Recycling and "The World For Sale: The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard Of"

This Freakonomics Episode, "The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard of"  interviews authors Javier Blas and Jack Farchy about their book "The World For Sale" with of the same subtitle.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-most-powerful-people-youve-never-heard-of-update/

This really tells the history of how the raw materials BUSINESS - the virgin raw materials mined and cut and pumped out of the ground - runs.  How they are bought and sold, and WHO they have been bought and sold by since the 1930s.  Mark Rich, original creator of Glencore, features, as does Trafigura which this blog covered 15 years ago as an actual case of Basel Convention dumping of industrial waste on Cote D'Ivoire in 2006 - by a virgin raw material mining and extraction company.

They don't use poverty porn. They have interviews of retired commodities traders who passed bags of cash (and thumbdrives of bitcoin) to trade copper, lead, gold, oil, bauxite and other non-recycled virgin raw materials for decades. Recyclers, this is our competition.

No need for me to recap it.  But if you are in the recycling business and don't know about Wagner Group, mining nationalization, bribes (historically deductible as a business expense in Switzerland), and how the Curse of Natural Resources works, then you are missing out on the main reason to keep doing what you are doing.

Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity. In this updated episode from 2025, journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy help us shine a light on the shadowy realm of commodity traders. You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-... FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV

 

Carbon Recycling: It's Procuring Hardened Cement Stupid

citation:  Nick Beckelman, Scientific American, February 2023

A number of articles are emphasizing that "recycled carbon content" cement has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases even more than electric vehicles does.  

Solving Cement’s Massive Carbon Problem

New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production

BY MARK FISCHETTI, NICK BOCKELMAN & WIL V. SRUBAR

In this blog I explore how Recycling Policy Organizations like MassRecycle.org, NERC.org, ReMA.org, EarthwormRecycling.org, NRRArecycles.org have the experience to look at "recycled content" rules of procurement to become important to putting "hardened cement" (the value-added by captured carbon ash in the cement) into the quiver of EPR and procurement law.

How do we get our memberships to think about cement manufacturing as an important "recycled content" story, as we did with recycled content paper procurement in the 1990s?  I guess we need to write complicated blogs hoping to get the interests of academics who we can then get to make the "recycled content cement" case, invite them as conference speakers. Part of this "fishing for swordfish" strategy will involve incorporating keywords that keep the Tilapia and Perch of the press interested in our press releases.

If recycling advocates currently consider glass aggregate / daily cover in our recycling rates (never an obvious call to raw material originalists, but that referee's call has sailed), I was wondering about some forms of carbon sequestration, especially cement and concrete.  See article in Nature below.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-024-00546-9

The process described captures carbon and re-infuses it in cement kilns.  Now I note 2 reasons not to claim this, but no reason not to make it part of our message even if it's outside our silo (similar to GMA1872 being outside the silo but in direct competition with recycling markets)..

1. Carbon at the point it's captured in the process is not "solid" waste - though it becomes solid, in the cement, after the process.

2. Cement manufacturing processes are outside our silo/focus at organizations like MassRecycle.

(I will later try to link all of the authors names so they find this eventually)

more

Oliver Franklin-Wallis' New Book, "WasteLand" Pre-Read

First a disclaimer - one cannot review, fairly, a book which one has yet to read. I have only read the electronics recycling chapter published in The Guardian, which features in part WR3A member Evans Quaye, who Oli spent time with in Accra.

Evans honestly has one of the most modest shops in Ghana, but he did an excellent job of convincing Mr. Franklin-Wallis that the "export bad" story was not remotely fair to Africa's Tech Sector. The chapter ends not with so much a conclusion, but a confusion... cognitive dissonance isn't the ultimate success, but in The Guardian's Environmental newsroom, it represents incredible progress. Oli gets an A.

Another chapter of Wasteland was positively reviewed last week at The New Yorker. I had to have a follow up chat with Oli when when I got halfway through the New Yorker review by Elizabeth Kolbert @ElizKolbert).

