WR3A Proposes a Partnership with the United Nations

Last week, three wise men came to our plant in Middlebury Vermont. I had met them at the CES in Las Vegas in January, where both WR3A and their UN Group were featured for efforts bringing technology to the developing world, during the CES Keynote address.

I had a follow up with them at the United Nations office of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in New York in February. We had lunch with Ambassadors and the president of Korea University, and met UN Deputy Secretary General (from Tanzania).

Three of the group (including Paul Jhin, former Deputy Director of US Peace Corps, Dr. YD Kim, former CEO of Hyundai, and Henry Kang, CEO or Earth Therapeutics) came to Middlebury to investigate WR3A's approach to used computers. I showed them how Good Point Recycling domestically recycled 77.5% of all the material we collected in 2008, and the employment generated by whirring tools and balers and sortation of plastics and metals... but I also showed them the 22.5% of material, such as working monitors and Pentium 4 computers, which we carefully triage for hard drive wiping, testing, and eventual export.

The UN obviously has to be careful wading into a controversial topic like ewaste and escrap and exports etc. I had shown them the coverage in CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic, BusinessWeek, etc. in 2008. And I showed them emails from clients asking Good Point Recycling's assurance that nothing will be exported to a poor country.



We invited some Vermonters to listen in and participate in the dialogue about the risks and rewards of used computer exports. Corey Berman came from the University of Vermont, one of our most important clients. Norm Staunton of the Association of Vermont Recyclers came and helped take care of the guests when I was pulled away from time to time. Zosha Peters, a Middlebury resident who volunteers for WR3A and who has lived in South Africa, came. And we even invited a new prospective buyer for WR3A, Lucien of Cameroon. Lucien and I had just met by internet, and he offered to come up to Boston to meet with the philanthropists and our clients.

Everyone had seen WR3A's Youtube video by now, and more film and photos of our refurbishing partners in Mexico, Egypt, Peru, Indonesia, and Malaysia. And we looked at the chart showing where the growth is for internet access.

What struck me most was that people at the table, like Dr. YD Kim, had lived through a transformation of the Korean peninsula, had actually experienced the changes that the UN is dreaming for Africa. In their lifetimes, Korea changed from a country that was less developed than Tanzania or Cameroon is today, to one of the largest OECD economies in the world. And they had seen Korea work from repair and refurbishing to light manufacture to engineering and invention. They were all aware that some of the 20 richest people in China were former bicycle repairmen and tractor repairmen. They could visualize what WR3A was trying to explain - that in the countryside of Ngaoundal Cameroon (where I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 80s), that motorcycle repair or TV repair or computer repair was like an engineering job. The best and brightest and most aggressive people on the continent were people just like Lucien. And Souleymane. And Allen and Fang and Mariano and Jinex...

WR3A is hoping that the UN can bring some balance and some sanity to the "war on drugs" or rather "war on internet" that is being inadvertently waged in Europe and the USA. The Basel Convention explicity, explicitly, explicitly says that exports of CRTs for repair and refurbishment is LEGAL.

Yesterday I got another email from another client insisting that we not export anything. The day before I had a phone call with an OEM representative, who is offering Vermont thousands of dollars for TV recycling... he had been in the maquilas in Mexico where the TVs were assembled, and he thought it was great what we were doing with Retroworks de Mexico and Las Chicas Bravas ... personally that is. But he had to insist that the company's brand of electronics, computers and TVs, be destroyed.

He hoped WR3A's message would prevail some day.

The UN supporters were really, really attracted to the story of computers being delivered to schools in Africa that were refurbished by smart and talented Africans. They understood that it's possible to sort out working and repairable equipment, and to export without shipping "Toxics Along for the Ride". They are going to visit the factory in Malaysia which WR3A vetted, which is ISO14001, which is legally permitted to import for repair, and which today takes back junk CRTs from across the state of Penang for recycling into new CRT glass.

That factory, which Dr. Kim is visiting this month, is moving its refurbishing technology to WR3A partners Egypt and to Mexico. The Malaysians flew to visit the Mexicans. The Mexicans and the Egyptians came to meet with the Americans and the Malaysians at the Recycling Today conference, and came again to the EScrap conference (WR3A sponsored their entrance).
Paul Jhin said, "Feed a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime."

This is incredible progress. Recycling overseas is progressing faster than Korea in the 1970s or Japan in the 1960s. And some of my clients want us to sit on the sidelines.

