2008 R2 Version 1 Is a Public Document. Certify That You Conform To It

The original Responsible Recycler Version 1 was a public document. EPA in Washington DC paid a professional mediator, John Lingelbach, to host a series of meetings with environmental stakeholders and experts (myself included) to get a standard that ANAB and ANSI could ok various professional auditors, such as Orion Registrars or Perry Johnson Registrars to certify.

Here is a link to the original R2 V1 document, which is now very difficult to find online. I had to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (and I left them a donation, it's a really cool utility).

Conforming to a public standard is something a small recycling business can do without any legal third party, such as SERI or E-Stewards, taking a financial cut. You cannot claim to be certified BY that third party, and you don't get a certificate with a gold star. But you can pay for the exact same person, the exact same auditor, to come and audit your status as certifyable to your conformance to the 2008 standard. 

The Versioin 2 of the R2 standard arguably made no changes at all to the Version 1 other than make it a non-public, copyrighted standard. And that was more than arguably due to the financial interests of the certification organization that John Lingelbach formed in order to make a living and hire people to "maintain" the standard. And they do "Maintain" it, and ANAB and ANSI may or may not add value that ISO (which you have to also adhere to in order to get R2 certification) doesn't give you anyway.

500 Year Young Unborn Superchild Salli

She's four years old, 15.4 kg (34 lbs), has dark brown hair, and dark olive green eyes. Her skin is mocha, the product generations of shuffled melatonin across generations of slapjack diaspora who spent generations falling from and rising to power over five centuries of globalism. Globalism is a word in history books - not that there are books - taken for granted by children of earth. The year is 2521.

 Let's call her Salli. 

Had Sally been conceived 504 years in the past, reaching this age in AD 1521, it's unlikely she'd have been aware of what we now call the Renaissance. The great artists, Raphael, da Vinci, and others would not have been recognized by the average European, let alone a child, or anyone in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Even if she had the fortune to be born in a European city - Athens, Florence, Berlin, London, Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen - she would statistically have been extremely poor. Over 12% of children born died in their first year. 

Five hundred years later, in present day 2021, it's easy for us to recall (or google, or Wikipedia) the great philosophers and artists of 500 years ago. The Renaissance or "Rebirth" period of history centers on humans who re-discovered ancient wisdom, re-appreciated Greek and Roman philosophy, and set the stage for founding fathers of democratic constitutions. Those constitutions eventually led to generations of oppressed, indentured, enslaved genders and races to aspire, and achieve promises of equality. Whether that equality status has been "achieved" as of today might be perilous to debate before the woke. But from the position of Salli in 2521 AD, a lot of progress was made by women and the colonized nations (absurdly referred to as "minorities" so often in western-centric writings) between 1521 and 2021.

The question today is what about her?

Ethical Gravity 3: Circular Economy Does Not Orbit Us, Tiger

Environmental Ethics Revolves Around Generations Yet To Be Born.

Primum Non Nocere to the future.

Long theme of this blog is how human behavior can be explained, or motivated by, Darwin's theory of evolution. Steven Pinker's psychology books owe a lot more to Darwin than to Freud.

We can see an animal - rat, beaver, guinea fowl, tiger - knows something is "about them".  Our brains are mapped the same way.

- Greed, Desire. 

- Fear, Revulsion. 

- Anger, Rage- Caring, Nurture.

The first three are called "Aversion Reactions".

I suffer everything - desire, fear, and anger - for the Tiger.

https://unsplash.com/photos/gRB4Euk4BYQ

A Word from The Recycling Industry that Sponsors Us

This blog is supported by international trade and recycling markets, which for centuries saved forests  and canyons and coral islands from the mining and forestry it takes to produce consumer goods from virgin material.

An excellent framing of today's so-called 'recycling crisis' is available today on Twitter. Follow @AdamMinter for decades of perspective.

