E-Stork II: Where Poisoned e-Waste Babies Come From

The first E-Stork post was a tale of three rivers:  Blackstone, Louhrajang, and Cape Fear.  Each poisoned river was traced upstream;  in each case, a textile mill was found.

When science sends journalists upstream, to witness the cause of pollution,  it's excusable to use a poster child baby in the story.  In the case of the Blackstone River, Saturday Evening Post stories about mill working children brought the pollution of the river into stark, cognitive risk.  Laws corrected the textile mills, and the rivers healed.

China's industrial revolution looks a lot like the Blackstone River Valley in the early 1900s.  Regulations may be ignored, but ignoring regulations is being documented.   This group of professors in China is bringing attention to an unpermitted steel mill (shanghaiscrap.com).  They aren't using baby pictures, but they are generating attention by being viral on the web.

Consensus over regulation begins with facts and science, getting the upstream and downstream on the table.   Annie Leonard is right about demand for "Stuff" driving competition to cut corners.   But the WSJ is also right, that cheaper goods benefit the poorest people (both in manufacturing and consumption).  It's easy for the rich to assert that Cheap is Bad.   If it helps you sleep at night to wear certified organic wool, good for you.

EPA took an important step in 2008 to try to bring groups to the table to air out such a compromise, in what eventually was labelled R2 or Responsible Recycler certification.

Perspective at EScrap 2011

In the 1990s, I learned from a mentor, Sheldon Appel, of Perkit Folding Box Company (a small paper mill, incredibly still operating in inner city Boston in the 1990s) that in the recycling industry, we think we are recycling paper, plastic and metals.   Actually, he told me, we are recycling people, by creating jobs and patiently working with people desperate enough to work for us.  He said he had stopped making money running the paper mill years earlier, but still ran it in Mattapan, because the people who worked for him would have serious trouble finding blue collar work if they ever closed.


Shelly, Baynard Paul, Jim Harvey, Milty Shaeffer, the Golds... a generation of recyclers who had been around as the Massachusetts paper mill industry survived by recycling.  The larger and larger scale paper mills were moving closer and closer to the trees, up in Maine and Canada, and proximity to the urban areas which needed the paper was now easy to do with Eisenhower's system of interstate highways, undercutting the advantage of having paper mills close to cities.  While the recycling mills like Perkit and Newark Paperboard and American Tissue were indeed "saving trees", they didn't do it on purpose...   They were accidental environmental companies, turning to a feedstock that came from the city, in order to survive and compete with a maturing market.