CRT Glass Market Murder Mystery: Killing with Friendly Fire

"I have to say something." 

We have a really, really immature CRT glass recycling industry.  With a couple of exceptions like Dave Dlubak, who knows how to keep quiet after 3 generations of managing scrap glass, we have a lot of people who think that negative campaigning against each other is the way to put themselves ahead.

"There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them."

Our "e-waste" recycling industry, in general, has made a mess out of "investigations" and "diligence" (or dis-lingence) of cullet end markets.  Having put the word "waste" in the title of our commodity, we were off to a bad start.  And it got worse.

We had a very, very low bar to meet, environmentally.  Provide leaded silicate in a way which is safer than virgin lead mining.  100 years of environmental science were behind the "hierarchy" of reuse, recycling and mining-for-disposal.  Stand at a mine like OK Tedi in Papua New Guinea, where cyanide tailings rush out of the rainforest, killing all the coral reefs.   Stand at a lead mine in Peru, or Kabwe Zambia (the most toxic place on earth).  All we had to do was take lead and silica which has already been mined, already been refined, and deliver it to replace the virgin raw material.  The worst recycling beats the best mining.

But greed for competitive advantages between recyclers has gotten in the way, and "inspection costs" are now perceived by the buyers to outweigh the financial and environmental advantages of CRT glass recycling.

2005:  I worked very, very hard in 2005 to open up the Samsung, Klang, Malaysia CRT furnace to secondary cullet.  That means recycled CRT glass.   We worked with one of the largest CRT contract assembly companies on the planet, who purchased $200M in new CRT tubes from Samsung Klang in 2003, to use their purchasing influence to open the door.

2008:  Someone in the USA, I won't say who, but in our industry, was upset that Samsung was taking "unwashed glass".  The Recycler had put in an investment to wash the phosphor. So they told a certain NGO in Washington to contact the Malaysia EPA about Samsung taking in unwashed glass to recycle it.

"Could you give us a statement please?"
"Yes. 'Chocolate makes one very thirsty.'"

Recycling Slag: True Environmental Law

Slag is a partially vitreous by-product of smelting ore to separate the metal fraction from the unwanted fraction. It can usually be considered to be a mixture of metal oxides and silicon dioxide. However, slags can contain metal sulfides (see also matte) and metal atoms in the elemental form. While slags are generally used as a waste removal mechanism in metal smelting, they can also serve other purposes, such as assisting in the temperature control of the smelting; and also minimizing any re-oxidation of the final liquid metal product before the molten metal is removed from the furnace and used to make solid metal. [wikipedia 2012.02.28]

This definition of slag is similar to CRT cullet from recycling operations.  There's a big difference, however, in how the two are regulated.  Where you would like to think that regulation promotes recycling over mining of virgin mountains, the opposite is true.

Mining and smelting has defended the practice of piling up used slag from foundries in massive piles all over the Western USA, Canada and Mexico.    It was debated whether these piles had to be disposed, in landfills, or whether they were really doing no harm in the desert and (as the capitalist model goes), that smelters would come back for it to mine it again when:

A) the veins of lead in mountains (second to silica, the most abundant element in slag) became more expensive to mine, and the slag would become more attractive, and/or

B) technology which already worked in the lab would be economical enough to turn the slag into a commodity.

The mines get bigger and bigger and the slag piles got bigger and bigger.    How does the regulation of recycled "slag", or by-product, compare?