Her concluding paragraphs include a very fair analysis by Oli Franklin-Wallis, which for The Guardian Environment standards deserves an A+. The next to last paragraph of the New Yorker article -

There are also practical hurdles. Precisely because plastic is now ubiquitous, it’s difficult to imagine how to replace all of it, or even much of it. Even in cases where substitutes are available, it’s not always clear that they’re preferable. Franklin-Wallis cites a 2018 study by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency which analyzed how different kinds of shopping bags compare in terms of life-cycle impacts. The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use and carbon emissions.” When Schaub’s supermarket stopped handing out plastic shopping bags, it may have reduced one problem only to exacerbate others—deforestation, say, or pesticide use.

Very fair. But the New Yorker article is titled "How Plastics are Poisoning Us", and it's hard to get to the end of the article without thinking it's based on Penn and Teller's 2004 "Recycling is BS" The LAST paragraph bears Elizabeth Kolbert's conclusion.

It also wasn’t all that long ago that we got along just fine without Coca-Cola or packaged guacamole or six-ounce bottles of water or takeout everything. To make a significant dent in plastic waste—and certainly to “end plastic pollution”—will probably require not just substitution but elimination.

It is hard for me to imagine that readers of this New Yorker article are more likely to wash out their plastic bottles and recycle them. And my fear is that it's a perfect recipe for the current state of affairs - conspiracy theories, shaming, suspicion - that young people may throw recycling as a practice in the rubbish bin as an "ok boomer" moral licensing scheme.  If the defending recycling is complicated, convenience becomes the enemy, and there's nothing more convenient than giving up.

It seems to those of us in the recycling industry that most coverage of recycling is dismissive or downright anti-recycling, but that coverage of the only alternatives - mining, petrorefining, and forestry - is too rare. It's less costly for a reporter to get to a city dump - Agbogbloshie is 20 minutes from the airport, 10 from Movenpick hotel - but the publisher or photojournalist gets the same "exotic Africa" credit as if they had visited Kabwe, or the mining portrayed in Siddharth Kara's "Cobalt Red". 

How We Knew About Apple's "Recycled Content" Plan 2 Years Ago!

Big announcement, just out, from Apple CEO - Apple will produce its electronics from 100% recycled material, not from virgin mining.

It's reported from Apple's just-released 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report.  It's bound to hit all the Earth Day news outlets this weekend.

Sourcing recycled content, creating a demand-pull effect, was what we were working on when I started at Massachusetts DEP in 1992.  It can be very big news.

Question:  How did I know about this almost 2 years before Apple's announcement?

Apple doesn't make its own stuff.  It's generally put together by a Shenzhen contract manufacturer like Foxconn or Wistron, which the blog has focused on many times.

Guess how we knew about Hong Kong EcoPark when we allowed a trial load of printers to go to Hong Kong - when our E-Steward downstream wouldn't pick up after several loads to their shredder?  When the BAN GPS Tracker was in our facility, and suddenly our shipments were mysteriously cancelled?

When I did background check on why Hong Kong would be paying for printer scrap again, before approving to the Chicago downstream replacing the E-Steward, I found that the $550M EcoPark tenants were sourcing scrap for plastic to be sold to a contract manufacturer in Shenzhen.   One who made devices with a major brand name label.

English Lesson: Recycle is a verb

Recycling is the present continuous form of the verb "to recycle".  Scrap and commodity are nouns.

"Recycled" can be either a modifier or a past participle of the verb "to recycle".  "Recycled content" (modifier) means that something made of steel is remelted and molded into something new made of steel.

Steel is rarely discarded or diverted from a landfill... But by virtue of the fact it has been remelted, it now has a "recycled content" label attached as a modifier.  "I recycled the steel" means it's still a verb if the subject doing the recycling is in the sentence, but in passive voice - "the steel was recycled", it becomes "recycled content steel".  Maybe I'm 6th generation steel recycler, and I've never even heard of someone throwing steel away in an incinerators or landfills.  If they did I'd pay for it out of the ash, it's always been a commodity to me as a recycler.  But even if I never pulled it from the ash or landfill, even if I came to your house and bought it, I've become part of a "waste management hierarchy".   How come my job is being redefined as "waste management" based on someone else stupidly throwing steel away?

Here's the slippery slope which lead secondary materials into a different category from mined ore, via lingo from the point of view of rich people, applied to poor people, who are assumed to be victims.