This isn't to say there are not winners and losers. Buyers and Sellers markets always create those, and we don't want to discount the pain from those who have lost pay, or their recycling jobs. But the only way to truly lose is to stop recycling.

@NewsHour @TheEconomist @WSJTech @WSJ @latimes @USATODAY @BBCWorld @mcclatchy There is still time to report about #Recycling correctly in time for #EarthDay Excellent box of nails by @AdamMinter https://t.co/BWPoyKMk87

— Robin I (@WR3A) March 28, 2019

Driverless Used Car and Electronics Imports to Africa

Follow up to the new "Driverless" UNU 2018 Person In Port Report


The headline, “Thousands of tons of e-waste shipped illegally to Nigeria inside used vehicles” was familiar. In my last blog, I gave readers "the fine print".

Almost everything documented by the 2018 UNU's "Person in the Port Project" (2018) report on used electronics imports to Nigeria corresponds with our 4 years of research in Ghana. Bottom line, the importers are presumed innocent. Most purchases are normal and good. The headline focuses on a statistic that 15,000 tons of 60,000 tons “didn’t work”. Put another way, 75% of the imported used electronics are fully functional. More importantly, the report tells us that of the 25% of electronics needing repair, Nigeria's Tech Sector is the best on earth at fixing them. 

"The high skill level of Nigeria’s refurbishing sector, with the ability to fix many technical defects in UEEE at reasonable service cost, also motivates importers to import both functioning and non-functioning electronic equipment to Nigeria." 

- 5.8.1 PIP Report 2018

The 2018 report avoids the “poverty porn” - pics of kids posed on old TVs, etc. - that marred its 2015 report. In almost every respect, the report shows a fairer image of Africa’s Tech Sector. And the most important concession Europe has now made is to concede the 2015 Report's KEY FINDING - motives of "drivers" to export "waste" - has been disproven. Joseph "Hurricane" Benson had no "driver" to put waste into his export containers. The only financial motive that can explain these shipments are intent to reuse and repair.

So the "driverless" waste export theory is busted. Let’s focus first on Ten Things the report gets right.

A Refreshing "Victimless, Villainless" Assessment of E-Waste in Chennai India: Naveed Ahmed Sekar

Mobile Consumption and Disposal in Chennai Metropolitan Region India (2017 Naveed Ahmed, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany)

This short analysis of "e-waste" phones in the rapidly emerging market of Chennai (Tamil Nadu), India, is the kind of abstract approach that could make a good model for other products and other cities.  

Once again, it shows the "circular economy" is heliocentric, and does not revolve around Europe.  Telephones sold to families in India (4 phones average per household in Chennai) are not thrown into the sea.  The secondary market is not "competing against" the legitimate scrap market.

Instead, Naveed shows the issue is reluctance to let go of devices. When people remember the purchase as a great sacrifice, they hesitate to believe it is eventually worth only the sum of its raw materials.  This leads to the same "hoarding" documented by Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s.

The Zen of Economics Poem

Silly poem with a side order of Tom Waits Underground (Robots) to Friz Lang's Metropolis.

"Dad only knows how to talk about things that interest him."

My dad only knows how to talk about things that interest him.

If you tried to talk about something unique to you, he'll listen, but he is casting hooks, looking for things that would bring the conversation back to his list of topics.

It sounds horrible?  But wait.  Among the things that interest my dad were Greek logic, Roman history, mid-20th century psychology research, Russian literature, Dickens, John Jacob Niles, and 20th century India.  To name a few.

He has no email address, no Facebook presence.  For someone who taught "mass communications" (MassComm), he's uniquely unplugged.  But as his kid, growing up in the '60s and '70s, I would say I was exposed to more things than the kids across the street.

I confess I'm a lot like my dad in regard to listening.   The things that interest me are less historical, more future oriented.  Sustainability.

