Michael Shellenberger's Mad at Solar Panels. Too Cute Substack Fallacy.

SEE VIDEO: WHY DECOMMISSIONED SOLAR PANELS ARE NOT DEAD YET.  

Like flip phones, CRT monitors, hotel TVs, ex-boyfriends, and used cars, your decision to electively upgrade to a newer solar panel does not mean the ex-panel's life won't go on.

I was coached that people don't have time to read everything, so here's the jist... Shellenberger's thesis is that solar panels are being upgraded far sooner than their 30 year warranty or 40 year estimated lifespan would have buyers assume. That's true, I just gave a presentation on that at NERC.org.  But the reason for the upgrades is not that the used panels are failing or are waste... It's because 

• the price and efficiency are falling, 
• the number of roofs is finite, 
• the cost of siting big solar fields near populated areas is skyrocketing
• early adapters like to upgrade to something new
• AND by 2028, virtually every older working will panel be cost-driven to replace

I have a whole presentation explaining this (Start at 2h 30min, NERC.org recorded session). Like desktop CRTs and Pentium 4 laptops, the solar panels are all going to get electively upgraded.

BUT  like those other items, the secondhand market is gobbling up replaced solar panels. And here's where the circular economy doesn't revolve around you, Michael Shellenberger - a 50% efficient panel replaced by a 100% efficient panel in Vermont GENERATES MORE KW IN AFRICA THAN THE NEW ONE DOES IN VERMONT.

Check out @AdamMinter's Twitter reply string to @ShellenbergerMD (he's not an MD, btw, he uses his first and middle initial).

MORE >

Dell Global Recycling Video by Von Wong, Theory of God

While I would love to sit down with Von Wong and correct some of his statistics about ewaste (to put a more heroic face on the overseas Tech Sector, described as "landfills across the globe" in the intro), I have to hand it to him, the artwork is great.



Can't resist sharing this.  Thanks to my pal in Malaysia, Nancy Poh, for sharing it.

But this is a two part blog. The next is about my theory of knowledge, and knowledge of God.

TRAGEDY 3: (Video) Puckett Defends "Guidelines" Developed Under Hoax

"When something is "claimed" to be exported for repair... but is actually exported for primitive dumping...."  Africans are accused of relocating to Europe in order to do this to other Africans, and #GreatWhiteSavior is here to help.

Better, listen to Jim make BAN's case, on video, and on his own behalf.   Below is the case for the "guidelines" which would rewrite Basel Convention's Annex IX, B1110 (the unamended Convention explicitly makes Hurricane Joe Benson's exports legal, See Part 1).  In the video testimony below, Jim Puckett admits that they are legal under the Basel Convention.   They'd be "illegal" under the "Guidelines" proposed under the Basel Ban Amendment, developed under the cloud of his hoax statistics.   As he describes, those Guidelines are being implemented in Europe.  Those were the Guidelines the UK Barrister used to convict Hurricane Benson.  Below is Puckett's impassioned case not to "roll them back" (i.e. why we should still amend the Convention with the hoax-fed Guidelines).

VIDEO BELOW

CRT Repair JuJu vs. CRT Maths

Is it juju, toxic cost avoidance, or engineering?  What's behind Hurricane Joe Benson's "WasteCrime"?

"Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so."  - Adam Smith

Europeans have decided to save Africans from trading with Europeans, and have made big glass "cathode ray tubes" the equivalent of ivory - trade punishable by imprisonment.  Environmentalist's acceptance of the sentences passed rest in part on our cultural ignorance ("they don't even have electricity in Africa" I've read in comment threads), in part our lost repair skills, and just bad math.

Buying a used TV in Essex, paying people to list its make and model and individual price, hiring a sea container, and paying people to pack it... we can estimate how much that costs.   The cost of shipping the container to an African port is somewhere between $4k and $9k  (see below).  The price to buy the TV from the marketplace in Lagos is known.  And the number of TVs you can fit in a sea container is simple.

But somehow, race and ju-ju and pictures of kids at city dumps get in the way of a simple transaction.  Technophobia, metalurgy, toxics and black people make simple trade too scary to contemplate.

Here are the mysterious parts of a display device.  This one is a CRT computer monitor, but a TV is not much different ( a different tuner mainboard).



