Yin, Yang, Omm Part 1: Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (HR2791)

#FreeJoePenna Blog (one of 8 composed on a France beach vacation 2014)

WR3A became the anti-BAN.  But we have both been part of a Charitable Industrial Complex.

It's like a tug of war over dusty, desolated, impoverished Darfur, a guerrilla morality of ethical posturing.   A war between rich over who gets the rights to the poor's images. 

Poverty and inequality, or the perception of it, is power.  Ask Marxists about how to harvest envy.  The bigger the problem is perceived, the more you can justify meddling and redirecting the marketplace to "fix" the problem.  (appropriate illusion and background music by Brazilian MysteryGuitarMan Joe Penna, below)



There is no denying that there are problems and inequalities in the system.  But whether or not the poor are hurt more by the free market than by BAN.org's efforts to "fix" it, we are contesting a moral high ground which itself has an economic value.  In this series (Yin Yang Omm) I'm attempting to write about how the economically disadvantaged either benefit from the dispute, or from its resolution, or whether they have any interest in it at all, and who-the-heck-are-we in that equation.

In several previous blogs, like Environmental Malpractice, readers get a closer view of what it's like inside the planned obsolescence shredding industrial complex, and how it is driven by white man juju - liability.  The fetishes placed on the secondary market by people "responsible" for the continued life of products they've let go of force many to shorten the lives of the product.  Recycling laws have made it almost impossible to export working assets.  It is taking billions of dollars of USA assets which are wanted by less affluent but rapidly emerging markets, and turning them into toxic piles, and puts people supplying countrymen who cannot afford new product into jail cells.

Reactions to perception of inequality or injustice can drive societies to do irrational things, to burn witches at stakes, ban books, and shred new cars.   Envy can drive liability lawsuits, jealousy can sway jurors... (so Mazda said to heck with it).  That's right, liability for product has created a system which actually shreds new cars rather than punt them into poor countries, and the same system is increasingly positioning itself to shred refurbishing markets.

Through a proposed new law on exports to secondary markets, BAN and CAER essentially propose a paradigm where the emerging markets cheap labor is available to only to corporations, but are blocked from buying their own supply of work.  RERA would allow these people to do warranty repair, and to assemble and disassemble brand name goods, but not to purchase non-working products for reuse, repair or recycling.

The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (HR2791)   

The Bill is supported by some people I really like. Niel Peters-Michaud, for example, has enlisted himself and his company both with E-Stewards, BAN and CAER, and has also been to Africa and testifies that limits on trade to that continent will produce better results.

"Do we really believe that the dream of someone in a developing world is to process our toxic e-scrap?  I think they would prefer to dream of driving a well equipped Audi." - Niel Peters-Michaud

Before going deeper into the psychology of two white CEOs from liberal northern states arguments over the welfare of Africans, let's look at what a state (California) with a system similar to RERA's has created.  Hint:  no new Audis have been distributed to any African nations.

Washington DC Testimony on E-Waste Rare Earths

I have to catch the 5A Bus to Dulles, and don't have many good pictures of the US Trade Commission hearings.  But I'll mention this:

The last panel of shredders and recyclers said that rare earth metals are not recoverable, and kind of waffled on the question whether hand disassembly provides better quality.

Here is an article by Bloomberg Reporter Adam Minter, who visited our Fair Trade Recycling partner in Malaysia.  They hand-disassemble hard drives there, and sell the rare earth magnets directly back to a company like Seagate in Singapore for direct reuse.  I'll show these magnets in a future post.

Here is an article recently posted by Fair Trade Recycling researcher Adelaide Rivereau, who is in Vermont from Marseilles, France, to study "e-waste" policy.  She has found definitive third party research showing that hand disassembly has greater value, creates more jobs, and has twice the environmental benefit when reuse components are recovered.

So how can someone testify under oath that rare earth magnets are not recoverable and hand disassembly is not preferable?

If you repeat the words "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste" as many times as our shredder competitors said it, you can become entranced.  They made reference to an article from 2008 by National Geographic, talking about the dirty children burning waste computers from the city of Accra.

The photographer, Peter Selleck, ALSO visited the fair trade recycling company visited by Minter, and showed pictures of the reuse operation there.   But there were no children in those photos, so if I say "remember the really great operation in National Geographic?  That's the one where I learned to hand disassemble hard drives for magnets".   No one remembers the National Geographic in that context.

Toxic "ewaste" + Shredder = small pieces of toxic "ewaste" = $$$