Some of us who are agents of conscience find ourselves less interested in other peoples mundane problems, or in discussions about the weather.   I don't share my mundane problems either.  Nor does my dad, so much, except to fit in with other people talking about their mundane personal problems.  He'd rather be speaking about his personal heroes, the people who shaped him, than about his ills and setbacks.  We'd be better communicators if we split our time equally with everyone else in society, worrying at least half the time about things that worry other people in the conversation.

Worry comes from cognitive risk, and if you are talking to other people who want to spend half the time talking about "shark attacks", rare and unlikely fears, turned into obsessions, you are supposed to compromise.  The likelihood that a sea container exported by a Nigerian from the UK is going to be burned by kids at dumps is pretty low.   But if that fear, that message of export impropriety, has been marketed everywhere to everyone, a polite conversationalist will want to give it equal time... But there I go again.

Dad was really good at watching cartoons with me.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets 9: Deliverance from Comics

"Dueling Banjos" composer Arthur Smith passed away this week, at the age of 93.  If you call me on my cell phone, the (originally titled "Fueding Banjos") song slowly erupts, and builds crescendo the longer I wait to answer.  When Arthur Smith was born, few Americans lived in cities.  When I was born, more than half of Americans lived in cities, and my Ozarks family was already in the minority.

I grew up very aware of the "cultural gulf" between USA's urban and rural families, at a time too many of us got our news about the world from comic books.   My future wife studied "Snuffy Smith" and "L'il Abner" from her home in Paris (Rosny was considered a kind of ghetto), and I learned about urban life from "The Cross and the Switchblade" comic, and "learned about" Europe from Richard Scarry, and about Africa by reading "Tintin".



Today, you no longer need to go to a college library to find out about what the world is really like.   But many of us hold onto our simplified stereotypes the way we hold onto comic books, hoping they'll become vintage collectibles.

The term "lesser developed country" or "LDC" was retired, and "emerging economy" is much more in vogue.  The same transition which occured in the richest nation on earth, the USA, is occuring everywhere.

"The world is undergoing a sustained urbanization process that's pulling more people into city centers and turning more places from rural outposts into denser urban organisms. A new report [PDF] from the United Nations projects that the world's urban population – roughly 3.6 billion in 2011 – will grow by about 72 percent between now and 2050, bringing the urban population up to 6.3 billion. That's about the same amount of people on the entire planet in 2002." - Nate Berg, The Atlantic Cities Blog

Those of us who see the world first hand, who travel from city to city, comparing Kinshasa, Cairo, Paris, Singapore, Kansas City, New Orleans, Paris, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Lima, notice more similarity than differences....  we see the world is melding and growing and culturally merging and mingling.   The internet, stoves, and the city traffic have more in common.  The music is in a state of free exchange, Soukous has rap lyrics, rap has sampled bluegrass.  African, Asian and European visitors to my home in the Ozarks are sometimes a little disappointed how similar it is to Vermont.  Having spent all that money on travel, they want to point their cameras at a hillbilly, the same as I was tempted to take snapshots of 'poverty porn' in city scrap markets in Asia, Africa and South America.

Comic books and photos are not substitutes for policy data.  Fortunately, there are far more people studying cities and urbanization than there are studying "e-waste".  Electronic scrap is an intellectual policy backwater compared to projects like NYU Stern Urbanization Project.   Billions of people are consuming and discarding in ways which make Annie's Story of Stuff seem oversimplified to an almost Biblical degree.

NYU SUP has produced 4 short Youtube videos to show the growth of cities, like modern art ink spots bleeding onto a white canvas.  Paris, Chicago, Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles... from space, they grow like fungus in the fingerprint of a petri dish.  Cities as they would be visible from space.



Cities recycle, and cities finance extraction of metals from rain forests and coral islands.  Cities repair and reuse, and cities discard.

Reporting Neither Policy

Why there should be no "recycling policy" and no "mining policy".   

There should only be a "raw material policy".  