In the 1980s and earlier, you needed several different types of mainboards for televisions which worked in different nations.   PAL, NTSC (National Television System Committee) , NTSC2 ("Not The Same Color" = Japan!), SECAM (Système Electronique Couleur Avec Mémoire) , MESECAM, PAL-M... For protectionist and other reasons, television analog transmissions varied country by country.  If you sold a USA Television to an African country in the 1970s (before VHS tapes), you'd have a very unhappy buyer who would have to pay a TV repairperson to replace the NTSC mainboard with a "Phase Alternating Line" (or, "Pay A Lot") analog board.

This all ended in the 1990s.  Remember the "converter box" for turning "rabbit ear" analog televisions into HDTV receivers?  Flybacks, Heat Sinks, Horizontal Output Transistors, RGB... a whole lot of TV tuning bot put onto a motherboard which was designed to "translate" any analog signal into digital.

This new mainboard (made in Taiwan by "Taiwanese" - the people in Taiwan who make stuff) was PERFECT for SVGA monitors... they already had more DPI (dots per inch) than TV monitors.   And it allowed any assembler or contract manufacturer ("Big Secret Factories") on any assembly line in the world to sell a TV to any country on any analog system.  They even sold the "coverter box" to countries (I saw them in Egypt) to allow a regular old SVGA computer monitor to receive any type of analog signal.

I'm in the electronics reuse and repair business, and everyone in the emerging markets knows all this.  I am dumbfounded why recyclers in rich nations don't know what I'm talking about.

Value of CRT Device = A + B + C

A= The CRT tube.   If it works, it's worth $20.  If it's busted it's worth -$4.  That's a $24 spread.

B = The copper stuff.  Circuit boards, yokes, wires, degaussing coils.  SMJ* says they are worth $5.38, I'd say closer to $3, at least inside the box before you do the work.  Working, they are only valuable if you have a CRT connected to them.

C = Supporting players... Plastic, steel, screws... stuff that has no purpose but to hold the CRT screen and circuit board/copperstuff together.

The scrap value = 0 + $5.38 + $0.30 , and the $0 is actually a negative number.   You pay people, or a machine, to separate the stuff (but if you run it through a shredder it's worth a whole lot less than $5.68).

Now, just imagine, what if you leave these things together, in working order?

A = $20              (per alibaba)
B = $5.38           (per SMJ / scrap metal junkie, see below)
C = 0.30             (handful of plastic and screws)
____

Working CRT TV or monitor = $40+  (What Joe Benson made on the TVs delivered to market in Lagos... and what Greenpeace had to pay to get them back again).

Full Lunar Eclipse, Seen in Cameroon, Africa at Ramadan May 1985

Below is {recorded livestream?} of tonight's Rare Hybrid Lunar Eclipse, which in 2014 we can watch live online.  No need to worry about clouds, or to go outside.  Social Media has it covered.

It would be my second.  I will always remember my first.  It was in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, Africa, sitting on a bench at night in a small unlit bar run by Suzanne Ateh, my "African mother".  I ate at her place every lunch, and spent many evenings drinking mimbo (beer), around a short table with backs to the wall, or sitting outside and looking out at the street.  It was a paved highway with no traffic.  Virtually none at all.

That night was the full moon of Ramadan, which started that year on May 4.  The eclipse was May 21.  Ngaoundal was probably 60-70 percent Muslim, and about 1/3 Baya, 1/3 Fulani, and 1/3 mix of other areas of Cameroon, brought there by a military training camp.  I lived near the military camp, which is where the bars and prostitutes were.

(Original Livestream video link ended without recording, but here's a good link from Mexico.  Fast forward to the first hour, hour ten minutes or so.)

Testimony Wanted: E-Waste Import/Export Trials

The Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit is collecting 2-3 minute videos, written testimonials, and quotes about the concept of fair trade as an alternative to export bans and prohibition laws.

We had far too many people who wanted to attend and present their ideas, even after opening a third class.  There will be online streaming of the FTR Event.  That means there will be gaps between classes which is an opportunity for you to present your case, pro or con, to thousands of viewers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The only warning is that there are plenty of facts on the table.  Dozens of import/export businesses are talking about their processes, and how fair reuse can actually fund the manual disassembly of used electronics they generate in their own nations.

