Why No Place's Industrialization Looks Like Any Other Place

Corporate conquests, raw materials, industrialization and economic development... I'm beginning to think that African classrooms should be receiving USA 1970s high school history textbooks.

Histories differ, context differs, trade relationships differ, languages differ, currency differs.  The development of Western Guangdong Province looks nothing like the development of coastal Shenzhen. The WSJ reported last week that Viet Nam would not instantly replace China as an outsource.  In Harvard Business Review this month, author Ndubuisi Ekekwe of the African Institution of Technology and Fasmicro Group published an essay with the headline "Why Africa's Industrialization Won't Look Like China's".

It's not a bad short essay, but it could have been even shorter. If the western edge of one Chinese Province looks nothing like the eastern edge, why on earth would we expect a whole continent to develop by the pattern of eastern Shenzhen?

A Word from The Recycling Industry that Sponsors Us

This blog is supported by international trade and recycling markets, which for centuries saved forests  and canyons and coral islands from the mining and forestry it takes to produce consumer goods from virgin material.

An excellent framing of today's so-called 'recycling crisis' is available today on Twitter. Follow @AdamMinter for decades of perspective.

This isn't to say there are not winners and losers. Buyers and Sellers markets always create those, and we don't want to discount the pain from those who have lost pay, or their recycling jobs. But the only way to truly lose is to stop recycling.

@NewsHour @TheEconomist @WSJTech @WSJ @latimes @USATODAY @BBCWorld @mcclatchy There is still time to report about #Recycling correctly in time for #EarthDay Excellent box of nails by @AdamMinter https://t.co/BWPoyKMk87

— Robin I (@WR3A) March 28, 2019

Refining the Fair Trade Recycling Mission Statement

"Recycling needs to be materials science, not a belief system. Collecting during bad markets is smart, shows reliable long term supply grid."

Fair Trade Recycling is pro recycling.  But we are not exactly defined as part of "Zero Waste" movements.  We are somewhat resistant to "producer responsibility", at least as a solution for secondhand goods markets - planned obsolescence and right to repair are opposing forces (if producer implies mining and virgin material extraction, we are all ears). If any group has a close affinity to Fair Trade Recycling, it's probably USA's "Net Impact"... young professionals in the business sector who are agents of conscience, making the world better by participating in, rather than reacting to, global markets.  The worst recycling is better than the best mining.

At the same time, while we defend and participate in the overseas recycling and repair and reuse sector, we are confronted with the eventual waste and unplanned obsolescence of goods we once exported.  Our vision is to turn this into an opportunity, a circular economy, rather than reversing course on the international trade which is clearly benefiting standards of living and information and education in emerging markets.

Our primary incentive is to create a transitional economy for Africa's Tech Sector, the reuse and repair markets for used electronics, which we project will face increasing pressure from new affordable devices (seen in Asia in the past decade).  We believe the value of the sector is in the minds and education and ingenuity of the repair market 

The "Tinkerer's Blessing" is the working title of a book I'm writing about development and "savior complex" and "charitable industrial complex".  It's actually very optimistic, a defense of trade and free market activity in Africa, Asia and other emerging markets.  Terry Gou, Simon Lin, Steve Wozniak, etc. were tinkerers very much like the laptop and cell phone repair shop gurus from Tamale and Accra, we want to pitch them as a functional distribution and maintenance market for inevitable growth of solar power models in Africa.

Where will Africa's Wosniak emerge?  Who will monetize the "good enough market" in a way that is scaleable (like Foxconn and Wistron), creative like Apple, and sustainable as Microsoft?

It will probably be in the energy sector.  Which brings us back to Solar power.  Can SolarCity (Elon Musk's transformational solar panel financing scheme) scale solar power in a cash-based economy like urban Africa?  Or do we need other innovative financing models, like cell phone plans, to secure investments?

We will need people.  Africa's Geeks of Color.  Africa's repairers, tinkerers, fixers.  We need to stop arresting the people who buy and sell teledensity equipment in Cairo and Lagos and Accra and Nairobi, we need to silence the charitable industrial complex which defines its goodness in misleading photojournalism depicting Africa as a "victim".  We need to push out of the closet the NGOs who use pictures of African kids at dumps to raise money which is never, ever spent on Africans.

Photojournalism without data journalism jails and fails.  Our mission will outlive me, because it's rooted in the same scientific method and inspired conscience which has made the world's best practices.

- Robin Ingenthron 11/9/2015

"Speculative Accumulation" of CRT Glass: Symptom or Cure?

I went into two hospitals.   One hospital was full of patients who might die.  A group was protesting on the sidewalk.  Any patient's death could be - potentially - malpractice!