In a recent Slashdot.org essay, commenters bemoan the fact that national dialogue is increasingly polarized, and "lacks nuance".   I contributed the following in response to the essay, "Edward Snowden and the Death of Nuance" by Dennis Fisher.  (Snowden and NSA debate is to Slashdot what Michael Jackson was to National Enquirer, or Michael Jordan was to Sports Illustrated).

"I'm from 3 generations of journalists, and part of the problem is that news outlets need to a) attract readers (make it interesting and simple), and b) are trying to cover stories that are frankly out of the reporters depth and comfort zone. Reporters want to cover both sides of an issue, and the easiest way to do that is to find two sources who disagree strongly... Opposite + Opposite = "fair and balanced". When "long form journalism" is proposed as an antidote, we still suffer from weak audience attention spans and excuses for writing prose that lacks punch, or remains lazy-sourced.

"This, in turn, rewards "experts" who take a polarized view. If your expertise provides nuance, you have to compete for the reporter's attention. So much easier for reporters to submit black-and-white points of view. Often reporters tell me they are afraid NOT to interview loud and ignorant people out of fear of "not having covered their side".

"In my particular field (electronics scrap policy) I've tried to interest reporters in identifying victims of policies which lack nuance - a "derivative" of the story which fits the black-and-white reporting model. The "victimhood" of un-nuanced policy can sometimes trigger "blame" and "innocent or guilty" coverage paradigm. I realize too that it's not the reporters fault that readers/audience response to nuanced articles is "Whoosh". "Whoosh" doesn't sell papers and tv ads. I fear this is causing erosion of even stronger news sources (The Economist, WSJ, NYT, etc)."   Read the 180 comments

After I hit submit, I was bugged by my reference to "Electronic Scrap Policy".  It has become an "export vs. non-export" policy, largely, or a manual disassembly vs. shredder debate, or a repair vs. obsolescence debate.    Victimhood triggers the "nurture and underdog" responses among readers and reporters alike, and to make any of these points of view "newsworthy", we are all scavenging for victims.

Rank The Environmental Atrocity: Is Fraud Visible from Outer Space?

Multiple Choice:  If you could correct one thing, to protect the planet, sustainability, endangered species, and the planet, what would you choose?

• Hard rock metal mining?

• Mining Indonesian coral islands for tin (to replace recycled lead batteries in electric solder)?

• Diverting Interpol enforcement from Ivory poaching, to arrest African internet cafe investors?

• A pile of inert silicate leaded flux (slag), sitting by a smelter for 80 years?

• A pile of CRT tubes, diverted from reuse, sitting in a warehouse in Yuma?

To the degree the last one belongs on the list, it's because of fraud.   The first fraud was BAN and SVTC telling California that the CRT monitors being shipped in 2002 were destined for dumps. They were being purchased by SKD factories.

The second fraud was, again, BAN and SVTC telling California that diverting those CRTs to "recycling" companies represented international law or environmental progress.

The third fraud was allegedly committed by the cathode ray tube recycling company ("Dow Management" in Yuma) which evidently took money for the tubes, stuck them in a warehouse, and ran.


Our war should be on fraud.

First do no harm.  Be true to thine own self.  Truth is not conservative or liberal, blue or red or green, truth is transparent, and only environmental and recycling systems based on truth will be sustainable.

(By the way, I had access to other 'close up' photos with children in them, but believe it contributes to poster child exhaustion, we all need to de-escalate the emotional button-pushing)

Why Recycling Coordinator Title Trumps Sustainability Coordinator

College and university recycling staff (CURC etc) kept in touch durint the Fair Trade Recycling Summit (Earth Week in Middlebury).  Some have confided that recycling is old hat, "sustainability" is in, and that energy and carbon are at their peak for "prestige" positions at their institutions.

Have always said our goal is for recycling to be taken for granted, to be as boring as laundromats.   But at the same time, if you are truly motivated by green, and ever have a chance at a career in recycling, grab it.

