It Was 20 Years Ago Today: Good Point Recycling's Eco-Entrepreneurism

Just ran across this photo from 15 years ago (just before we bought the Nissan forklift), at the warehouse across from Agway on Exchange St. The monitors were selling for $7 apiece back then.  Pretty much all we did was to do pickups, pull out the PCs and CRT monitors we could reuse, and load everything mixed back onto a trailer.

5 years earlier, I had announced my resignation at Massachusetts DEP to follow my wife to Middlebury, Vermont, where I'd taken a job running a thrift store while doing consulting work for EPA, MA DEP, New Deal Software, etc.

It was 20 years ago that I took a big chance and left my corner office at One Winter Street in Boston, having successfully instituted the USA's first waste disposal ban on CRT devices in Massachusetts. The consulting work I did for MA DEP and EPA was published in September 2000, about a year after I turned it in. Titled Electronics Re-Use and Recycling Infrastructure Development in Massachusetts, it eventually became the business plan for Good Point Recycling. 

The report was based on interviews with 48 electronic recycling professionals, 176 TV repair shops, 4 white goods (fridges) appliance collectors, 10 thrift shop operations (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc), 2 retailers, 20 computer monitor repair shops, 7 Original Equipment Manufacturer reps (not credited or cited), and 32 used electronic equipment exporters.

Xenon - Speculatively Accumulated Common Knowledge

Pinball Machines, Safety Dances, Styx, Mad Men and Roots:  Maintenance Memories


One of my favorite posts of the past season, "EWaste Entrepreneur Mad Man Meets Primitive Wire-Burning Robots"... tied to Mad Men, Season 3, "Episode 305: The Fog"...  Was surrounded in Vegas by people who would have remembered those references, but don't read blogs...

Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame Vixen

Vegas revolves around retro.  The music, the games, the restaurants, the shows... ISRI's conference recycled themes and images of good enough days.

This was the electronic woman known as Xenon, the newest pinball game at the Carleton College Sayles-Hill student union.  The arcade was nicknamed the "Peter Tork Memorial Game Room" for Carleton's most famous drop-out, Peter Tork of the Monkees band.  Xenon was hilariously erotic for a pinball game... "the game with the sticky cover".  The bumpers caused the robotic woman to exhale "Ahh!"..."Ahh!-Ah.. Ah-Ah!" as the steel pinball zigged around the slope of play.  If you lit enough of "her" lights,  um... something spread itself and you had to shoot the ball up the hole for a climactic free game (It was "Special").

At the same student union post office, I got my Peace Corps assignment for Cameroon (1984). In Africa, there were home-made "pinball" games (non-electronic).  The nails and springs and wooden pegs were, I guess, "primitive" compared to Xenon.  And there was an overall assumption pervading Africa that they were incredibly far behind the USA in technology.  This was 1984-86, before the personal computer or cell phone (they had bag phones in limos in the USA back then).  Today, Africa is far more wired than the USA was when I lived there... but as Louis CK describes in his Conan O'Brien interview, "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy" (and if you haven't watched that yet, yes it's more insightful than this blog, go ahead and follow the link).

Electricity in households in Africa has grown at a slower pace than television and internet.   Once you get access to energy, you have lots of things to plug into it.   But in the 1980s, TVs in Cameroon were extremely rare. If the Mad Men Show "The Fog" was having difficulty understanding why black Americans in the 1960s were buying "Admiral Brand" televisions, it was not as difficult to figure out why Africans were choosing used TVs from the USA and Europe.  It was that or nothing, and the amazing thing was the TV or the internet, not the shape of the bloody display device.  Once someone has a choice, getting picky becomes and option.   Reminiscing about retro is, in part, having common experiences with a generation that had fewer choices to stray from.