The Ptolemy-Liability Trap: Simplified Recycling Lifecycle Narratives Tend to Revolve Around You

The Vermont free-mail, coupon-funded newspaper "Hometown" is published and mailed by the Burlington Free Press - which, with its Headliner newspaper, follows the opposite, paywall approach, online. So I'm in a bit of a quandary in presenting the snapshot, below, of the opening paragraphs of the article. Well, it's a fair use claim, and also it's common practice for newspapers to show the "lede" (opening paragraphs), so here's what catches my attention this morning.

Burlington Free Press Thanksgiving "Hometown" Edition

Joel Banner Baird of Burlington Free Press may well have started a "recycling" story for the same reason that @AdamMinter told me those stories normally appear around holidays.... they are easy to write, require little more than a google page one of research, and seem to appeal to everyone. They are not time sensitive, so a reporter can write it a week ahead, and get home for the holidays faster. But at least in the opening paragraphs, Baird bluntly avoids the normal "gotcha" narratives common in holiday journalism (someone made millions of dollars recycling trash was the go-to in the 1980s, your recyclables didn't really get recycled in the 1990s, lather-rinse-repeat for every buyers-market, sellers-market cycle). It leads, but does not bleed.

The opening interview with Michael Noel (nice holiday namesake) of TOMRA, the master-redemption center recycling provider and owner of most supermarket reverse-vendor container machines, avoids falsely choosing between either "It was the best of times."  

...Or, "It was the worst of times".

Which is the most environmentally sustainable Container for my holiday beer?

Michael Noel tells Joel Banner Baird "The short answer is, it's complicated". That is an honest answer to the decades of environmentalists (spoilt brat) privileged demands to "choose" the "best" beer container, vs. the equally misguided alt-right "recycling is Bulls**t" waste-makers. Both camps are uber-susceptible to cognitive dissonance (or perhaps vice versa, those prone to cognitive dissonance probably lean toward extreme positions). The more they choose one answer (only use this one vs. nothing matters, environmentalists are wrong), the louder they both get. Outrage is not Expertise.

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It's all over now, Baby Blue

A hobby of mine in the 80s was to collect "cover" versions of this trippy Bob Dylan Classic, now the cassettes are worthless, but the tunes are so easy to find on the internet, I could never have imagined it. Happy Thanksgiving, Joni, from Good Point Recycling.

If you are looking for news about e-waste recycling, check out yesterday's post on Product Stewardship and Ghost tonnage. I get so alarmed by bad recycling policy because we have so little time, we are consuming the planet so fast, we have to take charge and count our ammo and regulate responsibly.

If you got here looking for recycled versions of "It's all over now, baby blue", here's a fantastic bluegrass version by the Country Gentlemen. I kind of love how the internet brings cultures - like my Ozark Rooted hillbillies and my college hippy friends - close together.



Just like it brings geeks together from Senegal, Egypt, Nepal, Mexico, and Indonesia.

Here is film of one I think I actually had on cassette. I remember the days of taping music, the "rights" and "copyrights", and how ownership of a piece of vinyl dictated our rights to make backup copies. As I remember, "33" was not just RPMs, it was also approximately the cost of the plastic vinyl that you were buying for $15 when you paid for the album.

When "napster" came out, I actually did an inventory of my vinyl and attempted to download exactly the tunes I already had purchased. I tried to set up a copyright system where you could use the napster technology to make "backups" of music the Supreme Court had already said you could make cassette copies of. Friends and I discussed EULA agreements on software and whether we'd soon have to check a End User Licensing Agreement to listen to music like this.

This started out a wandering Thanksgiving post, but I see now it is headed to Stewardship again. You see, ewaste is not created by hardware. There is no way that Pioneer could have designed my tape cassette player to make it immune from the CD players, or that Sony could have designed my CD player to immunize me from the MP3s.

The irony is that most of the money and margins are in the ether... the software, the tunes, the analog bandwidth. We should be putting advanced recycling fees (ARFs) on software operating systems like Windows 7, not on hardware displays. Stuff which has money and profits attached by licensing laws which are passed by the people, and which generally bring windfalls. That might be a better place to tag on e-waste costs. I am looking for someone to help me draft such a law. I think I'll post it under "gigs" on Craigslist.