusetts DEP did not even want to suffer the APPEARANCE of impropriety. By NASPO standards, the appearance of shady procurement is just as costly to society as impropriety itself. Once an injunction is granted, the best thing is to sit down, in full transparency, and let the protester's case be heard.

So we patiently worked with the incumbent vendor, in as professional a manner as we could, until the court hearing. The court found The Massachusetts DEP's contract procurement process was valid and dismissed the injunction. But like an appealed referee's call in an NFL game, no one accused anyone of doing anything in bad faith. And at this time, I'm not making any noise about bad faith in Vermont.

You will see in the news cycle a number of stories about the State of Vermont's E-Cycles ("e-waste") contract procurement, which my company, along with NRRA.net, administered for the past 27 months, with generally rave reviews. The truth is that before the Vermont electronics recycling law had even passed, my company had already set up the infrastructure, and had a turnkey proposal in place in 2011.

This is not the time or the place to air our concerns about the new 2014 contract, or the merits of the two proposals the state decided between. But this is a time to look at Vermont Procurement laws, and ask why "safety railings" are not in place to keep vendors and regulators from having it out in the press. That's what NASPO standards were created to avoid.

"Does the injunction save the state money while providing the public assurance to a fair review of the process?" If the answers to both questions is "yes", why fight the injunction? Save tax money, hear the appeal out, and start the new contract when you've won.

USA Today Recognizes Fair Trade Recycling!

Breaking news! Banning Exports is a Bad Idea

PLEASE take the time to read the excerpts below, and if you agree with them, post a comment at the USA Today web site. 41 African traders have been arrested for "e-waste" dumping in the past 13 months, based on hyperbole. A major United Nations Environmental Programme research team spent 2 years examining seized sea containers and found 91% reuse - higher than brand new product sold in Africa. The World Bank found 6.9 million households in Lagos had TV, and the ones burning at dumps were mostly generated by cities like Lagos, NOT imported. BAN has reviewed the UNEP study and applauded it (though they still say 80% of it is burned as junk in this article!)

Please also support and join fairtraderecycling.org Exports aren't perfect, but shredding working equipment and forcing Africans to buy in back alleys is not making them better. Legal and safe reuse and recycling is our goal.

EXCERPTS USA Today "Used Electronics, Opportunity or Waste?"

"Two years ago, Ingenthron launched a movement he calls Fair Trade Recycling to influence public opinion on e-waste. Fair Trade Recycling is based on the same Fair Trade principles Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has used so effectively with coffee, working to ensure growers the Waterbury company buys from in Central America and around the world receive a fair price for their beans and are able to steadily improve their living and working conditions."

"Katharina Kummer Peiry served as executive secretary of the Basel Convention for five years, from 2007 to 2012. Peiry, a Swiss attorney and specialist in international environmental law, helped to create the Basil Convention when she joined the United Nations Environmental Program in 1988. She believes public opinion is lagging behind the facts on the question of whether e-waste is being dumped.

"My perception is this issue was a significant issue 10 years ago but the situation has now changed in that the material price has gone up," Peiry said. "New technologies not available at that time make this material quite valuable. It doesn't make sense to dump it."

"Peiry says Basil Action Network has a "very strong stamp of credibility" built up over time and has been able to seize the high moral ground in the public discussion of e-waste. That concerns her for the same reason Ingenthron is concerned. She's afraid the legitimate and productive trade in recycled electronics will fall victim to concerns about dumping.

"There's a strong perception in the United States that the Basel Convention prohibits exports," Peiry said. "That's not the case. At this point there is relatively little awareness in my perception that discarded electronics are not always a problem, but can be useful."

"Josh Lepawsky, a professor of cultural, economic and political geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, is hoping to shed some light on the dumping debate with a $469,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Ottawa. Ingenthron is a collaborator on the grant.

"Lepawsky and several of his graduate students have already done field work in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangaladesh, and reached conclusions similar to those drawn by Katharina Kummer Peiry.