Here's why recycling is the best thing.

First things first, forget all about "waste management" and "zero waste".   We hitched the recycling wagon to the "waste management" pony for one reason.  No, it was not to preserve landfills, or avoid construction of incinerators.   Scrap and recycling has only one competitor - virgin material.

In order to compete with the mining and forest subsidies (e.g. the General Mining Act of 1872, passed during the Apache Indian Wars under the Ulysses S. Grant administration), scrap needed to compete with raw materials by claiming avoided disposal costs.

Recycling, reuse, repair.  They are ultimate environmental impact measures.  Don't quit your recycling job.

Africa Hears "Great White Father" in (Seattle) Washington

Since the successful "Fair Trade Recycling Summit" at Middlebury College on Earth Week 2013, there has been a notable trend in visitors to the website (fairtraderecycling.org) and this blog.

A year ago, the deep blue in the USA (ignore Alaska s.v.p.) showed most readership here.  But Europe was #2.  In a given day now, Europe may not check as often.

But look at Africa and the mideast.  In 873 weekly readers, Africa is showing continued interest, in our exposure of the "science" of e-waste "statistics".

The maps were well lit during the Fair Trade Recycling Summit itself.   355 page views per hour on the video alone.  Some of those were "classroom" views with multiple attendees.

But as Americans shrug and say "Huh, that's interesting", and go back to recycling old "e-waste dumping" stories, the logins at African Universities and Colleges continue.

Africans know that "new" product is A) unaffordable, and B) unreliable.   When there is a high number of returns on millions of units at USA's Best Buy, WalMart, or Target, they yank the product.  Certain new electronics have 33% failure rate from electrostatic discharge.  Where do the bad batches, new in box, go?  When a Taiwanese factory gets its display units back for bad pixels counts, or electrostatic damage, or bad capacitors?

Africa.

Firehose 8: Leyla Acaroglu and "Environmental Folklore"

"There's no denying..."  Below are tweets sent last night from Australia, where the New York Times opinion author wrote yesterday's column about how cell phones and electronics are exported for primitive burning.  I tried to reason (and am still trying)...

Leyla Acaroglu ‏@EcoInnovators2h@AdamMinter There is no denying that the US exports and in cases dumps waste on other countries. Just one example http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/12/01/e-waste-investigation-nabs-green-recycler-eri …DetailsLeyla Acaroglu ‏@EcoInnovators2h@AdamMinter Even what is 'donated' eventually becomes a legacy that has to be dealt with. Read what the UN says http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=612&ArticleID=6471&t=long …

Here's the fascinating part... While she appeared to deflect the studies showing that the E-Waste Myths had exaggerated the dumping by tenfold, and even sent links to the UN studies back to me (and Adam M), and sent links from the "dark year" of 2010 which is when the studies were commissioned... her TED talk is actually - fantastically - titled "Question what you think".  It's all about using science and lifecycle to define sustainability, and to beware "environmental myths".

Leyla Acaroglu's TED Talk is called "Environmental Folklore".  It's about using Lifecycle analysis to determine the real environmental costs of our decisions.   She talks about the scatalogical focus of "end of life", which is the same theme/mantra of this blog.  She should be open to the idea that the carbon, energy, and environmental cost of a display device are mostly embodied from before it's even sold or initially used, and therefore (like UNEP) agree that reusing it makes more sense than shredding it.  But she says "even what is donated eventually becomes a legacy..."

In the TED talk on youtube, I agree with her thinking about plastic vs. paper.  What we need to do is get her to apply the same "looking at the entire system" to assess CRT reuse vs. CRT shredding, the "green myths".

"Before you listen to this little guy in your head..., you should stop and question what you think you know". 

She and I completely agree on the Lifecycle.  The problem is, that when she writes about "e-waste" and cell phones, she's letting the Little Green Gal do all her talking.   Greenpeace and BAN are telling little green lies, and it's not turning out well for Technicians of Color.