Send your 2 paragraphs, or video or link from youtube/vimeo/viddler, to Testimony (at) wr3a.org.

Here's an example (my video response to Good, February 11, 2010...

Video Testimony on fair trade (share your ideas as well!) below (click "more")

(My favorites so far are on the theme of "right to assembly" means "right to affordable internet devices".   The same nations which are cracking down on used device imports are the ones cracking down on internet free assembly... )

Another "Poverty Porn" Parody

These are coming out so quickly now.   I think this is a movement.  As the NPR article reports, the reactions against "poverty porn", "parasites of the poor", "accidental racism" and "boycotts of geeks of color" are not something I'm making up.

I have heard the frustrating cries from the technicians in Asia, Africa, and South America for over a decade.

This video parody shows Africans coming together, a la "We are the World", to donate radiators to poor freezing Norwegian children.   The way Norway is presented does have a grain of truth... it is indeed cold there, and the cold is something that would really seem frightening to Africans.  But they hit the out-of-context, Onion-esque, clueless notes that anti-export organizations don't seem aware of...



At FastCoExist.com, Ariel Schwartz and Nathaniel Whittenmore describe some of the same lessons I thought we learned in the 1960s, about "poster child syndrome" (the UNICEF campaign).  From Ariel's article:

"Guilt-tripping is still a commonly used tactic in trying to get people to donate money for the impoverished, though it is slowly being replaced by more hopeful messages from organizations like Mama Hope and Pencils of Promise. Nathaniel Whittemore explains in a Co.Exist post from earlier this year that this is strategic: "It supposes that after decades of being battered over the head by relief organizations flaunting horror images, there’s not much left but table scraps in the guilt bucket," he writes.

Fair Trade Recycling is a movement to recognize the crazy good things about repair and trade and even recycling in the emerging markets.   I could never have predicted the animosity directed towards technicians and recyclers in emerging markets, promoted by the very people I hung out with in college.  Remember the "boycott" of Fair Trade Cotton at Victoria's secret?

E-Waste Poster Children are everywhere.

I'm still working on the individual examples for the "legal malpractice" case.  It's just something I want to be very careful with, something that has to be done right.

More from the NPR article about the video, below.

"The video is humorous, but there is a serious message.  The point is that images of helpless Africans are just as inaccurate as the idea of helpless freezing Norwegians.   A lot of Africans cannot relate to the patronizing videos and development initiatives."
"The organization says it has certain goals with the video. "
"Among them that fundraising "should not be based on exploiting stereotypes" and that media should have more respect in portraying suffering children."

David Fedele E-Wasteland My-alogue.

David Fedele, like Jim of Seattle and Allen of New York, has now "been there".  He, himself, has witnessed "e-waste" on the ground in Agbogbloshie, Ghana.   He has made a film, E-Wasteland.

"Every year, around 200.000 tonnes of second-hand and condemned electronic goods arrive in Ghana, West Africa."

"Goods are mainly received from the "developed" world"

"Salvaged metals are commonly exported out of Africa by multinational companies..."

The sole statistic is real (apart from the "mainly" and "commonly").   About the 200,000 tons of second-hand electronic goods that arrive in Ghana, West Africa, we now have hard statistics.   A 2011 UNEP study, co-sponsored by the Basel Secretariat, examined the goods imported.  179 containerloads were hand-sorted in Lagos alone.

They found that 70% work from the get-go, and another 15% are repaired.  That left 15% which will be recycled, perhaps from damage in shipping.  We can do better.

The "wasteland" filmed by David Fedele in "E-Wasteland" was also researched.  Between 80-90% of the goods being burned there, the UNEP/Basel studies found, was used for a long time by Africans and "generated" in Africa.   Since less than a third of electronics that Africans use are brand new (they cannot afford to have Egyptian revolutions on IPads, so CRT monitors had to suffice), many of those at the dump may have been imported at some time.  But the sea containers do not go to Agbogbloshie... they go to the reuse shops.  The reuse shops have a percentage damaged in shipping (11% of brand new Wal-Mart sales in the USA are store returns) and a percentage they take back from African consumers as trade ins for a slightly newer used electronic device.