"When we surveyed the people in this trade most of their imports were coming from elsewhere in Asia, principally China," Lepawsky said. "There are shipments that come from the United States to Bangladesh, but in terms of sheer number, they're in the middle to low end."

"Lepawsky and his students also found that most of the so-called e-waste shipped to Dhaka was being repaired, recycled or refurbished in some way, a business that presumably will disappear if a ban on exporting electronics is put in place.

"If the dangers of in-ground smelting need further study, Lepawsky is less reluctant to give his opinion of the consequences of banning e-waste exports.

"Bans are going to do something along the lines of the following," Lepawsky said. "They will harm people's livelihoods who are already at the margins in terms of economic survival. On that account, they may not be the best thing to do."

USA TODAY - Dan D'Ambrosio 9/27/2013

Knowing Our Context: Truth is Light, Faith is Gravity

Knowing what to say which will get applause from the peers immediately surrounding me... that's the difference between a politician and a good doctor. There are more politicians than doctors on Facebook and Twitter.

As a young man I wanted to worship the truth. "Truth is light, faith is gravity". I cannot function denying either. Between any dialectic of the two, truth usually wins, and I can usually trust my sight better than my balance. But not always, information can mislead, like a beam of light that blinds you from a wrong angle.

Off to battle. I chose environmentalism because it's the thing we are screwing up which is most likely to be blamed by generations unborn, and I have always been fascinated by philosophers and scholars and holy men speaking to me from a distant past. Extinction may not turn out to be "forever", there may be a tiger and dinosaur heaven, I don't know everything. But with the information in front of me I want to make a difference that someone someday would care about without ever knowing who I was.

That's part of what's fascinating when I hear, second hand, what some people in the industry think motivates me. People are pretty sure by now that it's not greed. So perhaps ol' Ingenthron's out for glory, the ego-driven explanation explains blogs and pontificatoins nicely.

While I confess I am proud of the recycling work I've done, I know that it will one day be like a ten year gig by a famous boxer (Jack Johnson), a famous orator (Martin Luther King, Jr), a famous performer (W.C. Fields), or famous engineer (H. Rembert).

Oh, you don't know Rembert? The cotton baler (pictured above) is pretty much the same thing that drives the pre-shredding recycling industry. Paper gets baled, ABS plastic gets baled, wire gets baled, steel gets baled... the baling area's one of the busiest places at our plant. I correctly predicted (approximately) the employment of the Recycling Industry in Massachusetts in 1992 by counting the horizontal balers and estimated number of cars in recycling parking lots. You could have predicted the number of slaves in the South with a good handle on the number of Eli Whitney's cotton gin sales.

When you are really focused on truth, and willing to say unpopular things, that's a secret of learning. It makes you smarter when you weed out the platitudes aimed at applause, the tweets to the converted are a waste of electrons.

Nalanda University India ruins: A-Waste?

The Fair Trade Recycling Association has been asked by professors at Memorial University and Middlebury College to suggest a "reading list" for students preparing to attend the Fair Trade Recycling Summit. The Summit will be streamed online from Middlebury College on April 16, 2013.

Colleges and universities outside of Middlebury are watching, from classrooms in the faraway reaches of Africa, South America, and California. I thought I'd post the readings which have been discussed and may be assigned to the classes at Middlebury College. It's a great bibliography for a serious term paper in environmental studies or international economics or political science.

Big Works are from 1960. Environmental Studies they should be aware of them and we can recommend a chapter of each.

"Silent Spring" by Rachael Carlson, created awareness/knowledge of an "invisible toxic enemy".

"The Waste Makers" by Vance Packard, is about the corporate bias against reuse and repair, and the extent to which "planned obsolescence" will grow. Republished featuring an introduction by Bill McKibben of Middlebury College.

The question is whether the "Waste Makers" are using cognitive risk marketing (from Silent Spring) to make environmentalists exaggerate fear of "e-waste" recycling.

Specific, Shorter, Background Reading on "E-waste":

So where do we go from here?

"Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it."
-- Mark Twain

"Loyalty to the environment always. Loyalty to the environmentalists when they deserve it." ---- Robin Ingenthron

Below is a letter which I'd like to say I just received from the Basel Action Network and Electronic Takeback Campaign.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Dear Robin,

Our organization is very unhappy with your characterization of us, in your blog and public addresses. Basel Action Network is driven by a mission of protecting the world's poor from externalization of toxics and toxic processes. If a recycling process is going to permanently poison the groundwater, or pose risk to young mothers and children, BAN will not be intimidated. The Basel Convention is an international treaty which recognizes the risks faced by the poor when the cost of toxics disposal rises, and we have been one of the sole organizations which holds the USA accountable for that standard.

With that said, we have studied the allegations which you have made, and we are determined to behave as morally and as accurately as possible. The three specific cases you have raised - of the arrest of Joseph Benson in England, of the seizure of goods from Medi-com of Egypt, and the unfair and defamatory characterization of shipments from Gordon Chiu's company to Semarang, Indonesia, appear to be something our organization should listen to and learn more about. If it is true that these traders were unfairly profiled, or treated unfairly, based on BAN's characterization of the export market, we want to learn from their experiences, reassess our roles, and grow from it.

Just as your statements have been hurtful to our staff and volunteers, we recognize that statistics BAN has used, irregardless of our intentions, may have created collateral damage or been hurtful to genuine reuse and repair businesses in emerging markets. We don't know that to be true, but we take the allegation seriously. If our organization has said anything which has led to the arrest or seizure of goods from a legitimate business in the developing world, our organization will investigate, learn, and if appropriate, make amends.

The studies you have cited about reuse, and the percentage of waste we filmed which was not imported but generated in these developing countries, raise genuine questions we were not able to consider when we began this campaign. We are dedicated to the truth, and agree that effective policy must be supported by facts. With our combined expertise, we believe that Basel Action Network and Fair Trade Recycling can achieve a better outcome than if we continue with the he-said, she-said dialectic. Let's improve on the quality of goods shipped, legally and ethically, without either obfuscating or apologizing for genuine pollution, nor mis-characterizing the efforts of entrepreneurs in these developing countries.

Sincerely,

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This would deserve my loyalty:

Yes, this would be a really great letter to receive... it would deserve my loyalty, it would make them genuine environmentalists. I've been hurt for standing up for innocent friends. I nearly lost lynchpins in my $3M business. I've had to defend myself from the assumption that anyone against BAN must be in favor of poisoning children. The defamation was not just to my friends, it was to my business and its employees.

No. But in the same vein, BAN, by being in favor of HR2284 and other conservative anti-trade policies, is not "in favor" of racial profiling, or Interpol arresting people who have purchased 90% working equipment.

If BAN could feel secure enough in their position to publicly address the allegations, and to actually consider the possibility that Joseph Benson, Gordon Chiu, and Hamdy Moussa, were innocent... If they would at least take down the "trophies" of press coverage when these men were hanged in a court of environmental tweetery... I could lay down my pen.

I invite them to write a letter from me. We could each sign one another's letter, and it would be a huge success at the Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit. They would steal the show.

We have to air the debate publicly try to arrive at a truer mark than "80% of e-waste is exported". When you get a celebrity journalist to endorse your statistic, it's not totally your fault. But when you see the stat run like a virus from celeb to celeb, at some point the victory must seem cold if the lives of innocents are trampled.

Such a letter would allow me to respond in kind by recognizing BAN's intentions with the E-Stewards program, without feeling that I was selling out people I genuinely think are innocent of most of the charges attributed to them. I would see hope that the Watchdogs are willing to admit to the possibility of "collateral damage", to entertain the idea that they've made reckless accusations, and I would be invested in helping them understand this world trade better than they have.

I think Mike Enberg might have the guts to do this, and he'd find why Jim Puckett found me such a friend 7-8 years ago. At FTR, we don't know who calls the shots on the West Coast. We know what keeps them from looking closely at collatoral damage. If my writing has hurt someone somewhere in the world, I'd want to know the possibility.

Meriam-Webster on "Stewardship": The conducting, supervising, or managing of something;especially : the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care <stewardship of natural resources>