Yin, Yang, or Omm Part 2: White Man Ju-ju vs. 3-Point Shot

In Part I we took a close up of an actual problem - the past decade of managing Cathode Ray Tube televisions and monitors, after briefly introducing the concept that guilt and liability - positive ethical systems - can be twisted into bad law via fear, greed, and envy.  

What's the "green scare?"  

Same as the red scare.  Export Sympathizer is today's "Commie"

The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (RERA), HR2791, was the focus.  The bill acknowledges overseas refurbishing and recycling operations if and only if the name-brand company (e.g. Dell of Texas) is shipping there (warranty repair, takeback).  That's "responsible".  The contract factories overseas are NOT owned by the name brand, there are no Dell employees at the computer display factory.  If Hurricane Fung, Hurricane Hamdy, Hurricane Benson, or Hurricane Chiu were OEM employees taking back used goods for repair and refurbishment, they'd be "Stewards".  Instead they are "primitive waste criminals".

The Guardian covered Dell for coming out against a geeks of color boycott, and I vigorously applaud Dell for that.   But RERA language creates a "members only" export system.

As the blog got longer, I've cut it into three or four parts.  Poor editing, or de Tocquevillian insight?  Mostly lack of time to edit, I'm running a business after all.  The digression into psychology and ethics is the readers choice, I figure.   Just don't hit the "print" key.

LIABILITY JUJU

Good Point Recycling is R2 Certified!

[ May 2012, Middlebury, Vermont ]

John, Colin, Pete and Rachael did what was necessary to get our company R2 Certified.  We received our Certificate this week, and it has been registered with R2 Solutions and ANAB.

Who gets the credit?  Not me, that's for sure.  I was travelling to Mexico and South America and Vegas and DC during the past quarter, and sending staff to Nairobi, and negotiating Fair Trade Recycling contracts in Europe and Asia.  While I was off making it more difficult to certify and mass-balance more and more activity, the staff at Good Point Recycling was busy making sure the factory runs, orders are met, material is safely processed, and we do things right.  John and Colin did everything right, and Rachael and Pete made sure the state contract and our clients didn't suffer or stray from the rules John and Colin set.

Me, I just made the job harder.  It's easy to get certified if you refuse console televisions and just take off lease computers and laptops ("no hair on the meat", my pal Joe says).   It's easy if you aren't dealing with 12 countries, and 8 different purchase orders, with different reuse specifications.

Want to get R2 Certified the Easy Way?  Lay off the staff, stop the reuse and exports, don't handle residential material, and buy a shredding machine.  Better yet, don't do it in house - collect the material and send it to someone else's shredder.  The less your company tries to do, the less you must document.

It's easier to get Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) communication if you aren't cross-training women from Mexico, or running a job training program for challenged and disabled people with the local counseling service.  It's easier to certify a few things, than to be a "general practitioner".

HR 2284: Banning A-Waste and E-waste

Missing children, typical used car sale

It's a modest New Year's proposal.

The most toxic product Americans own in their lifetime is the automobile.

Filled with toxics, flammables, carcinogens, ewaste, inhalants and pollutants, and capable of violent safety violations, the cars have an agency, the Department of Motor Vehicles, to ensure proper stewardship, from cradle to grave.

Unfortunately, our government has let us down!

Stop the feeding of used antifreeze to poor kids

Automobiles don't last forever.  Americans like buying new automobiles.  Especially middle class and wealthy Americans.  We spend billions getting the latest new wheels.  But what happens with the old cars we discard?

Sadly, wealthy neighborhoods have a dirty little secret.  The used car dealerships and junk car lots are never found on Fifth Avenue.  Old, used cars are passed along to poor people, with all their toxics along for the ride.  Whenever you buy replace your old car, you are complicit in exploitation and environmental crime.

Watchdog groups indicate that eighty percent of used car sales go to people with less money than the people who bought new cars.  All the problems and headaches of the old car inevitably flow to people with less means to deal with the toxic tons of deadly waste.

Wait 15 Seconds, Walk 5 Meters

If you don't like the recycling you see in the non-OECD nations (about 6 billion people), look elsewhere.  "Elsewhere" within the non-OECD is an incredibly sophisticated, layered, textured market.  Wait fifteen seconds, walk five meters, and you will see something or someone completely different.

Cameroon has changed since I lived there in the 80s.   Douala (the port city and economic capital) has just been "wired" by high speed optic, as of December 12... Cameroun's first "smart city".