As if breaking our equipment is going to keep these people down. As if they are going to stay barefoot and pregnant. Despite the horrible one-sided press accounts, despite deliberate misrepresentation of the facts, we cannot stop this. If I cannot sell them the equipment they need, they will buy it from a back alley. If I cannot move the refurbishing technology, they will fix it with a coathanger.

E-Waste Primer: Hard Drive Management

Hard drives have a lot of data on them. Most of my personal experience has been around the pain and hassle of getting my information back off of a hard drive which failed or was dropped. The time and expense made me wish I had kept a backup.

The principle of a backup is that if you have two computers, and one is easy to log into and get the information off of, and the other is exceedingly difficult, that you would boot up the former.

If you don't back up your drives very regularly, you better hope that the computer that broke is the older one. Some information, like social security numbers, doesn't change much (unless maybe there was a birth or a death between the older and recent backup). Other information, like passwords (hopefully) and credit card IDs does change over the years.

The more recent data is probably on a newer computer. It is probably more valuable to a thief looking to resell a computer, and that person is also not one you want to have your hard drive information. These two concerns come together when a laptop is stolen from the back of a car.

Here is where I think some people's concept of risk de-links from reality.

If someone is stealing a 486 or Pentium 1 computer, when there is a Pentium 4 right next to it, you should either be very, very, very concerned or have a good laugh. The only thing that would give the Pentium 1 computer value would be if there was very specific data on it, specific to you, which no one else should know. Maybe it is your soon to be ex-wife, who is getting porno pictures to win custody in your divorce case. Yes, that would be a concern.

Or maybe the thief is an illiterate mountain man who thought the Pentium 1 was more valuable because it was "bigger". That would maybe be a good laugh, because you are happier that they didn't take your Pentium 4, and now the Pentium 1 with its hard drive is even farther from your ex-wife-to-be.

If you are concerned about data that is only of use to a few people - a competitor, or a foreign espionage agent, a nosey neighbor, I would argue the PC is safer in an anonymous pile, a hundred miles away, than it is in plain sight on the floor of your office.

Now, let's take NPR, speaking to millions of people, about one million computers.

For the purpose of discussion, let's say that 500,000 of the computers are Pentium 4, and 500,000 are ancient Pentium 1s. What is the risk to the public?

One school of thought is that all the PCs should always be wiped. That all 1m computers should be wiped in all cases.

The opposite point of view is that none of the hard drives should be wiped, if they are all mixed up, the odds of your personal information coming out are just a few in a million. Because let's face it, there is no factory of Iranian students taping shredded paper back together (a concern about exporting shredded paper from a few decades back), and there is no factory scale operation snooping for anecdotes for divorce cases. Or for that matter, no scaleable operation looking for credit card or bank info in this way - those operations are modernized and look for the credit card data through other means, such as spyware and phishing schemes, not by physically buyer hardware and seeing if it boots up and if it doesn't boot up, repairing the hard drive and doing data recovery on it to find the credit card information.

Real Life: If all million computers were sitting in my warehouse, and my warehouse was broken into, the Pentium 4s would be gone, and the Pentium 1s would still be there in the morning. The divorce lawyers would not be in the mix, because the very personal data is already a needle in a haystack just by being commingled in the warehouse.

The risk, in other words, is a factor of the free market. The more desirable your computer is, the more steps you need to take to protect its data. But the people stealing computers for the value of the computer are only going to take a random interest in reading your files. If there's porno on the stolen hard drive, they've probably already seen it and are not definitely not going to satisfy their jollies by stealing and rebooting hardware.

If it's desirable because you work for the Department of Defense, and nations hire spies to get your information, your standard should not be to wipe true data and rewrite false data. You should be putting false data, and spyware, onto your PCs and allowing them to be stolen. It's called counter-espionage. But for your rank and file, meanwhile, you want to destroy all the hard drives no matter how old.

For NPR's 1 million computers, here's the fact. The most valuable thing on a used PC today is Adobe Photoshop, or Quickbooks, or Microsoft Office Pro. There is typically $800 worth of software on a used P4 that has a resale value of $100.