Myths, Folklore, Hoaxes and little green lies

FIREHOSE: New York Times Opinion Page (Leyla Acaroglu)

From today's NYT... An Opinion piece in support of the type of "export police" I've been writing about this month, in the Firehose Series.

"In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry."


Smashing batteries to recover cadmium?  Descriptions of the same Youtube videos which have been discredited?  There is no new information in the column at all.  A lot of imagery of harsh conditions, poverty, victimization.  Who wrote the article?

Leyla Acaroglu is a sustainability strategist based in Melbourne, Australia.

Here are pictures of the people who buy and recycle cell phones.  Some of these pictures will look familiar.  Most will not.   I got these from a rare blog kept by David Kousemaker (dkousemaker), TechTravels Blog, a mostly photo blog (much less wordy) about used technology.  But unlike BAN and Greenpeace's photography, it's not political, and he isn't soliciting your "charitable donation".

http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-1/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-2/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-3/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-4/

I've put a handful of these photos in small scale below (fair use, and Kouserman actually allows non commercial commons use, see bottom).

Leyla, if you want to talk about sustainability in development, give me a ring.  I chose repair and refurbishing because the "Network of Tinkerers" is a model for development which offers an alternative from the curse of natural resources (and foreign aid, which appears to have the same effect as oil and diamonds, creating a Darwinistic government class that provides the greatest rewards to the sharpest elbows).  Tinkerers, networkers, technicians, fixers, repairers, geeks... those are the people who turn discarded tech into affordable access.  We called it "Yankee Ingenuity" in the Northeast.   There is no better way for a smart kid without connections to make $300 per day than by fixing and salvaging.

Read the other blogs here, Leyla, and you'll find that BAN and Greenpeace are filming the city dumps at major cities, and the used imports are mostly not the same stuff people throw away here after using it for 20 years.  Five reports show 9%, 10%, 13%, 15% of the imports are waste, which is actually less than new "affordable" product imported into places like Africa or sold in shops in China.  The free market is not as bad as you've described.  And no one can afford to pay for scrap to be shipped across the ocean just to dump it, something of value must be there for the ride (and it isn't batteries smashed for cadmium... who told you that?).

In May, 2011, I channeled a book from 1960.   No, not Vance Packard's "The Waste Makers", about planned obsolescence.   No, not Rachael Louise Carlson's "Silent Spring", about the invisible toxics from our heavy industry, and their heavy poisonous toll.

In "E-Waste Bloggers Play Atticus Finch", I referenced Harper Lee's dramatic novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird".   Ms. Lee, who has recently been in the news over copyright and author control, told the simple story of her native Monroeville, Alabama.

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

FIREHOSE BLOG: Africans, Malaysians, Middle Eastern Technicians - Run for cover

The firehose of disinformation about our Fixer brethren continues.

There is a war against the "Good Enough Market".  CAER, Greenpeace, and Basel Action Network have refused to withdraw the falsified and disproven statistic that 80% of used electronics exports are primitively burned in a horrible toxic process.  Interpol in Europe, acting on the fake, discredited, false, made-up statistic, has arrested 40 African export businesses.  USA EPA has publicly accused an Egyptian man of primitive ape-like processes for 100,000 computer monitors for which he paid $28 each ($21 per monitor plus approximately $7 in shipping).

You think the USA had a problem in the deep south in the 1960s?  Look at how we are treating the Deep South of the world.  Firehose of false, fake, brutally dishonest allegations against technicians in developing world.  And it's "environmentalists" holding the firehose.

Emerging markets (3 billion people with per capita income ~$3k/year) online more hours than West

Greenpeace Europe video accuses these men of burning these TVs.  Interpol arrested their boss.

Malaysia has now taken away the permit from this factory, written about by Shanghai reporter Adam Minter.

