This was my comment to the organizers and regulators in the meeting about CRT Cullet Markets (see agenda at bottom):
We were involved in the sale of CRT cullet from an alleged "pile" in the southwest which was widely speculated to be non-moving.
Cullet from the pile was sold (not through us but using our smelter's same trucking company) to a lead smelter in Mexico, which paid 7 cents per pound.
After the 2010 SEMARNAT border controls on the CRT cullet, the Mexico lead smelter said the material was a "headache". They changed in 2012 to charging 7 cents per pound instead of paying 7 cents for the exact same material. That is a change of 14 cents per pound based on nothing but "diligence" which equated (to the mining/primary smelting company) as "risk".
This discussion is inadvertently creating justification for companies which speculate on whole tubes, avoiding the cutting and washing. EPA needs to clearly distinguish between diligence on whole unprocessed material and companies which have turned that material into saleable commodity.
A shredded toaster (steel pieces) should not carry a label of "toaster waste". It's ferrous metal. The CRT glass which has been processed should be treated as leaded silicate, and governed by MSDS and DOT etc. according to its properties, not as a "waste".
When we exaggerate the risks of "waste" (attributing more weight to the risk of human-generated secondary material) compared to the risks of identical or higher-risk "virgin" material, we set up bad regulation. The regulations we have established for "Cathode Ray Tube" glass penalize a smelter if they try it as a feedstock.
The culprit, ironically, may be the word "Stewardship".
lead mining of yore
When we mine gold, copper, tin, iron, tantalum, silver, etc. from mountainsides and Indonesian coral islands, we do massive damage on several scales. Endangered species are exposed by access roads. Children mine coltan to fund warloards. And the number one and number two sources of mercury in the USA are not mercury mining - they are gold and silver mining. The mountainsides release radioactive uranium, leaded dust, mercury, etc. Fourteen of the fifteen largest Superfund Sites in the USA have been hard rock metal mines. But the mountain is not a "Steward".
We still govern mining based on the General Mining Act of 1872. How can recycling compete with standards of yore?
Mother Teresa in Calcutta Orphanage, holding future Tata Dealer
I was rereading the "Cognitive Risk: EWaste Cell Phone Cancer!" blog from 2011. I am kind of proud of it, its one that reached pretty high and could have wound up stuck in the weeds (like so many others in my "draft" box).
In this evolutionary brain "thought experiment", I put western civilization on the couch and explore how political movements - such as free trade or anti-globalization - take root. Today's post is another "thought experiment", about how we have evolved to embrace both justice and mercy, and how that affects the way we hire or fire people. I think it is good to be compassionate, but cowardly not to terminate when elephant extinction is at stake.
As a business person, I can identify something that is uncomfortable... the need to fire people who are not contributing.
As a parent, I prefer the coach who doesn't cut my kids from the team.
Here's where the rubber meets the road. My generation was inspired by Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau, and Diane Fossey. They made us feel empathy for weaker species, and to feel in our hearts a passion for earth's environmental diversity. The lure of empathy and critical thought is vital to our movement.
I felt the same heart-wrench when NYT journalist Jeffrey Gettleman wrote last week about the surging, militarized poaching of the African Elephant. It stirred my passion, and my frustration.
Environmentalists are dropping the ball. We are chasing e-waste and a war on reuse, and every time a dime of our attention is wasted on the fake story, we lose credibility. We need to learn from our corporate species, and fire environmentalists who are misdirecting finite attention and money towards bogus hoaxes and myths of the harm and danger of reuse and recycling.
When I say I want to fire someone, I get a strange look from most of my friends who are also inspired by Goodall, Cousteau, and Fossey, and who feel genuine sympathy for the "E-Waste Poster Children". I'm urged to balance and compromise, I'm told that "we wouldn't be here" if not for Basel Action Network and Greenpeace. Well... I can say with 100% certainty I WOULD BE HERE. I got here first, both to the movement for sustainable development of the southern hemisphere, and to recycling, and to reuse and repair, to exports, and to Africa. And if someone has to tell BAN.org they are fired from the environmental movement, well might as well be me.
What is the balance between cooperation and conflict? How do we shift a movement from mercy to justice without losing the empathy that brought the people we love to work with us?
As Yadji explained in his video, people are leaving the backwaters of the developing world and heading to the city. I've been writing a lot this year on the "pixelization" of wealth distribution, and how clumsy the "rich vs. poor" country debate has become.
The changing world means that companies like Sony, RIM (Blackberry), HP/Compaq, and Dell are receding, just as RCA, Magnavox, and Polaroid disappeared over the past decades. But when I read that the "electronics industry" is in decline, I laugh. That's like saying "basketball is in decline" because Larry Bird or Michael Jordan are unable to compete on the court.
Video: Chris Martenson's presentation to Gold and Silver Mining conference in Madrid. This is fascinating... the metals companies know that recycling and sustainability are not the enemy. The challenge is reality. I respect metal mining companies, even if everthing I do is done to stop them...
This is not going to be an entertaining or pithy scrap blog. I need to write about this video for some personal reasons... it is revisiting, in much more sophisticated way ..
My career as an environmentalist and my choice of recycling was cast in high school, in the late 1970s.