The other "hospital" was not, technically, a hospital so-to-speak.  It was a cemetery.  They killed and buried every patient.  They explained they were avoiding any speculation.  

This is the argument today about a recyclable commodity, CRT (cathode ray tube) glass.  Somehow or other the idea is getting out there that "speculation" of CRT glass that might get dumped rather than recycled is so rampant that "landfilling" is the solution.   ADC (alternative daily cover, or layering CRT glass in a landfill) is a "final solution", and trumps CRT "recycling" because it happens in less than 365 days.

Basel Action Network, which receives payola from shredding companies for their "E-Steward" certification, is busy waving the warning flag about the dangers of "speculative" accumulation, or possible future landfilling of CRT glass.  Piles of CRT glass in warehouses or in mining territory have been there for more than EPA's 365 days, BAN warns.   The risk behind of "speculative accumulation" is that you begin to doubt whether the glass at the recycler might wind up at the dump.

Lauren Roman of Transparent Planet (a former BAN staffer) is circulating a petition to get EPA to "enforce" against speculative accumulation.  It is true that the CRT glass in certain piles has not been recycled yet, and therefore true it may wind up at the dump.  The solution?  End "speculation" by dumping it.   Kill the patient and put our minds at ease.

Will any of the piles at recycling plants wind up needing to be disposed?  Possibly.  That's what the "speculative accumulation" rules mean.  If you are granted a "recycling exemption" to not be considered a "waste", you have an egg timer on it.  365 Days.

So some states (including Vermont) are buying into the argument that landfilling, if done in the right order, is preferable to recycling on the 366th day.   Broken pieces of CRTs, applied as as wind cover at the end of the day, are somehow "safer" than the intact pieces covered over at the beginning of the day?  Because after 366 days, maybe the CRT glass at the recycler will - gasp - be landfilled.

"Dump the glass now, the suspense is killing us!"

Some of the patients being treated at some of the hospitals will wind up in the cemetery.  How exactly does that make the cemetery preferable to the hospital?  It's such incredibly bad logic that it gags the mind.

Hurry and dump the CRT glass, before the recycling market has a chance to save it.

6 Pieces of Dad Advice for College/University Applicants

Three cheers for college applications.  My wife and I are parents of college-bound twins.  We want them to graduate debt free.  We believe college is a really good investment (my spouse is a prof at a selective college).  But if education cannot be provided without crippling compound interest, it can be DIY (do it yourself).   My great grandfather became an expert in Roman history, among other things, by reading books.

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Our twins will be in good colleges for under $10K next year (including living expenses, on average).  They ate almost that much at home, so the effective cost is better yet.  They could work side jobs and earn their way out if they have to.

If I'd been debt free from my own two degrees, and I could have been saving money for my own kids college.  But I'm from the class of 1984.


- President Ronald Reagan turned the Pell Grants into Pell Loans
- Inflation fell to 4%
- Colleges continued to increase tuition by 10-16% per year (!)


My generation was told that debt was rational.  That the interest rates were "lower than inflation" and that that was somehow an equivalent of earning money.  The result was the first generation to think you could actually make a living off of inflation in the housing market... which led to the 2008 mortgage crisis.

As many in my liberal arts college railed against Reagan and the Pell Grant cuts, I could see that we were just drinking straws, from the federal cup into the colleges' mouths.  As long as the government kept filling the punch bowl based on "need" - set by what the colleges charged - it was clear the colleges had little incentive to stop raising fees.

So no big tuition savings for our kids.   Instead, they get plenty of advice.

My parents and grandparents advice, as I recall, was all about money more than love, spirit and friendship... at least that's what if felt like listening to their advice, as an 18 year old.  What I now know is that loved ones will someday call needing help, and you'll wish you had savings.   If you can't help them and wish you could, it's usually due to past decisions about compound interest.

If our kids are the products of our marriage, this is about product stewardship.

6 Pieces of  Fatherly Advice About College

2013 Good Point Recycling End Markets: 6 Percent Reuse

Good Point Recycling of Middlebury Vermont is now preparing our 1st Quarter Report and Annual 2013 Report for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.   Having just had these numbers audited under our R2 Solutions annual surveillance in March, we have more than enough data to demonstrate what kind of a company we are.

  2013 Outgoing Recycling:  Good Point Recycling

The most obvious change over the past 4 years was our decision to bring demanufacturing jobs in house, doing the television and monitor teardown here in Addison County.  Our payroll hit $26,000 per week, much of it in time-and-a-half (OT), and we hired more experienced people to do it.  So Red "CRT whole unit outsource" went down, and blue "Bare CRT tube glass", and associated plastic, went way up.

