OP ED: GPS Tracker Controversy Resurfaces #Monitour

Just a brief update about the 2016 reports (2) by Basel Action Network which claimed that their partnership with MIT Senseable City Lab demonstrated that 36% of USA E-waste is illegally -  and shamefully - exported.  When the first report came out, one year ago, we contacted MIT to question the following methodological concerns in the study.  MIT sent a disavowal and stopped appearing with BAN in the press, but the damage has been done.  BAN unmasked unwitting and unwilling participants and named names - even companies like mine that they know for a fact did not export the device they shipped to us.  Where there's smoke, someone should get fired.

1) 50% of waste - CRT TVs - were not tracked.  Probably because they are almost never exported. If they are never exported, the exported "findings" fall back into the 10%-20% range identified in several other studies.  It's the "blue-eyed basketball player fallacy" (selective sampling).  They tracked 30% of types of devices deemed likely exports, and found 36% of those were exported.

2) BAN covered up destinations which didn't fit their "primitive and shameful" narrative of overseas recycling.  Here is video from April '15, six months before our downstream USA recycler exported a printer we handled, of Hong Kong's legal EcoPark.  We found direct evidence that BAN erased the coordinates for this facility, and shared that on the blog and with MIT.



3) BAN misidentified legal repair and reuse as shameful exporting.  Two CRTs tracked in Pakistan ended up in a multi-story reuse shop a couple of blocks from Pakistan's largest tech university, in the same building that sells CRT analog converters (changing monitors to TVs).  Another data point that "disappeared" in BAN's second report appears to show a large SKD factory in Foshan.  If it isn't this factory, then why did BAN erase the datapoints in its second report?  In Fact, one of the SEATTLE devices exported (under investigation by Washington DEP) was in fact tracked through the site above, and is found in reuse in Tin Shui Wai (a city, not a rice paddy, in the New Territories).  BAN erased the datapoint, but it was shared with us by someone in Seattle, and we profiled the cover up here.

4) Whether or not the tampering and fallacies above were intentional, BAN's participation and funding and sharing data with E-Stewards who sponsor BAN financially are prima facia violations of MIT ethics rules on both conflict of interest and tracking of "unwitting and unwilling" human subjects.  If there was any question whether BAN was just following devices or was targeting unwitting and unwilling subjects in the first report release, that was released in the second, where BAN named me personally and my clients in Somerville, despite knowing that we did NOT export the device they tracked. Oh, and the Somerville site is a commercial office, not a public drop off point... MIT undergrads had to ring a doorbell and get buzzed in to a building with no "recycling" sign.  At that point, MIT assigned its attorneys to the case and MIT Senseable City Lab issued a disclaimer and stopped commenting publicly on BAN's allegations.

And remember, #2 EcoPark is a direct competitor of E-Steward donors!

5) We had direct tracking of exactly how much of our used electronics we qualify for direct or potential export.  It's under 10%.  We provided that information to MIT Senseable City Lab, who provided it to BAN before BAN issued the 2nd report ignoring that data.   The fact we could track that item without BAN's GPS was less interesting to us than the fact that an E-Steward who pays BAN handsomely cancelled our shipments of printer scrap for several weeks while the GPS tracker was in our building.  A source at MIT has privately confirmed the same suspicion, that BAN had active access to "live" devices and that it would have been simple to warn paying sponsors to avoid shipments containing the devices.

If anyone needed a track record for BAN's targeting of me personally, here is a reminder of a paid BAN staffer's characterization of me, personally, to a Chicago Patch reporter two years earlier, and BAN's public admission of the personal attack, and apology to me.

Whether funders like The Body Shop Foundation or researchers like Carlo Ratti of MIT Senseable City lab will ever partner with Basel Action Network again is an open question.   But they would be wise to track the history and reputation of the "watchdog" that barks at companies that don't pay them "certification fees" worth millions of dollars to stay silent, and to fund vicious racist attacks on innocent Tech Sector importers and exporters like "Hurricane" Joe Benson of the UK - the Tom Robinson of UK's witch hunt into fake news about Agbogbloshie distributed by BAN... falsehoods exposed by me months before BAN's report called me out in shameful light.

