Good Point Recycling is a socially and environmentally responsible company bringing employment and revenue to Middlebury from out of country sales.
GPR repairs and resells affordable computer equipment to needy areas, offers extensive consumer recycling services in the Northeast, and sets the high environmental standards expected of Vermont companies.
The internet and access to translation in the Middlebury College area created 'Fair Trade' and 'green' opportunities in the global economy. Government officials rely on us as consultants in regulating e-scrap exports, as demand for technology is inelastic and many suppliers are unsophisticated.
Our Purchase Orders are akin to micro-lending, raising global standards. Rather than squeeze ever last penny from the export market, we offer discounts to overseas companies which raise their standards and allow transparent access to their practices. We document high recycling rates, and do not export 'toxics along for the ride'.
Our success brings:
- Affordable recycling
- Blue collar jobs (highest placement levels at local counseling services)
- International fair trade and micro-lending
- Reduced mining and forestry
- International development
- College grads work with with local trailer park residents, Africans, Latinos, and Asians.
"Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose"
- The Village Blacksmith (Longfellow)
This is Peace Corps 4.0
Computers and Press Releases are blunt instruments
(photos from MAILonline, cited under fair use policy)That is basically the story at the UK MailOnline
"...The boy had grovelled in the dirt for mercy, whimpering as blood dripped from his cracked skull. With the computer monitor that had been broken over his head lying on the ground nearby, filthy children with glassy-eyed stares and twisted smirks had stood over him."
Just how bad is donating a used computer to Africa? According to the Mail, you have blood on your hands. Your monitor is being used as a club to beat small children.
What shocks me is that the photos appear to be a ratio of about 20 good computers to one thing being burned on the ground for copper. The author is so over the top, it provides the best explanation for what Jim at BAN calls my "apologist" attitude for exporting. The kids at the landfill look sad, but I don't actually see many PCs there.
Ok, just to warm up for the E-Scrap 2008 conference, here's some push-back...
BAN and SVTC are promoting companies which have zero reuse policy, which destroy everything. They mean well. But by doing so, BAN and SVTC create a vacuum for our competitors to mix bad material into. We have met the enemy, and he is us. If they stand behind an article like this, they are hurting the people they claim to champion.
Another quote from the article
"Most of the hard drives were empty, but one contained medical records relating to patients based in Leeds. It came from a computer marked Northumbria Healthcare Trust, although the data found did not relate to its patients but to customers of a pharmacy that had used the computer after the trust had disposed of it."
Let me get this straight... the hospital the author is attacking... it wiped all of its hard drives. But one was re-used by a third party.
So the author attacks the hospital...Threatening to hurt and embarrass people who have sent wiped, working computers, is a bully tactic. As a former Peace Corps volunteer, as a man who housed African refugees, homeless people, impoverished women from a Mexican coop, international students, young Egyptian computer repairers, Peruvian small businesspeople, and others in my own home this year, I am so frustrated I could cry.
Companies with "no export" policies, and laws like California SB20 which REQUIRE destruction (obsolescence in hindsight) of working monitors, are morally wrong. While the Pledge is careful not to ban all reuse exports, the easiest way to join the Pledge is to end reuse, and that is what many "True Stewardship" companies have done. Put in a big shredder, and you are golden, even if it leaves a pile of toxic fluff (printers and CRTs do NOT shred well, people).
To quietly accept export of "tested working units" (even though that could include a 1988 286), does not go far enough. BAN needs to speak out against California's perverted SB20 "cancellation" rule.
The "tested working" rule is not even in the Basel Convention, which explicitly states in Annex 9 that exports of used CRTs for repair and reuse is completely legal. Critics of digital divide programs state that "someday the monitor will go bad", but that was true of MY first computer when I bought it in 1992 (and there was no CRT recycling infrastructure), and it is true of a brand new computer any African student might buy.
Many people in our industry say they agree with me, but that I am sticking my neck out. BAN has officially refused my company offer to sign the Pledge, over our interpretation of Annex IX, (and officially endorsed a company which exports more than twice the monitors I do). Well, this isn't really a promoted blog, it is intended only for people who understand the nuances of the export issue. So in the words of Huckleberry Finn (when he abandons his guilt over not turning Jim in as a "runaway nigger"), "All right, then, I'll go to hell". It's my favorite line in all of literature...
Companies like mine are not "wishful thinkers". We fly to see our partners, we ask for reports of our mistakes (if we are sending something they couldn't use, we need to know in order to correct it), we fly buyers here to pre-inspect our loads. We have had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and changed a lot of practices along the way.