Something that surprises people is how little we export, and the reasons it has declined.  Good Point never exported more than 30% of the material, I think the peak (28%) was in during the years (2006-8) when we were buying and selling monitors from other companies, for refurbishing in Malaysia and redistribution in Egypt.

Why the decline?  Was it stricter EPA enforcement?  
Responsible Recyclers standards?  
Pressure from Basel Action Network?   
Strict Vermont E-Cycles Program standards?

No, none of these explains the fall from 28% export to 6%.  It's the marketplace.  And there's nothing ghoulish, witches brewy, noxious, or radioactive going on.  There's no Batman villian in the "e-waste" trade.  When the reuse market finds another source, no one wants to import it any more. It's scrap.  Metal and Plastic.  Recycling.  Boring.  Laundrymat scale boring.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets 7: The Rusty Radiator Awards

Although I had a degree in International Relations, had spent a semester at the UN, and made a career in the science of development, I racially profiled someone in Singapore in 2005.    I know it now.   I deserve a rusty radiator for racism.

On my way back from Guangzhou, where I had gone for a second visit to see the second-hand shops of Foshan and the "Big Secret Factories" of CRT reuse, I stopped in Malaysia and Singapore for a couple of days.   Armed with my camera, I decided to hunt for some "exotic photos" to prove that I too, like Jim Puckett of BAN.org, had "been there".  Now, Interpol is trumpeting their act. with a project to describe their efforts to arrest "criminals" I refer to as the "geeks of color".

I understand where David Higgins' group at Interpol is coming from.  E-Waste is in the news, and we want to show our credibility, show we have been there, walked the streets, and have seen the problem.  We work for the (world) government, and are here to help. 

The shop below I presented in a Powerpoint slide at a NERC.org conference as an example (an olive branch to Puckett and Westervelt) of clearly bad imports.   I had stayed on the street, waiting for the man who owned this shop (Mr. Teck Recycle) to roll up the metal door.  He had a ladder on the inside, which he needed to physically climb up to the ceiling to start to descend items for resale on the street. 

I acted like I knew where this guy's material came from.   I didn't.

It seemed the guy had packed this 4M x 10M street shop "to the gills" with imports, and was never going to be able to reuse it all.  I represented this person as an example of "toxics along for the ride", of being an example of the primitive importer, and contrasted him with the SKD (semiknockdown or semi-knock-down) factories I wanted to "reform", in our view.

I confess that I assumed this was all recently imported material.  I had absolutely no evidence of that. We now know that the 6 billion people in the "non-OECD" generate far, far more used electronic scrap than the OECD does.

Lets teach them all the missionary position, put them in top hats, and certify them as non-primitives.

Was Mr. Teck Recycle importing at all?   Singapore, though not "OECD", was already as wealthy then as California.   It had become wealthy via the "Tinkerer's Blessing", the reuse and refurbishment trade, which evolved into contract assembly, then into ODM (Original Design and Manufacture).  Sure, some of this material may have been imported, but I had no idea how long before Mr. Teck Recycle got it.   What percentage came from residents of Singapore, which at that time had a higher percentage of engineering degrees, and higher percentage of online high speed bandwith, than the USA's Silicon Valley?   Why did I immediately assume the Singaporean shops were filled with USA "toxics along for the ride" (a phrase I pounded at the NERC audience?)

Sure, it was a sound theory.  Maybe some of this stuff did come "along for the ride".  But I had no proof, all I had was a need to position myself not-too-distantly from Basel Action Network's "80% Primitive Recycling" export statistic, which we now know is no more true than 80% of Los Angeles black teenagers are gang members and high school drop outs (BTW that's said tongue in cheek, it's obviously untrue, but the fact I have to apologize and point that out shows the root of whitey's problem).

Ghana TV repair 2014

Profiling.

Boycotting the Third World? My Thought Crime About That

This weekend, USA Today and Burlington Free Press are were supposedly running two stories about my company, and about the Fair Trade Recycling summit.  Both stories were to feature interviews and quotes from Jim Puckett, who might say that my company is doing something wrong, even illegal.

A normal delay?  Did my blog signal someone to say something to someone?  What are the ethics (and smarts) of pre-defending yourself in a blog for a story yet to be published?  



I don't ship to these places any more.  I wish I could.

My company only exported 8 percent of goods intact last year.  That's 92 percent domestic USA processing.  And most of the 8 percent intact units went to Mexico, an OECD country, where the manual disassembly is a decent job compared to local mining jobs.   What we are actually doing that bothers people is defending people overseas, representing them to be not evil.  "Apologists" was Puckett's word.  I haven't seen the article yet, but I've seen what Basel Action Network has said about me and my company in print before, and heard him say I was promoting illegal acts to my face last week.