It's a shame that legitimate concerns exposed by the study can't now be pursued without airing false propaganda.   The fact our Massachusetts printer, sent to Chicago, didn't go to the place in Hong Kong described and approved (#2) and the reasons - legit or not - given to our downstream USA copy machine repair shop who exported it... all legitimate avenues to explore and learn from.  But those could have been pursued without "unmasking" the unwitting and unwilling participants, and without the 5 research fallacies described above.

I'm bringing this up because last week a Vermont Agency of Natural Resources staff person made a claim about my company and the GPS tracking which did not mention the legal R2 certified facilities in Hong Kong or EcoPark (video above), in defense of new Procedures which the Agency admits are directed at one company - mine.

Heliocentrism Of E-Waste: The Economics Don't Revolve Around Us

The Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth.

Really.  It doesn't.  And the economics of "e-waste" processing doesn't revolve around you, either.



Catholic Pope Urban VIII showed the "value added" by Authority.  The Church of the Inquisition found Galileo "vehemently suspect of heresy". Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest. 

Today, most people know the name of Galileo.  Not many can name Pope Urban 8.  But at the time, I'm sure that was difficult to imagine.

It seemed natural, from a layperson's perspective, to think that the sun did revolve around us, and to take the Church's word for it.  People really didn't have the time or lenses, resources or motivation to test the theory.  If we wanted to know more about the origin of sun and stars, we were sent to an Authority Figure.  The Pope served as Heliocentrism's "Denier in Chief".

The Dominant Organized Religion did a lot of cool things for art and engineering, if not pure science.  Then (as today) people were impressed by the construction of huge cathedrals.  The church charged money to manage your baptism, your marriage, and your parents bodies (or your childrens') at the cemetery or mosuleum... no doubt putting in a good word with the Man Upstairs at the "end of life".

Geography Baiting 4: BAN Investigates Un-American Recycling Activities

Well, this guy must not be a credible source...

"Just a few days after arrival, the printer left Vermont and travelled to the Chicago area and then onwards to the port of Long Beach, California. It next pinged off of the coast of mainland China before arriving at the port of Hong Kong. Two days later it was in Mr. Lai’s Farm. " - Jim Puckett

He's talking about ME.

Sounds very "Un-American".  Sounds like Evidence that we are exporting 40% of our waste, according to BAN.  Or worse, sounds like companies that PAY the NGO tribute money are a "safe" solution to the Un-American problem, we must be shipping more than 40% just to buck up the average.

Caution:  Wet Taint

Sounds like.  This NGO makes a lot of noise, but the report they issued says in one place that 50%-80% of devices are exported, in another place over 80% are exported, and in the press release says 40% are exported.  In Geography Baiting #3 we showed what the actual MIT data say, and when corrected for the sampling error (not GPS tracking the 60-80% of e-waste that's almost never exported), what they actually have is data that is pretty close to the 7%-15% range of other vetted studies.

But this is about sound.  Jim doesn't want people to listen to me, he wants to discredit the blog.  So he's got a GPS on a device purchased by an R2 Company in Hong Kong, traces it to an R2 Company we sold it to in greater Chicago, and traced that back to us, who was downstream for our client in greater Boston - the one with no public drop off point - who someone told MIT undergrads to deposit the normally reuseable laser printer they were told to sabotage inside.

They did probably expose something we didn't know - that the buyer of our buyer in Hong Kong is using Hong Kong EPD's non-chemical non-hazardous waste classification of printers to outsource those devices on the cheap.  That's information, and we began acting on it last May.


But the "Geography Baiting" is making all Asian recyclers - all "Un-American" recyclers, seem primitive.  Telling readers that what happened to Robin could happen to you.  If a device might be reused, might be repaired, but someday eventually gets disposed, it will impugn you for doing business with someone who does business with someone who does business with someone overseas in the first place.  That is why they name the client in greater Boston, who is 4 transactions away.  

