Showing posts with label resources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resources. Show all posts

Recycling Rates and the Inverse "Normal Curve"

What do the wealthiest people in the world have in common with the poorest people in the world?  

The poorest people in the world have the highest recycling rates. They cannot afford to feed their own children, and so the scrap value of a discarded can or bottle is a resource they cannot pass up.

The richest people in the world also have higher recycling rates - but not as high, because they can afford to purchase things that cannot be recycled. The rich have more education, and understand why we need to fund a recycling "system" to preserve resources for future generations.  So we have children's interests in common, but weirdly different children as the wealthy purchase for their own children expensive objects that are nor very recyclable (like Nintendos or X-boxes).

Who recycles, who cares about recycling?

It's an inverse bell curve, or "normal" curve.


Religion of Retrospect

Hey I just got up out of bed, in the middle of the night, to write this down.

I consider myself religious, yet attend no church.  I believe that all the things I have to be most thankful for are the result of some really "great books".  Bhagavad Gita. Tao tse Ching. Plato. The New Testament of the Christian Bible. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.  Aristotle.  And others.

Here's how I judged whether something was inspirational, how it became great.

Retrospect.

Hans Rosling's "Don't Panic" = Best Documentary / Talk I've Seen All Year

BBC.co.uk/dontpanic

This is brilliant.   Please watch it all the way through.  Hans Rosling is explaining what I call 3B3K much more elaborately than I have been able to.



Hans Rosling's TED talk was (I think?) produced by BBC and redistributed by National Geographic.

It's 60 minutes long, but Environmentalists and Recyclers everywhere should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch it.

If Rosling added all extraction (mining metals, fresh water, habitat) as well as energy extraction, it would be stronger.  But he will perhaps get a wider audience by focusing on the one hashtag.

WR3A - Live From Nairobi, Kenya!

The Great E-Waste Hoax of Africa is Falling!

Live from the ground in Nairobi, where WR3A has 4 people watching the proceedings. 
These are each links to the individual presentations. 


I'll try to give titles and presenters names later, in the meantime, hunt and fish and flag.

Concluding Remarks, final presentation 
"Avoid the import of e-waste and near-end-of-life equipment without
hampering the meaningful and socio - economically valuable trade
of used EEE of good quality. 
Refurbishing of EEE and the sales of used EEE is an important
economic sector in some countries of West Africa (e.g. Ghana and
Nigeria). 
It is a well-organized and a dynamic sector that holds the potential for
further industrial development. 
Indirectly, the sector has another important economic role, as it supplies
low and middle income households with affordable ICT equipment and
other EEE. 
"In the view of the sector’s positive socio-economic performance, all policy measures aiming to improve e-waste management in WestAfrica should refrain from undifferentiated banning of second-handimports and refurbishing activities and strive for a co-operativeapproach by including the market and sector associations."