Dell Global Recycling Video by Von Wong, Theory of God

While I would love to sit down with Von Wong and correct some of his statistics about ewaste (to put a more heroic face on the overseas Tech Sector, described as "landfills across the globe" in the intro), I have to hand it to him, the artwork is great.



Can't resist sharing this.  Thanks to my pal in Malaysia, Nancy Poh, for sharing it.

But this is a two part blog. The next is about my theory of knowledge, and knowledge of God.

Cultural Gulfs in Emerging Markets 8: Tooth Repair in Kowloon's Walled City

33,000 people
8,000 homes
1,000 businesses
2.8 hectares

That's 1.2 million people per square kilometer (Manhattan is 27 thousand per square km)

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating 18 minute video (Greg Girard and Ian Lambot) documentary on Kowloon's "walled city", the slum which formed outside of Hong Kong, as rural peasants and refugees sought shelter in a place that was closer to Hong Kong's growing economic power in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s.  It was condemned in the late 80s and torn down in the early 90s, as Hong Kong became too prosperous, land values increased, and people became embarrassed and self conscious of the towering slum, which typically housed four families to an apartment.

This fits with the "Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets" blog series.  There are equivalents to Kowloon's walled city today, counterparts in Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa, Lima, and Mexico City.

The move from spacious rural poverty to dense urban poverty is a mind trip, an incredible social and cultural shock.  It explains the demand for hundreds of millions of SKD televisions (small TVs made from reused USA computer monitors in the 1990s-early 2000s).  It explains the growth of internet, ten times the rate of growth in nations earning 3,000 dollars per year as in the "developed world"

The documentary begins with some of the "bad jobs" the walled city became known for, and the early "poverty porn" (before the term) in kung fu movies and Jean Claude Van Damme and Jacky Chan films.

During my life, living and working with people who know these city-slums intimately, bringing my family close by or inside these places, or to eat with families who once lived in these places and have now moved up on on, I'm sad that there has been so little documentation of the "tinkerers blessing".   The WSJ documents heroin and opium trade, prostitution, and primitive dentistry (a form of repair)... though it does later briefly allude to how good the dentistry became, how the dentists progressed.

Laptop repair and cell phone repair is a form of bloodless dentistry.

Enough, click to watch.

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

Ethical: Samaritan "waste" to slums (The Red Shoe Blog)

The "red show blog" (April 2011) was Tocquevillian.

Why RCRA needs a "good samaritan" rule for Americans trading with people in emerging and converging markets.

Disposal used to mean throwing something into the gutter of a street.  In some of the world's slums, that is still the primary method of waste disposal.   If you throw something into a gutter next to other stuff that is wet and abandoned, you can't really say that you considered the object a valuable commodity.

But what if you were walking the streets of a slum, in India, Pakistan, Kinshasa, and you dropped a $100 bill on the street?  Ethically speaking, is that the same thing as littering?

It could be argued that it was stupid.  Or callous.  Or demonstrated a lack of concern or care whether the $100 bill would do any good to anybody, if it was blown away or trodden into the mud it would have been "wasted".  PREMISE:  Value by itself does not mean that something is not waste.

From the Red Shoe Site blog

But imagine you kept your eye on the bill, and you intended to make sure it was either found, or that you'd come back for it.  You mark where it is thrown by a single red high heeled shoe in the gutter, and watch.  You see a small girl pick the money up, gather excitement, and carry the bill to her parents.   Every day thereafter, the little girl comes to look beside the discarded red high heeled shoe.  Naturally, you'd begin to recognize her, identify her, empathize with her.  You might want to leave a $20 bill by the red shoe again.

Ethically, this is no longer "disposal".   I don't think you would define the bill as "waste".  PREMISE:  If not abandoned, placement by itself does not indicate intent to discard.

Now imagine the object you leave in the slum is a device, something else of $100 "value".   Imagine further that the device contains a circuit board, that it is an "electronic device".   The fact that it is fully functional and working does not mean that it is not waste (premise 1), and the fact that it is exported does not mean it has been discarded (premise 2).   The rules we establish for a $100 bill must also apply to laptops.