We do allow some printers to be exported.  Not very many.  Less than 6% of the printers that arrive at Good Point Recycling are intended or approved for reuse, and it was one of those BAN tracked to the R2 buyer whose R2 buyer sold it to someone at MLPF. 

Our problem at Good Point is that we believe in, and want to support rather than boycott, the best practices and state-of-art recycling in emerging markets.  We now know that the downstream 2nd tier audit didn't tell us everything, but we'd have no more info about that than if we had used an E-Stewards company, and BAN/MIT have not demonstrated that E-Stewards is superior to R2 in their study.  (But look at how my pal Craig Lorch is portrayed in an inset, compared to me).

"e-Waste" Travel in Scrap Metal

The most common mistake humans make is thinking that a century is a long time.  Extinction is apparently forever.  Consuming something non-renewable is more important to me than, say, correspondence about dating and relationships.  There is little going on today of more environmental importance than non-ferrous metal consumption.

Consuming finite earth natural resources is something all humans have in common.  But compare readership of "recycling" articles and blogs to, say, Jezebel's website.  Many more people are obsessed with "crap email from a dude" - or CEFAD - and thousands of posts and sub-posts comment on these poor guys' nerdy correspondences to lost girlfriends. It's humbling.  People seem more interested in what some lady's ex-date wrote in an email than they are in undersea mining and coral reefs.  Those crap emails from dudes about wrecked relationships seem inexhaustible, but people seem fascinated.

My obsession is about other wrecks (or wrechs, a new recycle tech term  first coined here) ... I'm into recycling. I write endlessly about junk, wreckage, breakage, and scrap.  The photo above is from 2002, when I toured a metal scrap shredder for automobiles at Guangzhou Iron and Steel, and arc metal furnace in Guangdong.  They had purchased a large used auto shredder from the USA.   At that time, it was a big deal.  Since then the company has bought MBA Polymers, the USA plastic recycler, and has seen its own operation dwarfed by larger ferrous recycling investments, particularly in northern China.

I was recently asked about the export category of "breakage" and "printer scrap" and miscellaneous small wrechs, computer speakers, keyboards.  Compared to refurbishing at contract manufacturing factories, it's a tough export to defend.  But it's not easy to be proud of the domestic solutions either, if you really do a mass balance and lifecycle analysis.  Right now, there are 3 ways of dealing with the printers, VCRs, speakers, keyboards, and other somewhat unregulated e-knick-knackage, sold for plastic and/or metal value, with less than 25% reuse:

1. Hand dis-assembly.  We can do this in Mexico, and Unicor can do it with prison labor, and of course they can do it in China.  It means taking the printer or telephone or computer speaker apart and sending the plastic value to the plastic recycler and the metal value to the metal recyclers, and maybe catching a few reuse items (This week we sold a queer thing called a Power Technology Portable Fiber Optic Fusion Splicer for over $300 which someone pulled out of "breakage").  Not all hand disassembly joints are alike.  I have also seen Chinese women with razors carefully stripping copper wire by hand (photo).  I was proud of them.  Recently Adam Minter commented on the relative success of women like this in the scrap field in China.  It's not a job to be ashamed of.                                                 

2. Shredding.  Most of the shredders out there get the steel with a magnet and the aluminum with an eddy current.  The plastic, the circuit boards, the copper all winds up in a pile of waste known in the recycling business as "fluff".  Because of the way electronics are screwed together, a lot of the plastic and glass and boards stay on the aluminum and steel.  What results is actually very similar to ZORBA scrap.  If you look at it, it can have stones and plastic and wood and glass and  debris all in it... but it is still richer in copper, aluminum than anything coming out of a metal mine.  There are very high end shredders which can apparently get even circuit boards out of scrap metal, and there are ones which basically make big stuff smaller.  Not all shredders are the same.  But generally, the more clean they make the grind, the more carbon and energy they have to spend... there are diminishing returns on re-re-re-re-grinding ZORBA, and at some point the recycler or certification process has to make a somewhat arbitrary decision as to where to draw the line, how much plastic-shard per wire segment is enough processing.  Then they need a law or a regulation to make people pay for their machine.             