I won the NFL (national forensics league) "double ruby" for public speaking with the points earned from a 1980 speech to a Northwest Arkansas Garden Club conference... with a speech about exponential growth and consumption, comparing resource and energy consumption to a closed ecosystem petri dish experiment. No one but me recalls it. But while it was amateurish redneck attempt by a teenager, it was basically the same speech as Martensen gives above.
My call to action worked... perhaps not on the Garden Club, but on myself. I went to college and ran recycling programs, I studied international relations based on the mining and oil extraction which was headed for rain forests and coral mines, I saw recycling as the most efficient way to save both land resources and energy and to reduce the mining and logging roads that brought humans into rain forests in proximity to bushmeat and species extinction points. I underestimated how much rain forest was falling from meat consumption, but I did understand that human population growth, and consumption per capita, was heading the direction that Chris Martensen describes in his book, and in this Youtube video presented at the Gold and Silver mining conference in Madrid.
Martensen seems to still hold my teenage skepticism and alarm.
On the one hand, I still agree. I'm witnessing a disaster. On the other hand, some of this consumption is accounted for by bringing resources to people who never had them. 80 percent of households today have electricity, worldwide. Cell phones are in use across Africa. The rate of consumption per capita has been expanding, and that consumption per capita accounts for much of the consumptive growth. If the per capita consumption rate of the early adapter consumer drops, it means the size of drops of water in Martensen's eyedropper become smaller with each drop.
The rate of consumption, in other words, is not just people being born, but consumption being offered to more people who never aspired to it. While the population of the USA tripled (from 93 Million) since 1910, the access to things like electricity, refrigeration, and running water also expanded. So 2/3 of the next century's consumption came from increased population, but another 25% came from offering that consumption to the 1/3 of the population which was already here. So the rate of increase in consumption is not going to continue at the same pace... the rest of the world is catching up 4 times as fast as the USA did, and much of the "new" consumption is going to "old" population numbers. That means the rate will slow.
This is only going to soften the blow somewhat, kind of like reaching a level rate of speed before a car crash (Martensen.com refers to it as a "Crash Course"). But it buys time, and technology solutions are time sensitive. As the water reaches us in the top row of bleachers in Martensen's flooding stadium, it rises less and less quickly.
Bad news for the species on the ball field, or the people living in the dugout.
For me, the indicator of our generation's success at environmental sustainability is not a degree of Fahrenheit or Celsius on a calendar. It is the rate of species extinction. In that way, I feel total failure, even if I no longer believe as certainly in a doomsday consequence.
My hopeful solutions, though, are sad ones. They are not about saving the Great Barrier Reef, or restoring the OK Tedi River in Borneo. Now I imagine that DNA may get sequestered, and can we sample and save and sequester species rapidly enough to create a lifeboat, a modern Noah's Ark. The rate at which we are learning about DNA is also exponential, and if we are learning about species loss at a rate faster than species decline, there may be hope in 30,000 years that we'll figure out how to repopulate the desert planet we are creating.
At 32 minutes Martensen describes the diminishing resources for ores, how copper becomes more expensive to extract from the ground each year. But the percentage of households with electricity - worldwide - is 80% today, something unimaginable to me in the 1979 speechwriting time period. As copper gets more expensive, people move to slums which are closer to the source of energy, economizing the copper use.
Must grow, can't grow... I basically agree with much of Martensen's presentation. But I think that what he misses is the rate of credit card consumption (I'm still listening, he may come round to it). The percentage of American's future income which we borrow against has been growing, which actually depletes that future income through compound interest, and believe we have reached an economic tipping point where incomes will not continue to grow. Well in fact incomes stopped growing awhile ago, but the amount of the future income we can borrow is going to stop.
More has been written than I can edit. In fact this isn't worth reading or posting if I don't get around to part 2 or 3... but the lecture by Martenson is worth posting. I have more to say in regards to how economies do grow, in an adolescence which hit the Asian Tigers and BRIC nations. Their rate of consumption, and how it occurs, is now the key task. And we white people look like the Oncler, offering them a truffula seed.
Perhaps I'll get around to editing the second half of this post, in a Part II and III. But there is so, so much recycling work to do around me. The scrap waits.
Agriculture in developing worlds can mean starvation. There are a lot of things better than starvation. Perhaps they shouldn't have to make that choice. But they do.
Roll up the window, you're letting the air out
Bush meat, hunting of endangered species.
Gold mining and gold panning, using mercury from USA's recycled lamps
Cutting rain forests.
Soldier.
Sex worker.
Kidnapper, pirate, and thief.
There are many paths once the starving leave the rural fields and move to the slums.
Scrapping and repairing are not on the lists of Ju-ju professions. The strong concentration of scrappers in China and Africa is not a sign of exploitation. These are good people who are trying to thread a needle, who are trying to create wealth in the most honorable way they can. Scrap and repair is the road most travelled for the smartest kids in the slums.
Jorge is still fixing TVs. Choma was not replaced. See them in action in the 2008 video below
They cannot all be taxi drivers, cooks, and teachers. There has to be a way to add value. Entire economies are supported on the multipliers from scrap and reuse. The money they bring in makes another career, like teaching or taxi driving, or pie baking possible.