So there is a risk, and Good Point Recycling has a policy for wiping hard drives. But our policy, like "women and children first", is that the more modern and valuable the PC, the sooner we are going to wipe and reformat it. If it is a Pentium 1 or a 486, it will get destroyed week to week by a crew of laborers who remove the screws and sort the scrap plastic and metals. The tech department throws higher end P4 hard drives into the same pile if they have been hammered and ruined. Certain clients pay to have their hard drives destroyed in an orderly fashion, and that involves even the truck driver (to document chain of custody) and destruction within 24 hours. We don't turn that business away, and we are very good at it.

But if someone on NPR suggests that people should not be recycling their computers, or hitting their 486s with drill presses, it kind of sets off a Keystone Cops escapade of citizens calling my office to ask me to account for the day and time their Pentium 1 was destroyed in 2006. Most of those people brought their computer to a trailer where it sat for weeks at the town dump before we came and got it.

But I answer them patiently, because I know they are really concerned.

Here are my 3 favorite, most told stories about hard drives:

In 1999, when we held our first computer drive, I was trying to resell and repair as many as I could in a thrift store. That meant booting them up and erasing personal files, so that I could leave the original license on the computer and advertise it with the Adobe, Microsoft, etc. licenses still on it, adding hundreds of dollars in value to the thrift store customer. Within a week of trying it this way (and I was just one of 3 employees), I booted up a PC with a folder on it that said "Divorce". I was bitten simultaneously by curiosity and horror at my curiousity, like a high school teacher that saw a sexy cheerleader. I realized then and there that my method, whose sole intention was to preserve software value, was not scaleable, because I could not entrust that to employees.

Later in my career, one of the older ladies who had brought in a PC came in with second thoughts. She said she had donated it to us in the collection event, but now she was concerned that a young person might get the PC and use it to look at pornographic images. I thought she meant she had some on there and assured her it would be either destroyed or wiped. She said destroyed is fine. But she asked how wiping it will keep a young person from going online and downloading sexy images in the future? That my friends is a tough bar to leap over.

My third story goes even farther back, to when I was in the waste paper business at Earthworm Recycling in Boston. A big law firm that we collected waste paper from called and said there was a panic because they were missing a $6 Million bond note. One of the employees thought it might have been thrown out with the recycling. We told them the collection was a few days ago and the paper was probably baled by now. They sent 4 people to the baling plant, I guess with the idea that they could look through 100 tons of office paper and find their bond note. They looked at the piles of paper in front of the baler, and at the bales. "I'll tell them it's been shredded" said the lawyer, and he left.

Commentary on Europe exports to Africa (Greenpeace Story)

This week Greenpeace made a major splash in the European media with a tracking device hidden in a "junk" or "unrepairable" TV taken to a recycler in England.

The coverage in UK's The Independent is the most thorough, with 4 full articles.
BBC summarized the story accurately.

In both The Independent and the BBC coverage, it is (probably most accurately) stated that 1/3 of the exports to Lagos are not working and not worth repairing. This concedes WR3A's point, that 2/3 of the goods are legitimate commodities, and the rest are TAR (Toxics Along for the Ride). This is why WR3A's approach is to reform the export practice, and to provide cleaner loads to Africa from more reputable recyclers.

We note with concern that the Greenpeace press release, printed on MarketWatch, returns to the "up to 80% of E-Waste from Europe failing to be disposed of safely". Nothing in the investigations above suggests that 80% of exports from Europe are junk.

The Greenpeace blurb goes on to implicate anything exported for further repair:

"It's illegal to export broken electronic goods under EU legislation (and) at no point ..was the TV turned on or tested to see if it was in working condition," Greenpeace said.

This new "working condition" standard is another clear swipe at the text of the Basel Convention, which in Annex IX, specifically states "Re-use can include repair, refurbishment or upgrading, but not major reassembly" (B1110)

The free market gives more value to a non-working Pentium 4 or 1998 non-working TV than it does to a "working" Pentium 2 or a "functional" 1980 TV. The former are commodities, the latter are junk. Greenpeace fails to grasp that the most talented repair persons in the world today are in developing countries. Repair is becoming a lost art in the EU and USA. If you want a cell phone fixed in London, find an Egyptian.

WR3A is a "Fair Trade" organization which seeks to match ethical USA recyclers with the legitimate (and overwhelming) demand for reuseable and repairable computers and televisions which Americans throw away. Capturing the reuse value in an ethical and professional manner reduces the cost of e-scrap recycling, meets the solid waste hierarchy, and promotes the standard of living and education in developing countries.