3. Burning.  This gets most of the  anti-export film. It happens in this country, too.  Burning wire to get the copper out is the ugliest recycling.  There are 'materials of concern', i.e. solder and small boards on these items. The only thing that prevents it from being downright "bad" are the alternatives to recycling - throwing it away and mining more to replace it.  A recycler told me she'd rather throw wire away then let poor people burn it.  Having seen poor people without even copper to burn, and having seen virgin mining, I'd put burning down above "safe disposal", as a next to next to last resort.  Another novel form of burning was done as a trial at our partner's smelter in Nacozari.  Ten years ago, when they upgraded the office computers and copiers, they tossed them all at once into a 1200+ degree centigrade smelter furnace capable of getting out the copper, gold, silver, and zinc.  They have a wickedly modern smokestack that estracts pollutants and extracts them into other raw materials... but it's probably not an efficient option.

So... the rest of this post is about a common but unknown management practice.   I didn't put it on the list above, because it could wind up to be any or all of the three.  Just as our smelter engineers threw all the obsolete office machines into molten metal ore, most people in the USA throw a lot of different stuff - hair dryers, lawn mowers, spent PCs - into scrap metal bins.  When those items are collected at a one-day event, they are called e-waste collected, but when they are thrown into a scrap metal bin, where do they show up in the numerator and denominator of MSW management?

Here is a reminder of a post last spring, the "Toaster Recycling Test", describing the 'materials of concern' on a toaster.  Toasters have pretty high failure rates, they have copper and little circuit boards.  Not many are handled as 'ewaste'.  Pound per pound, however, it would be pretty difficult to tell a shredded ton of toasters from a shredded ton of VCRs.

When the electronics and electric appliances wind up in the river of scrap steel, with the bikes and file cabinets and cars, they are heading to an unknown - their numbers are diluted in a river of steel, and they become a statistical footnote.   There is so much steel out there, a lot of recyclers just throw telephones, printers, computers and even monitors into scrap metal bales.  All the e-waste in the country could be diluted into all the steel and it would go "away" like bike tires and plastics in an old fridge.  Like in Goodfellas, you can throw bodies into the trunks of cars at the auto yards, why not a TV or a dot matrix printer?  Would it surprise or shock any of us to find toasters and VCRs in America's #1 export - scrap ferrous metal?   ISRI does an amazing job bringing legal terminology to a chaos of devices and publishes the bible on scrap metal terminology.

In fact, many of the CPUs and printers and other scrap I saw in China were being pulled out of bales of scrap steel.  Huge quantities of scrap ferrous metal arrives in the port of Hong Kong.  The CPUs and microwaves and printers and other machines arrive inside loads with cars (which have their own computers in them now) and white goods and lawnmowers, etc.

What really confuses people is when the Price of ABS and HiPS plastics pass the price of metals, as happens more and more frequently.  Then Chinese will pay a lot more to keep the plastics out of the shredder, figuring they can always sell the metals afterwards.  I will write a totally separate post about plastics recycling in China.   Here is a photo of a Chines plastic recycling business for electronics plastic.

The USA companies which are shredding  e-scrap are largely giving up on the value of the plastics, which wind up in 'fluff'.  If 1% of steel scrap is used electronics, and this company imports 1,000,000 metric tons per year of scrap, then 1,000 tons of computers and other e-waste is coming in as a very small percentage of bales.  And this is just one scrap metal company in China.  In 2009, the USA exported 2,030,000 tons per month of ferrous scrap:  at 2% "e-waste", that would account for 100 sea containers per month just going out with the regular scrap metal.  SteelOrbis runs monthly export figures (like this one from Sept 2009):

"According to the latest statistics released by the United States International Trade Commission, the country's ferrous scrap exports totaled 2.03 million metric tons in September, increasing by 31.19 percent year on year and down 13.72 percent over August.
In September this year, the US' largest ferrous scrap export market was South Korea, with exports of 511,993 metric tons. South Korea was followed by China, with ferrous scrap exports of 384,500 metric tons, and by Turkey with 309,160 metric tons.
On the other hand, in the January-September period of this year the US exported 17.33 million metric tons of ferrous scrap, down 1.15 percent year on year. In the period in question, China imported 5.16 million metric tons of ferrous scrap from the US, Turkey imported 2.77 million metric tons from the same source, while South Korea imported 2.49 million metric tons."