I got out of the Egypt business just before the crackdown by shipping monitors to the Malaysia company, which refurbished them to new-in-box warranty for my old Egyptian partner.  Now, the Environmental Malpractice is making them the fourth victim.

Two Weeks To Fair Trade Recycling "E-Waste" Summit

Also bookmark the web page www.fairtraderecycling.org

Press Release Here.

University Sustainability offices invite E-Waste Exporters (African, Latino, Asian) to face with activist, regulators tinyurl.com/fairtewaste
— Robin Ingenthron (@WR3A) April 2, 2013

Keynote speakers and panelists include:

·         Andrea Boron, US International Trade Commission.  Used Electronics Exports (February 2013).
·         Adam Minter, Author, “Junkyard Planet”.  Adam is a reporter for Bloomberg, based in Shanghai, who writes columns for BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, Recycling International, and The Atlantic.
·         Katharina Kummer Peiry, EcoConsult (Geneva, Switzerland). Former Executive Secretary, Basel Convention Secretariat 2007-12.  Former UNEP staff, Nairobi Kenya.
·         Eric Harris, Assoc. Counsel/Dir. Of Govt. & Intl. Affairs, ISRI, (Washington, DC).  Industry representative to UN PACE program.
·         Josh Lepawsky, Geography, Memorial University (Newfoundland, Canada).  Chief researcher, $479,000 Fair Trade Recycling research grant.
·         Ramzy Kahhat, Professor of Engineering, University Pontifica Catholic de Peru, FTR grant.
·         Stephen D’Esposito, President , and  Juliana Birkhoff, Vice President of Collaborative Practice, RESOLVE (resolv.org)
·         Jean Frederic Somda, International Attorney and former Prosecutor General of Burkina Faso
·         Martijn Van Engelen, Aatelco CEO, founder of Fair Trade Electronics in Holland, exporter.
·         Reed Miller, Researcher, MIT.
·         Lynn Rubenstein, Exec Director, NERC.org.  Board Member, R2 Solutions.

They will be joined by international group of importers, recycling regulators, activists, technicians, and geeks.  (Some participating by video).

• Jinex Mindevil, CEO, Ace TV, Lima Peru
• Ruediger Kuehr, United Nations University, Inst for Sustainability, Germany
• Michael Durfor, Executive Director, NRRA, Epsom, New Hampshire
• Colin Davis, VP, WR3A (Fair Trade Recycling), Middlebury, Vermont
• Kyle Wiens, CEO, IFIXIT, producer of documentary “The Fixers”
• Charles Brennick, President, Interconnection, Seattle Washington (WR3A Board)
• Mostaem Billah,Memorial University, Bangladesh
• Jim Lynch, TechSoup Global, California
• Allen Liu and Ow Young Su Fung, CEO and VP, Net Peripheral, Malaysia
• Gordon and John Chiu, CEO and VP, Advanced Global Technology, U.S.A and Peru
• Roberto and Alice Valenzuela, Retroworks de Mexico, Mexico (WR3A Board)
• Mike Rohrbach, Founder, CCLAC.org, Arizona (WR3A Board)
• Timothy Anderson, President, World Computer Exchange, California, U.S.A (WR3A member)
• George Hinkle, CEO, ARCOA Recycling, (WR3A Board)
• Muhammed Wahab Oboi, Importer of electronics, Ghana (WR3A)
• Sarah Commes, PCRR, Refurbishers Group
• Hamdy Moussa, CEO, Medi-Com, Egypt, (WR3A)
• Joshua Goldstein, Professor of Chinese History, USC Los Angeles
• Nancy Jo Craig, CCARC.com, Refurbishers Group, Louisiana
• Oscar Adrian Orta, University of Guadelajara, Mexico (WR3A)
• Adelaide Rivereau, WR3A, Masters in Waste Mgt, Univ Paul Cezanne, France
• Eric Prempeh, Technician, Good Point Recycling, Ghana
• Robin Ingenthron, WR3A, American Retroworks Inc., Good Point Recycling, Vermont
• Brenda Wijnen, University of Amsterdam (WR3A)
• Eva Carreira, WR3A staff, Vermont (WR3A)
• Miguel Macuiza-Artur, Worla Aid, Angola
• Qasim Munir, Good Luck Traders, Lahore, Pakistan

