Social Strata Recycling: It's the Recycling Economy Stupid

 While I'm certainly not a fan of communism or any system that concentrates authority in a smaller number of bullyboy hands, I do respect Karl Marx's economic theories. Compound interest rewards those who save - who tend to be those ABLE to save.  If you are born to slaves or paupers, and have no choice but to lift your bucket where it is and lift as you climb, you are extremely unlikely to become self-made in a single generation.

It's the Recycling Economy Stupid.

That said, teaching people that it is hopeless to lift their buckets as they climb is cruel and unusual, historically speaking. The empowerment of resentment - Marx's elixer for proletariat revolution - has little evidence of building wealth in society at large. Most people benefit from a smaller slice of a bigger pie than taking away another person's piece and re-distributing it among sharp elbowed bullies.

Do Packaging Bans Make Sense on an Island? It's the Metal Stupid

The past few years, the Recycling Community made a lot of progress on a couple of fronts. Mainly, the decade-long furvent conviction that "environmental justice" meant boycotts - and arrests - of geeks of color in Emerging Market Tech Sectors has been recognized as an #OwnGoal.  Last month's post of the Recycling Today podcast, and this month's recognition in Recycling International's Top 100, mostly paid tribute to a cold revenge against the 80% Waste Hoax.  He who shall not be named has disappeared from the Top 100 list.

This weekend I'll try to use a common challenge - recycling on an island - to explore how my recycling philosophy can bubble-sort ethical dilemmas using logic and statistical likely outcomes. I can already see some prospect for "long-form blogging". But it's the only December blog, and there are still people discovering the evolution of recycling ethics.

My takeaway: Ptolemy is the perspective of gravity around one's own ego.  Like "Spiritual Materialism", wanting to do the right thing is necessary - but by no means sufficient - to having the most sustainable impact. Too often we view our environmental efforts from within our own silo - or on our own island - relative to other humans acting for other various reasons.  In a karma-Judeo-Islam-Christian morality, God is going to grade on the curve. My moral licensing is measured by my effort to excercise on my care for the planet, etc. Better than nothing. A Ptolemy map of the cosmos is better than no record at all.  We'll test that out today.

Bio-Accumulating Ideas Like Heavy Metals

my dad's idea
like mercury
bio accumulate

my great grandfather
my mom's dad
my auntie maude

the lies wash through
the truth resides
ideas like heavy metal

ideas don't smell
odorless colorless
nothing to fear

The truth clings
past my life
my kids my friends

bio accumulate
mind accumulate
the truth and die free

Some flee toxins
Some flee ideas
Cognitive risk

I ate Plato
I ate Gandhi*
I ate Mandela

I ate Jesus
I ate Buddha
I ate Lao Tsu

I ate Black Elk
I ate Copernicus
I ate Ayn Rand

I ate Kahlil Gibran
I ate Aristotle
I ate my Grandfather

I'm eating Bob Dylan
I'm eating Steve Pinker
I'm eating Woodie Guthrie

Their ideas
Their little bitty kernel ideas
Bio accumulate in me

elemental

Scrap Metal Fraud: Diary of Export Heart Attack

Dear Diary,

This is a story of a scrap dealer, who has to make payroll while meeting Responsible Recycler standards in an international marketplace.  This is all true, all happening in the past two weeks.

China 2005

Monday... We are still dealing with the aftermath of a missed wire transfer from a USA client.   We took the wire (about $60K) for granted and wrote some big checks against it.   Someone at the sender's local bank claimed to be asleep at the switch (though I think it should be investigated whether the money was withdrawn from the client account on the day of the wire, and the bank was kiting it for 24 hours).   Bank fraud can mean the bank's fraud.  We were hit with about $1600 in bounced check fees and panicked phone calls with our own payees.  I took screen shots of our account showing the wire was late and the correspondence from the client sending us the money that their account had cleared it the day earlier.

Rachael, our CFO, makes the case that the wires are outrageous, taking $20-30 from the sender client and then $18 at our receiving bank... wonders whether we should use more paper checks to avoid the accumulated bank fees.

Tuesday:   To make up for the panic among our suppliers for the bounced checks the previous Friday (one of our loads was actually held and not unloaded until we sent another wire to cover the bad check, truck idling), we issue more checks to get the payables under 30 days.  To do that I need to sell some of the $150K in scrap metal that we have processed in the building.

Wednesday:  We re-double sort the green board to eliminate the "jelly bean" boards (yellow, purple, red, and blue boards typically made in China and typically having much less gold content), to get a better price than our last load sent to the R2 compliant buyer.   That takes extra staff time, and it's part of the reason we have so much metal value in inventory that I now desperately need to cash out.  The high grade printed circuit boards had been processed by our USA buyer for sale to Umicore or Boliden in Belgium or Dowa in Japan... it takes 90-120 days for our buyer to get the reconciliation on their load, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They evidently got some loads back with way less gold than they expected and were told that the culprit was "jelly bean" boards.  They factored their loss over average loads going forward, and my company took a $6,000 hit.  They admitted they didn't know whose boards had how many jelly beans, it was an average spread out to cover their losses.

Scrap Boys: Agbogbloshie Ghana Video

A film by Taylor Patrick, Michelle DoCampo, Mary Ellen Skawinski, available on Vimeo.

There are a lot of good film clips in this.  And I'm sure Michelle, Taylor, and Mary Ellen meant well.

But I recommend you watch it first with the sound off.  Now, take a piece of paper.  Make a list of jobs you would NOT want your student from Peace Corps to be doing when you went to visit them in Africa...

1) Child soldier
2) Sex slave
3) Bush meat hunter
4) Robber
5) Cutting down rain forest
6) Conflict metal / tantalum miner
7) Gold, lead, metal mining
8) Oil pipeline tapper
9) Spam writer
10) _________________________________________________________________

Organic cotton farming may or may not be on that list.  Now, take another sheet of paper, and make a list of jobs which you hope your students might have when you go back to visit them.  Doctor, nurse, banker, astronaut, movie star, engineer, software writer....

Now ask how many of the latter jobs your student can achieve without access to a used computer.  The answer is NONE.  Not one of my students could afford a new computer, and none of those jobs are available if you can't get internet in Africa.

After watching the film with the sound off first... play the sound during the interviews of the actual African scrap recyclers.  These are interesting.   Then watch the whole thing.

This is a lot like the Fair Trade Cotton attack (Bloomberg News V. Victoria's Secret) last month.

"It's as if recoiling from images of poverty is becoming equated with compassion." 

After I watched the Scrap Boys video the first time, I watched again, and I followed scene-by-scene by annotating.  You can read what's happening with the sound off, below.  By the way, there's lots of talk about "e-waste", but practically no "e-waste" of any kind visible in the film, or at least not in "imported quantities", and certainly nothing like nice equipment being unloaded from containers in the Greenpeace video.

Dumps at cities in Africa have e-waste, sure.  The same as they have junk cars (prominent in this video).  But there is almost nothing here, no evidence whatsoever, of significant dumping of USA and Europe waste.  They describe how most of the imports are good, but there's no film of that, none of a container being unloaded either.  But there is scrap metal - lots of it.  Car parts, refrigerators, wheels...

Fair Use in responding to claim that Agbogbloshie site is primarily about electronic waste

Scrap Boys from Michelle DoCampo on Vimeo.(For comparison see Fair Trade Recycling To Africa video, made in 2007)