Did you know a tested working Dell 17HS Trinitron monitor is 'waste' at the factory in Jakarta, and the non-working Dell E773 is good? I didn't until I visited the buyer of my tested working monitors in 2004. In Peru, the Dell 17HS Trin is fine, by the way.
We must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. BAN should not take its toys and go home over the reuse repair "loophole". The only way the situation will get better is if companies like mine succeed in establishing a recycling infrastructure in the countries which REFUSE to stay barefoot and pregnant. If California breaks every monitor, they will buy the monitors from a mobster who sends them junk TVs mixed into the load. The war on drugs approach has had 6 years, and let's admit it now does more harm than good. Companies in WR3A are actively engaging wonderful people in Egypt, Senegal, Malaysia, Peru, Mexico, Singapore, Indonesia, and China, and doing the same kind of work that micro-lending organizations are doing.
If African doctors cannot get affordable working computers, children will die.
Slashdot is cool
Good Point Ideas Blog: More about SKD (reusing monitors as TVs) Market
Good Point Ideas Blog: More about SKD (reusing monitors as TVs) Market
This was a good paper on the reuse market for used computer monitors.
This is a difficult business to be in. There is no financial incentive to 'clean up' the load before shipping to an SKD factory (semi knock down, see wikipedia), so the free market allows a lot of crap to get sent overseas to these markets. The good stuff flies away, off to store shelves to live on as a useful product, the bad stuff accumulates. Someone who only visits the country once every few years might see the accumulation of 10%, 20%, 30% crap on the ground (depending on how hard the used goods supplier is working to remove bad stuff) and think it represents 80% of the exports to that country. They don't see the good stuff, it's not on the ground.
But like a bullethole, you know there was a bullet. You know because the economics of shipping junk across the world and dropping loads of 80% junk on the ground could not pay the freight.
More and more USA companies are giving into the temptation to buy shredders to just grind all the computers up, recovering the metals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EehKqoHVBQ4
It's being sold as "best practices". Sure, we will leave Africa barefoot and pregnant (they cannot afford new computers), we will tell the Pacific Rim to mine more lead from the Papua New Guinea rain forests to make new CRTs, we'll charge USA generators extra fees to grind up good stuff.
Then we will call ourselves "true recyclers" and give ourselves awards.
Look at the pile on the ground at the end of the video.
"No export of whole units" is a bad policy. It won't stop demand in lesser developed countries for working used equipment (NAICS 92). It divides the market into pure exporters and pure shredders.
And now they are trying to legislate it. As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I am alarmed. I don't like junk on the ground in Africa, and we export fewer than 1% of the TVs we take in, making it almost not worth it. We have stopped exporting anything lower than Pentium 4. It would be tempting to replace staff who wipe the hard drives and remove unrepairable equipment, replace them with a big shredding machine.
That's what recyclers do who don't like having employees. Creating jobs is a bitch. Let's tell the Egyptians to go buy new stuff and pass a law to keep a Vermont company from sorting the good from the bad. Let's call them names and imply they are bad people. And leave piles of lead dust all over the ground.
I guess I see myself almost being driven to defend the bad exporters. I almost think the pendulum has wobbled so far to the left that "Planned Obsolescence" or Obsolescence in Hindsight is going to win at all costs.
Of course I know the bad exporters are the ones who left the big bulletholes all over this market, which discredited exporting and reuse. Who cause really fine people (like many at BAN.org and Greenpeace.org) to react and promote policies out of sheer frustration.
BAN knows perfectly well that the Basel Convention Annex IX explicitly and succinctly allows exports of electronics for refurbishment and repair. EXPLICITLY states this!!!!~!! But they are so frustrated by the piles of messes, the accumulated scrap that was not good, that they see it as a loophole.
One told me he hopes the poor will "leapfrog" the USA and get newer and better computers than we got. Hey fellow Peace Corps volunteers, hear that? (No bread on the shelves? LET THEM EAT CAKE.)
I think the only hope is to set up proper recycling overseas for the leftovers. Trying to police the exports to limit "Toxics Along for the Ride" may be too difficult, and our Fair Trade model is woefully underfunded and undersupported. What Africa and Asia are going to do is LEAPFROG the USA's woeful repair and recycling practices. They are going to do with smart people what the shredders can never do - separate out a 1 gig stick of RAM worth $10 from a 32meg stick of RAM worth metal.
Pete Seeger, we need a new "John Henry" song for the repair and reuse people, running ahead of the shredding machine. "John Henry was a RAM sorting Man"... But John Henry will probably be named Essam or Hamdy or Souley or Antonio.
This was a good paper on the reuse market for used computer monitors.