The event will be STREAMED LIVE.  If you are studying, researching, preaching, questioning, or otherwise fascinated by international recycling and scrap trade, you will want to watch this event online (seating is sold out) or participate via live streaming.

Local recycler American Retroworks Inc. and Good Point Recycling will hold an open house the same day in Middlebury, where live streaming of the event can be followed, and you can meet face to face with scrap and reuse buyers from several nations.

Do we make the world better by boycotting people based on their race, nationality, color, or language?  Do we give up too much control of the "end of life" when we let goods be bought and sold overseas?  Do prohibitions mainly benefit the lowest common denominator?  If used computer exports are outlawed, will outlaws control the export business?   Can "stack and pack" really compete with fully functional, tested working, and repairable equipment?

Meet the people who make the policy.  Visit www.fairtraderecycling.org.

"Fair Trade Recycling" is a trademark owned by Robin Ingenthron and licensed to WR3A, the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association.  WR3A is a non-profit consortium based in Vermont, with worldwide membership.  Donate to WR3A to support real solutions to resource and waste issues.

Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit Update

Earth Week Event:  Fair Trade Recycling (of "e-Waste") Summit in Vermont

copyright robin ingenthron

There is considerable interest in our April 16 Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit, a free conference paid for by Middlebury College, Memorial University, and WR3A.   In fact, we are out of seats already.

The good news is that the Summit will be broadcast via Live Streaming throughout the day.  We are preparing a number of videos to fill the gaps between sessions.

I'll post a list of speakers and presenters and panelists this week.  We are immensely honored at the number of Guests who have chosen to attend in person rather than via the Skype options offered to the presenters.

Fair Trade Recycling Summit Nations Represented (confirmed participation to date)

• Angola * Burkina Faso * Canada * China * Egypt * Holland  * Indonesia
• Malaysia * Mexico *  Peru *  Switzerland * USA

more

Charm Offensive

Being charming and being offensive at the same time is tricky.   It's also fascinating, an entire Hollywood genre.

Anti-slavery advocate John Brown may be my hero... he created a space for Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas to work inside.   But if you don't have a popularity guru, and aren't part of a Lincoln-F.Douglas team, it does help to build up chits, credits, and bitcoins of goodwill.  Count your cultural ammo before you embark on something really worth being contrary over.  It's not a secret, but it has to be a habit, like a banker saving interest, or a cowboy counting his bullets.

Sometimes we discover an injustice in our group, and we have to buy or earn attention to it, until we recruit our Great Communicator like Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain, or Frederic Douglas.

Until then, how do we promote justice while remaining acceptably affable?   How do we communicate the need for change to people who aren't really in the business and whose attention we are borrowing?  It's kind of like selling Civil Rights Movements at a Little Rock Garden Club meeting, or Women's Suffrage to a Chicago Country Club, in 1925.

Take note of what you are spending with this Charm Econ earnings report by Sebastian Drake.

13 Characteristics of Likeable People by Sebastian Drake

1. Smiling - 

2. Eye contact – 

3. Touch – 

4. Not talking about yourself – 

5. Not talking too much - 

6. Empathy – 

7. Not trying to impress – 

8. Showing praise and appreciation – 

9. Never criticizing, ever, for any reason –

10. Not trying to fix other peoples’ problems – 

11. Eliminate negativity - 

12. Never complain –

13. Never impose weakness on others –

Maybe we can assign earnings per day to each habit and treat it like a checklist.  Follow these steps, and be less unpopular.  But when is Charm over-rated?