--

2009 New Year's Letter to Recycling Clients

Good Point Recycling

www.good-point.net

802-382-8500

Good Point Recycling PO 1010, 227 Pond Lane, Middlebury, VT 05753

January 20, 2009

Dear Clients,

2008 was an eventful year. We are always aware that you are the reason we continue to enjoy success. We have a lot to introduce to you as we begin 2009.

First, we were proud to open our new 50,000 square foot facility. After years of renting space in different locations (and transporting stuff back and forth between buildings), or adding services (like textiles or baling) just to drop them for lack of space, we realized we are here to stay. Buying the building allows us to proceed with several new endeavors (described below), to process more in house, and to set smarter shipping and marketing targets. We also hope to develop more career employees when the temperature falls below freezing. There are more photos of our facility and operations, and video, available online (videos also coming soon).

The new facility will allow us to roll out our next big announcement - brand sorting for reimbursement. We have agreements either directly or with the processors of the following brands: Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, and Samsung. There are still a lot of details to work out. For one big example, some OEM representatives want documentation that their product was accepted for free before they will reimburse it, but do not want to cover the cost of transportation. If they pay us for processing only and not collection, it means we need to work out what you can collect. To keep our foot in the door, we are allowing individuals to drive to GPR in Middlebury - but that's not a very effective or green solution. What we have offered as a compromise is to charge 18 cents per pound (TV rate), weigh the brand sorted items, and then subtract out (credit) your municipality for whatever the OEM credits us. We will send a separate letter describing our proposal, which is intended to reimburse back 100% of whatever subsidy we get from the OEMs for TVs.

Third, we were recognized as the nation's expert on exports. Membership grew in the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A), a "Fair Trade" organization we founded. EPA hired WR3A as a consultant to identify legitimate CRT exports, and BusinessWeek, National Geographic, and CBS 60 Minutes relied on us for advice and perspective. The Consumer Electronics Association gave WR3A a grant to film many of the select buyers who represent the "fair trade" export market, as well as collections. We hosted and visited techies from Africa, Asia, Middle East and South America, and filmed what they can do. It's hard work to visit and qualify these markets, but we have to do it... In January, CEA presented a 3-minute trailer CES Show in Las Vegas, between two keynote addresses (CEO Craig Barrett of Intel and John Chambers, CEO of Cisco). "If computer exports are outlawed, only outlaws will export used computers". The full video of the CES keynote address includes our video (about 1/3 through)

Fourth, we participated on a national panel invited by EPA to define "Responsible Recycler" (R2) standards, meeting with other respected recyclers, government officials, and advocates from around the country. EPA posted the R2 standards in November, 2008.

Fifth, we developed our staff . Rachael was promoted to a nice front office, and Colin Davis returned from a year sabbatical (running his own business, Builder's Studio) to be VP of Operations.

In 2008 we hired a professional OEM auditor to visit our largest market in Malaysia in October. Every unit we send for reuse is accounted for through proprietary tracking software (developed by Good Point, 2006), and reconciliation reports done by the Buyer note fallout rates (about 6%, which are then recycled, with glass going to Samsung) Good Point has also helped the Buyer efforts to obtain ISO 14001 status this month.

There is more to report than we can squeeze into a letter, but our last bit of news is a bit of a warning. In a year largely defined by a world financial crisis, Good Point has seen rates from ERI (the Pledge company which bought Electronicycle) increased by over 50%. We briefly tried other CRT glass processors, but they increased their rates even higher than ERI within a few weeks. We will do what we can in-house, but the raw material markets for the demanufactured scrap have plummeted to pre World War II levels. We have strived to offer consistency, and don't chase prices at the expense of accountability, but you may want to plan on fee increases for your consumers until the OEM programs mature.

Vermont has offered convenient access to TV recycling for years now, thanks to clients like you. 84% of Vermonters can now recycle a TV in at least one spot, open six days per week, in their county or district. Everyone here at Good Point thanks you sincerely for your support. We wish everyone the best in the year to come. Attached is a short end-market audit which shows where material we collected from you went to last year.