That's not an attack on what Good Point Recycling does.  That's an attack on our belief in other people.  Most of the intact units exported come from other recyclers out of state, material I buy tested working (including some e-stewards) and broker.  We do 2 shipments a year to Africa, and I brag about them, but they are less than a half of a percent of our 13 million pounds.

Still, I'm awake at 4 am wondering what the effect of a BAN accusation will be on my company and its employees.   Jim Puckett's quote is that I'm doing something illegal because the Basel Convention is going (in the future) to be amended to make export for repair or recycling illegal in the future.  His claim is false on its face value.  But when it runs in a headline, my company and employees will certainly be injured and be held to more scrutiny.

My belief that something should remain legal in the present doesn't mean I do it now, or will do it if it's illegal in the future.   If his quote runs, where is the line being drawn?   I don't ship to the factories in the photos above because Vermont doesn't want me to.  But it sucks, they are good companies, and the glass is just winding up in glutted piles.  But that's my OPINION, my belief.    Jim has said it's illegal.  My opinion is a transboundary movement.

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).

Shanzai Vs. Patents: Future Stock

Tip of the hat to Adam Minter of Bloomberg/Shanghaiscrap.com, who gave an even-toned but illuminating presentation on Chinese "E-waste" recycling at the EScrap Conference here in Orlando.   I hope he will put it online, though it would be missing his verbal critique.

Adam listened to my theory of patents...  That the USA and Europe have been so important a market to sell INTO that it was relatively safe, ten years ago, to let Taiwanese and Chinese subcontractors and contract manufacturers, such as Foxconn and Wistron, make everything you sell.   An American gadget company, like Dell or HP or Apple, is in many more ways a retailer - selling "shelf space" inside a box with their logo - than a traditional "manufacturer".     Even Japanese companies, like Sony, are letting China's contract manufacturing giants make the TVs.

My theory goes, that as the "Dell" box contains a Frankenstein of Corsair, Seagate, Intel, etc. parts, sewn together by Foxconn assemblers, that they increasingly rely on the patent to remain part of the equation.  The patent enforcement was access to American and European buyers.  If you violate our patent, we can stop letting you make our products, and without Dollar and Euro holding customers to sell to, mutually assured destruction would ensue.    My theory then says that an important milestone has been reached - China is buying more new products than America is.   While the USA market remains important, the leverage of a major OEM brand is declining.   Selling copyright-infringed or knockoff products solely in Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai, etc. is not the "desert niche" it was a decade ago.

My question to Adam was whether the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) would step in, and wield their own power of patent enforcement.  How would that power be used?  Would CCP become a member of AGMA, or a power broker?   Recalling how HP gave $6M to the Chinese EPA in 2002, and how it resulted in seizures of printer cartridges, ink cartridges, printer repair shops, and repairmen, could a CCP-AGMA bond become a future sci-fi villain?  Or would the CCP "forget how to speak English" and ignore western patents, letting their own private companies wield the free market power once enjoyed by USA brands?

PPV - Shanzai Mona Lisa

Adam taught me an important word - Shanzai.

This isn't an exact translation, but my understanding is that in the same way Westerners have a "soft spot" for underdogs, that Chinese culture has an applauding respect for "one-upmanship" in "improving" a great product made by another.    If I could improve on da Vinci's Mona Lisa, I might share a space at the Chinese Louvre.   If the "knock off" is an improvement - like the "Iphone V" discovered in Shanghai (an unauthorized copy which actually improves on any Apple Iphone sold before it), that the reaction among the Chinese public is like a rock audience to a guitar riff.

Future of Stock:   If the public in China do not hold corporate stock in the OEMs, they are unlikely to care whether a contract manufacturers "forgets english" and marches off to its own drum.   Even the CCP would find it hard to enforce against Shanzai.  That ultimately means that America needs to stay rich in order to leverage China's manufacturer sector.   And the more America outsources its manufacturing, the more difficult that will be.

I for one welcome the new Shanzai overlords.  If taking "cores" and used product to refurbish to like-new and better-than-original, it means using fewer natural resources, and producing less carbon, to make life better for more people.  The more we shred product to prevent "gray markets" the more America shreds its wealth.   A less wealthy America is less important a market to lose over a patent pissing match.

Cheap, reused goods, open new markets.  Ford Motor Company had the best reply to Vance Packard - people learn to drive on used cars, and the more people learn to drive, the bigger the car market.   Internet access in places that earn $3k per year is important to the future of American producers.    Let Africa, India, China, Indonesia and South America have cheap used goods - we should sell ours to them.  That is how the neighbors improve their houses, and the property values of my own house will go up with the neighborhood.