This is a difficult business to be in. There is no financial incentive to 'clean up' the load before shipping to an SKD factory (semi knock down, see wikipedia), so the free market allows a lot of crap to get sent overseas to these markets. The good stuff flies away, off to store shelves to live on as a useful product, the bad stuff accumulates. Someone who only visits the country once every few years might see the accumulation of 10%, 20%, 30% crap on the ground (depending on how hard the used goods supplier is working to remove bad stuff) and think it represents 80% of the exports to that country. They don't see the good stuff, it's not on the ground.
But like a bullethole, you know there was a bullet. You know because the economics of shipping junk across the world and dropping loads of 80% junk on the ground could not pay the freight.
More and more USA companies are giving into the temptation to buy shredders to just grind all the computers up, recovering the metals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EehKqoHVBQ4
It's being sold as "best practices". Sure, we will leave Africa barefoot and pregnant (they cannot afford new computers), we will tell the Pacific Rim to mine more lead from the Papua New Guinea rain forests to make new CRTs, we'll charge USA generators extra fees to grind up good stuff.
Then we will call ourselves "true recyclers" and give ourselves awards.
Look at the pile on the ground at the end of the video.
"No export of whole units" is a bad policy. It won't stop demand in lesser developed countries for working used equipment (NAICS 92). It divides the market into pure exporters and pure shredders.
And now they are trying to legislate it. As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I am alarmed. I don't like junk on the ground in Africa, and we export fewer than 1% of the TVs we take in, making it almost not worth it. We have stopped exporting anything lower than Pentium 4. It would be tempting to replace staff who wipe the hard drives and remove unrepairable equipment, replace them with a big shredding machine.
That's what recyclers do who don't like having employees. Creating jobs is a bitch. Let's tell the Egyptians to go buy new stuff and pass a law to keep a Vermont company from sorting the good from the bad. Let's call them names and imply they are bad people. And leave piles of lead dust all over the ground.
I guess I see myself almost being driven to defend the bad exporters. I almost think the pendulum has wobbled so far to the left that "Planned Obsolescence" or Obsolescence in Hindsight is going to win at all costs.
Of course I know the bad exporters are the ones who left the big bulletholes all over this market, which discredited exporting and reuse. Who cause really fine people (like many at BAN.org and Greenpeace.org) to react and promote policies out of sheer frustration.
BAN knows perfectly well that the Basel Convention Annex IX explicitly and succinctly allows exports of electronics for refurbishment and repair. EXPLICITLY states this!!!!~!! But they are so frustrated by the piles of messes, the accumulated scrap that was not good, that they see it as a loophole.
One told me he hopes the poor will "leapfrog" the USA and get newer and better computers than we got. Hey fellow Peace Corps volunteers, hear that? (No bread on the shelves? LET THEM EAT CAKE.)
I think the only hope is to set up proper recycling overseas for the leftovers. Trying to police the exports to limit "Toxics Along for the Ride" may be too difficult, and our Fair Trade model is woefully underfunded and undersupported. What Africa and Asia are going to do is LEAPFROG the USA's woeful repair and recycling practices. They are going to do with smart people what the shredders can never do - separate out a 1 gig stick of RAM worth $10 from a 32meg stick of RAM worth metal.
Pete Seeger, we need a new "John Henry" song for the repair and reuse people, running ahead of the shredding machine. "John Henry was a RAM sorting Man"... But John Henry will probably be named Essam or Hamdy or Souley or Antonio.
A compliment
I got a couple of compliments about some of the blogs I've written.
I wish I had more time. Right now, I am busy raising $1.5M to drastically expand Good Point Recycling businesses in Arizona, Mexico and Vermont.
This summer, we have added textile baling, added fluorescent lamp collection, gone to 100% demanufacturing of PCs, cardboard baling, stretch plastic collections, etc. We have enlarged our job training program, and are trying to rent office space in our new building.
When my family returns to Vermont in three weeks, I will have to readjust from this year of surfing my idle time and mania to exponentially expand the business. It will succeed, rather than fall apart, to the degree we recruit and keep quality people.
I wish I had more time. Right now, I am busy raising $1.5M to drastically expand Good Point Recycling businesses in Arizona, Mexico and Vermont.
This summer, we have added textile baling, added fluorescent lamp collection, gone to 100% demanufacturing of PCs, cardboard baling, stretch plastic collections, etc. We have enlarged our job training program, and are trying to rent office space in our new building.
When my family returns to Vermont in three weeks, I will have to readjust from this year of surfing my idle time and mania to exponentially expand the business. It will succeed, rather than fall apart, to the degree we recruit and keep quality people.
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