Sincerely,

Robin

Robin Ingenthron, president

American Retroworks Inc., dba Good Point Recycling

Alfred Lothar Wegener: Copernicus of Drift

Alfred Lothar Wegener

It's interesting that his idea about Continental Drift, proposed in a paper in 1912, was something he felt was not worthy of recognition because it was so patently obvious (and he credited several previous researchers for proposing it). On History Channel this AM, one geologist speculated about how many schoolchildren must have been shushed for proposing that the continents fit together like a puzzle piece. I remember vividly proposing it to my dad in Fresno, where I attended elementary school from 2nd-6th grade, and how he chuckled in an adult way and said it was a coincidence. I think my mother encouraged me more to question it, but the consensus was that it was a childish idea.

It's more interesting (in this blog) that Wegener was distainfully dismissed by geological experts for much of the past century, and he died vainly trying to find evidence to support the theory he labelled "continental drift". That geologists succumbed to "group think" and called him a doofas.


...(wikipedia)

During Wegener's lifetime, his theory of continental drift was severely attacked by leading geologists, who viewed him as an outsider meddling in their field.[12] His hypothesis received support from South African geologist Alexander Du Toit as well as from Arthur Holmes, but was not generally supported due to the lack of a known driving force and the absence of evidence beyond the coastline shapes and fossil records. The possibility of continental drift gradually became accepted by the late 1950s. By the 1960s, geological research conducted by Robert S. Dietz, Bruce Heezen, and Harry Hess, along with a revision of the theory including a mechanism by J. Tuzo Wilson, led to widespread acceptance of the theory among geologists.


It sounds now like Nicolaus Copernicus.

(wikipedia) Although Greek, Indian and Muslim savants had published heliocentric hypotheses centuries before Copernicus, his publication of a scientific theory of heliocentrism, demonstrating that the motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in the center of the universe, stimulated further scientific investigations and became a landmark in the history of modern science that is known as the Copernican Revolution.
... (merge with wikipedia on Galileo)
In 1633 Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture,"[34] and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

So the comparison here is the power of groupthink, the power of the catholic church, and the power of self interested parties to steer public perceptions of the truth... but also that truth eventually comes out.

I like OEMs and wish only that I owned more stock in them. When I describe their self-interests, I think of them protecting their shareholders. With that said, the combination of group-think, poster child politics by BAN.org, and the threat of wannabe counterfeiting white box generic re-manufacturers is worth trillions, and it is the single best explanation for A) China's import policies (shredded monitors allowed, working P4s not allowed), and B) the best and simplest explanation for consensus between certain OEMs and certain policy jaggers in the US and Europe.

If anyone reads this someday, I'd suggest it would be a great environmental studies thesis topic to see how the gravitational pull of OEM interests affects implementation of versions of environmental laws. For example, there is was a soda pop company in California when I was a kid which used deposit bottles. But CA became the one state which doesn't institute its bottle bill via units, but by pounds of broken glass. There must be some folks who were in the smoke filled rooms in the 70s who could explain to an interested student how the "breaking for reimbursement" became the norm. Maybe it's a good thing, maybe they were trying not to suck the reuse deposit bottles into the recycling system (which led to the exemption of deposit refill bottles from MA bottle redemption laws).

Maybe it was concern about bottles being refilled with someone elses product. Sound crazy? Consider:

Coca Cola spent a lot of money developing the hobbleskirt bottle, patented by Alexander Samuelson of the Ruth bottling company, when "white box" copycat cola companies began competing in generic bottles. That, and a lot of advertising and marketing, helped Coke survive to be the giant it is today. A true "bottleneck" to entry in the field, it allowed a trademark and a stewardship to be recognized which the marketplace accepted (along with Pepsi and RC Cola).

Coca Cola has a museum in Atlanta around the hobbleskirt bottle and considers it their most valuable innovation next to their "secret recipe".

Is treating CRTs - which have much greater added value as working units - like bottles to be broken merely a hiccup, an example of bad concensus, or something else?

My point as always is that we have a limited amount of environmental dollars in the total M1 which will be spent from our economy, and we have to spend them wisely to achieve the most environmental benefit. Billions are spent now collecting mercury lamps, and the mercury from those lamps is exported to alleuvial mining operations as bad as the worst Guiyu riverside. We need to spend every billion as if it really means something.

I question the millions being spent every month to break working monitors and TVs. I've done it for 10 years. And I'm beginning to spend my spare time reading about Wegener, Copernicus, and Galileo. Surely the majority of people who rejected their new theories were not their intellectual equals. But surely they had intellectual equals, in the church or the scientific community. What did they know? When did they know it?