When You Have Time to be a Great Writer: BusinessWeek on Recycling

This week Bloomberg BusinessWeek runs a whole chapter from Adam Minter's upcoming book "Junkyard Planet", which is coming out in November (but you can advance order it, as I have).

I've only gotten through about a third of the article, and I'm already pleasantly stunned.  There's Johnson, the scrap man I know from my days at Electronicycle.  He's a Chinese copper trader, who taught many of us in the e-scrap business much of what we know about the metal chemistry of many of the electronics parts and wires we get from de-manufacturing.    Adam drove across the USA ("9,600 miles in 26 days") with Johnson in a rental car.

"It’s an essential trade. In 2012, China accounted for 43.1 percent of all global copper demand, or more than five times the amount acquired by the U.S. that same year. A modern economy can’t grow without copper. One way to get that metal is to dig holes in the ground; the other is from scrap. Since the mid-1990s, China has taken both approaches, with scrap accounting for more than half of all Chinese copper production every year (peaking at 74 percent in 2000). Because China is still a developing economy, it doesn’t throw away enough stuff to be self-sufficient. 

That's a brilliant explanation.  I've got it here somewhere, I think to myself, tongue in my cheek... somewhere in my thousand blog posts, I've made that point.. probably repeatedly.  But like the difference between a ten pounds of copper in one kilogram, or ten pounds of copper in ten kilograms, finding that information through my blog comes at a high price, and requires a lot of mental sorting (and there's that noxious burning smell in too many of my posts).

It's music to my ears, you could say.  Music about settling accounts.

Editor Wanted: Because Less Is More

Las Vegas, 4/18/2012.   Weather will finally hit the 80s today - it has been hotter at home in Vermont so far this week than here in Nevada.  Groups and small talk.  Tweet talks.

Had a long after-dinner discussion with someone whom I deeply respect in our little computer refurbishing community last night.  I know something in the blog wasn't resonating with him, thought we'd have a drink and he'd give me some guidance.   He's 11 years older than me, started out as a hippy scavenging from his job on a garbage truck, amazed by what people throw away.

Benjamin Franklin at work on a printing press. Repro of a Charles Mills painting

While he said he could respect the long-bomb "Foreign Affairs" posts, that he simply didn't have time for them, and said more importantly that my denser posts, digressions, and obscure historical parallels were losing people he hoped would be my allies.  He says that groups in the refurbishing community, in particular, could become a groundswell of support for the "geeks of color", the counter- obsolescence planning, and other crusades I'm engaging.

Sounds like a case for less is more.

Now, this blog began (if you go back to the first years posts) as a journal I was convinced that no one at all was reading.   I was shocked by the first comment ever posted... "Not quite no one."

Well, my secret desire is that I'm going to have time one day to tear all 2000 pages (including a number of as-yet unpublished posts that I wasn't happy with) down into 249 pages that say something that hasn't been said in a way that more people would listen to.  I don't happen to care whether that's during my lifetime.  I'm acutely, or rather chronicaly aware I could die next year.

My evening mentor said that's fine, but he'd like to see me pay $14 per hour to some college student or professor just to edit each post as it comes out.  After listening to him, it seems ironically more arrogant not to pursue the idea.