If you apply the actual statistics to David Fedele's quotes, which he stands behind (quite forcefully in an email I'd like to share but modesty forbids), you'd find that 200,000 tons of used electronics are imported, and 170,000 tons of those 200,000 tons are reused and repaired.  [POSTSCRIPT:  In Mr. Fedele's defense, he did reach back and reopened the dialogue by email, despite my lashing in my third email to him..  He's got a conscience and means well, and probably didn't know what a ferocious, passionate, pro-recycling, pro-export bastard he was dealing with]

But all 20 minutes of the film is poor black faces burning wire in fires.  They also burn refrigerators, tires, other items which millions of Africans own and eventually throw away at the dump.

David explained to me when I contacted him by email that he wasn't comfortable using statistics, and he thought that the silent imagery, without commentary, conveyed the truth.

Much like the truth conveyed if you film cadavers - and nothing, nothing but cadavers - in discussing a hospital.   Piles and piles of burning cadavers, in a film about a hospital which saves 85% of its patients.  Who would ever be caught donating to such a hospital?

I get frustrated, and I wrote too much to Mr. Fedele, trying to explain the damage done by depicting Africans solely as lonely wire burning beasts at landfills. I was wanting to find a way to tell something about the Fixers (ifixit.org film) or WR3A's crude videos on Viddler.com of geeks of color making the best jobs they can find making good enough product for  their nations growing internet.  My experience vs. My experience.   Like a "fly and buy" trip from an African or Chinese buyer, we wear our experience like a shirt, making our respective fashion statements amongst the untravelled masses.

David says,

"Then you go on with your own self-absorbed rambling. "

Guilty as charged.  That's just the problem, exactly.  I'm a long winded, self-absorbed, pedantic, businessman protecting my life choice (trading with people in a continent I lived in and loved).   I'm probably the worst advocate these poor sots in Accra and Angola and Cameroun and Lagos and Cairo could wind up with.   I'm an awful filmmaker and not a very good writer, my friends plead with me to hire an editor.   I go on and on, diarrhea of the keyboard.

The problem is that these African friends of mine, Wahab, Hamdy, Souleymane, Miguel, and their compatriots Jinex and Fung in South America and Asia, have so little choices of people to do business with.  The E-Stewards don't return their calls.  And Film makers like David Fedele make it very simple and powerful not to do so... just like Pieter Hugo's savage portrayal of exotic wire burning.

It's not a dialogue, it's a my-alogue.  David's film, Robin's blog.     The sun orbits our compassion.

Three Interviews with Yadji Moussa about Cameroon, Africa, and "e-waste"

These are pretty unprofessional, unedited, videos interviewing our departed friend from Cameroon, Yadji Moussa.   I'm working today on getting some photos together for the service on Friday.  Yadji's kids, Innah and Adam, will be coming from Michigan.

The service will be held at the Memorial Baptist Church, between Pleasant St. and Court St (Rt 7) near the Middlebury green.    Friday, July 6, 6:45PM

War of Images: 3 Views of Hong Kong Waste, Recycling

World electronics recycling policy has been boiled down to characterization of trade between "wealthy" OECD nations and "poor" non-OECD nations.

Photos, film, and images describe people living in a geography which is too distant for the viewers to visit.

Below the photos and the break are two videos, two stories of what scrap exported to Hong Kong are all about.   One is the description from BAN.  The other is the biography of an American scrap recycling trader, describing what life is like in Hong Kong.

First, photos of SWANA style landfills in the "new territories".







Videos below

Faces and Tales from E-Waste Internationals

Below, just some video of the faces from our 2007-2009 CEA Grant video of the Recycling Geeks and Tinkerers we met worldwide.  I was just goofing around with finding clips from different geeks we interviewed.  Demanufacturing and reuse with folks from Arizona, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Louisiana, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, North Carolina, Peru, and Vermont.  There are hours of video uploaded from these countries at www.viddler.com, and not enough time or money to translate or edit them.  Viddler is a great alternative to Youtube, by the way, nice video quality.

Foreign Recyclers Take Over the World 2008

Three years ago, my 8 year old son came back from a year in France, and reacquainted himself with my office while I took a nap.  He found a FLIP camera there, which I'd gotten back from one of the WR3A videoers (Peru, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Mexico, Malaysia, Indonesia, Baton Rouge, North Carolina, etc).

see below