 When the PCs are shredded by poor first generation shredders, they can be more easily sprinkled into this outgoing ferrous metal. 

My point is that the number of containers of "obsolete" PCs blended in with good and repairable equipment must indeed be improved on.  But if no one is providing numbers or data, we don't actually know whether bad apples inside repairable PC loads is as bad a problem as the obsolete scrap going into scrap steel bales, shredded or unshredded.  Whether or not WR3A's loads could be improved from the 15% recycling rate, the 100 containers per year we export would yield 15 containerloads per year of recycling.  1% of steel scrap is a lot more than 15% of good computers.

Modern and sophisticated Chinese integrated metals companies, like ARMCO (which trades in ore, scrap, and metals) actually LIKE e-scrap mixed into their metal scrap.  According to their website:

"The needed raw materials of this project product are the waste automobile, waste machinery, building materials, waste machinery equipments, dismantled ships and steel scraps in the society and so on. Along with the development of iron and steel industry, the existence of steel scraps resources in the society as well as the increment of the waste ships and automobiles have provided large amount of resources for the recycling and processing of steel scraps."

In my opinion, the much of the current recycling story is "man vs. machine", a John Henry ballad about which will happen first, a shredder which doesn't ruin the plastic and copper and reuse, or a sweat shop with an air conditioner which people trust not to set stuff on fire.  When the USA does it by hand, we use immigrants, prisoners, retirees, charities... I think it's too tough to call, some of the newer shredders look impressive, and the notorious non-transparency of the scrap dealers in China is maddening. But from the past decade, I'd say the hand dis-assembly wins environmentally.  And it's a much higher job creator, and tends to capture more reuse.

WR3A has been labelled a "reuse" organization.  The fact is that we focused on reuse first because the technicians overseas are the farthest from the racially bigoted stereotypes that it was easiest case to make that organizations like BAN had painted exports with too broad a brush.  The case for "export for recycling" will be more difficult, as companies with shredders that work better raise the bar on certification standards from the decade-old shredders which simply require the ZORBA etc. to be re-sorted overseas.  As Chinese companies like Soundera and ARMCO continue to invest in their own high-tech shredding operations, the lines will be further blurred.

In five or ten more years, when everyone knows that China is generating most of its own "e-waste", when China and India and Brazil are OECD countries, and when most of our computing power is in a cloud run from our cell phone (or wristwatch), a lot of this debate will seem archaic and quaint.  The blogs about dudes who write crappy emails to ex-dates will probably be more relevant.   The only question is how much rain forest and coral reef we preserve over the next ten years while filling the insatiable demand for metals and plastics.  Anyone who gets in the way of recycling will have blood on their hands, and if they got in the way of affordable recycling with lies, they will got a lot of 'splainin' to do.

My 2004 proposal for UNICOR still stands.  Rather than complain about Unicor, the federal prison industry recycling program, why not send them all the keyboards and printers, the things that even owners of big shredders cannot want to process?  It would keep them busy, which is really all that the Unicor program is asking for.  Unlike computers and monitors and TVs exported for reuse, tracking plastics and metals disassembled by hand is really,  really hard to document and certify.  I'm confident our Mexico operation is doing it right, but I also know how hard it is for us just to verify data on the factory we own.

It's really hard to track your commodities around the world.  People surprise you. 

First surprise, Arkansas hillibilly named Mr. Fire Cloud is building a genuine French castle within an hour of my parents' home in Searcy county.  See today's NYTimes.

Second surpise, kids from South Park convince me that "hate crimes" are mistaken. (12.2011 removed video, found it causes posts to be blocked in some countries)