Aya Heroines Rising

Meanwhile, the level of suspicion raised by anti-export groups has risen to comic book proportions.  There is a huge campaign, backed by nanny-NGOs, planned obsolescence, and heavy shredding investors, dedicated to preserving decade old images of children in puddles of filth.  They want us all to believe there is no convergence, that 6 billion people are moving backward, away from the OECD.

If you actually work with the geeks and the techs, you see that the world is developing in positive ways, faster than believed  possible.  Yes, there are child soldiers, there are terrorists, there are Somali pirates, there is disease, and there is poverty.  But the tide is rising, not falling.  And the seed is the same as in Singapore and Japan - Geeks and Tinkerers, Fixers, and Techs.

Plan Do Check Act

Poster Child, Toxic E-waste

At the California Sustainability Directors conference last summer, I was pinch hitting as a representative of R2 - Responsible Recyclers standards for "e-waste" recycling.  I was hastily invited by someone as a counterweight to what was originally a purely E-Stewards presentation on certification.

When certifications compete, it's a bit like warring doctors or feuding priests.   Both certifications were set up less than 18 months ago, neither has really been tested in the field.  Either may have unintended consequences.  It's only the second inning.

Both certifications are overseen by professional auditing bodies - ANAB and ANSI, the same which authenticate ISO, RIOS, and other standards and practices.  These bodies are designed to check on whether the standard is independently verifiable, legal, and can be implmented via PDCA - Plan, Do, Check, Act.  The standards are so similar in many respects that the auditors can use the same pages of verification interchangeably to ensure that the companies applying for the standards meet the same environmental, health and safety laws.   None of the standards have an in-house auditor playing Catcher in the Rye, catching children from falling into toxic fields.  PDCA is better than nothing, but it is weaker than a civil law contract.

How then do the certification advocates differentiate between them?  Marketing.

The groups which are invested in the term "e-waste crisis", the ones who would use prohibition in trade with techs of color as a solution, are using drama, guilt, innuendo and poster children to attack the other groups best efforts to promote best practices.   They treat companies seeking R2 as the new evil exporters.   Seeking to do good without the ayatollah's blessing leads to ayatollah cursing.

In describing "responsible recycler" practices in their Wikipedia article on "E-Stewards", Basel Action Network tries to poison the well on the term:

Jim Puckett, director and founder of BAN, said: "Sadly not all of those companies that call themselves responsible recyclers are truly responsible and many are not recyclers at all, but are just exporters. We have been to the techno-trash dumping grounds of Africa and Asia and seen the children being poisoned. This is why we created the e-Stewards Certification in the first place."^[3]

Jim made a similar accusation, in an editorial he published in 2009 E-Scrap News, that "fair trade" recyclers were "poisoning people".  He claimed to have knowledge that containers of refurbishable equipment imported into Indonesia was "hazardous waste" (same claim we are still waiting to shake out from his accusation against Intercon Solutions of Chicago Heights).

The marketing against a standard developed to improve e-waste trade is obnoxious at best.  The R2 "Responsible Recyclers" program represents a two-year consensus document approved by regulators, NGOs, and industry, not "just exporters".  It is the association with possible exporters which poisons all the other R2 certifications, according to BAN.   "Exporting" according to BAN, simply means poisoning children, not creating internet cafes in Africa.

Poisoning the well for alternative certification standards does not just affect the exporters or users of a particular practice.   Consider the effect on R2 companies which do not even export.   If you are R2 certified, even if you do not export, you may share a certification with someone who does export.  And that exporter, while they have been certified for proper and legal exports, BAN implies may be poisoning children...   You may be R2 certified and use no prison labor (most do not), but because a prison program can seek R2 certification, wham!  You are not the same as a prison program.    Someone who goes to a church which allows gay marriage is the same as someone married to a gay person... at least, that's the same logical thread.... Joe McCarthy reincarnate.

Just how big is the risk that an exporter "among" the R2 may be poisoning innocent little babies?   BAN is silent about the major study released on Ghana's imports of used computers, showing 85% reuse.  Why?  Why do professional AID workers, Peace Corps volunteers, and development officials applaud the same fair trade recycling importers in Africa which BAN says are poisoning children?  Why would stakeholders from NGOs, EPA, and industry "collude" on an R2 standard which kills children with e-waste?   Nevermind the fact that almost all the exports come from Europe and not the USA (BAN applauds the EU's higher standards).

When someone is promoting something, marketing it in this way, there's one common denominator.

Follow the money...  the difference between R2 and E-Stewards is payola to BAN... not a dime of which goes to help a single African baby.