Earth Day and EWaste in Vermont

On Earth Day tomorrow Good Point Recycling is getting recognized for some out-of-the box thinking on ways to lower the costs of electronics recycling in the Champlain Valley.

We started in 2001 by collecting used computers, only, for 21 cents per pound, and employed just a few job training staff from a local counseling service. We trucked just about everything down to a larger CRT recycling company in Massachusetts, but sorted the material and did light work to earn a better rate.

We started with one-day events in Addison County, Lamoille River, and Mad River Solid Waste Districts. When they saw we could do the work, more districts called us. Pretty soon all the counties in Vermont had outgrown the "one day event" programs and started collecting computers as a regular part of their district solid waste management programs.

As we promoted the larger cities to permanent collection and moved the "events" to rural areas, we found new efficiences, and were able to reinvest savings or pass cuts on to clients. Eliminating the reliance on events also eliminated a lot of bottlenecks and allowed us to set up milk runs and regular collection routes, and to plan on training more Vermonters to do more of the work here in Middlebury. As our costs came down, we added TVs, first at the same rate as computers, and then later dropping our rates to 18 cents per pound in 2004.

By 2007 we only had to do "Events" for promotional reasons, when a sponsor wanted to show they cared and take on some of the costs. Free recycling is like free ice cream day (today) at Ben and Jerry's - a lot of fun, and long lines, but not really sustainable. When the kudos are handed out, the hard work lasts all winter.

Good Point Recycling eventually included transportation in the costs, and got our door price (for material delivered straight to our dock in Middlebury) down to 12 cents for TVs, monitors and computers. Word got out, and last year we managed 2,008 TONS of e-waste, from all the states of New England and New York as well. Today we collected for an event in Lake Placid, tomorrow Massena, we collect in Montreal, Connecticut, and hopefully next weekend in Long Island New York.

Today Good Point Recycling has 50,000 s.f. of warehouse, 5 trucks, 20 staff, and is a consultant for the federal government, OEMs and overseas. But we haven't forgotten our mission - helping Vermont job trainees, helping reduce the "digital divide", helping to set Fair Trade standards for world recycling programs.

The big obstacles are the General Mining Act of 1872, which subsidizes the mining of copper, aluminum, gold, paladium, and other metals we recycle... at the cost of bankrupting Superfund (hard rock mining produces 45% of all toxics released by all USA industries). Then the "export everything" companies, which don't hire the people to check and test used electronics, and pass "toxics along for the ride". And now we are having to navigate between big out of state companies which are looking at our Vermont program and wondering how we got where we are.

This is the hardest year to stay in business. Scrap prices during the past six months fell to pre-world war II levels. One of the sponsors of our largest recycling event of 2008 flatly refused to pay more than 9 cents per pound, and hired an out of state company (for 25 cents per pound) when we begged on hands and knees for the balance (to 12 cents) in 2009. They seem really proud to pay the out of state company $60k for the work we asked $33k for. Fortunately, that is rare. Every other Vermont client has paid their bills and worked with us to compromise on costs and figure out ways to create a win-win. Although our environnmental costs, insurance costs, and overhead are high, we find that most of our clients don't try to get a free lunch, and in return we help them out whenever they can.

New Program for EWaste in Vermont

E-cycling, ewaste, escrap, whatever you call it, just got a big boost on Earth Day.

Some of the larger OEMs have recognized what Vermont has to offer. They see that 84% of Vermonters can recycle a TV or computer 6 days per week, and very few residents have to wait on a "One Day Event" to clean out their surplus electronics.

Once a year or so, some manufacture or corporate do-gooder comes along and sponsors an "EVENT" to clean out ewaste. People hear about an upcoming event. They stop driving to the pay-to-recycle depot. And you get a line of 200 cars. And the recycler gets an overtime everything-at-once headache and less material at the regular drop-offs for the next few weeks. These were appropriate to get the infrastructure started, and may still be the only way to get e-waste collected in other parts of the country.

But it kind of looks like Starbucks "Free Coffee" day on the parking lot. By far, more TVs and computers are recycled at the regular $10-per-TV program open 6 days per week in their county. The attraction is the word free, it doesn't prove that people won't pay the regular fee every 5 years or so when a TV goes ka-blooey. If I held an event and paid $5 per TV on the same day as a free program, I'd have a line of cars, but it wouldn't prove that people won't recycle for free.

The trick is to make TV recycling commonplace and convenient, and not to charge any more than a bridge toll. Most Vermonters have been to New York City once in the past five years, but not many could recall the George Washington Bridge toll if you asked them.

The biggest e-waste collection event of the past year was probably Sony's. They collected TVs and computers from 3,494 cars in Foxborough, Massachusetts last September, over 500 tons. There are other OEMs sponsoring events in Vermont. I am not against these "events", but the coupon program is a way to channel manufacturer involvement to support an ongoing, established, common-sense program. We don't have "events" for mattresses, white goods, refrigerators, auto batteries, or tires, and those are collected at about 85% rates throughout the country. Our little coupon program, we hope, will strengthen the existing infrastructure, lower fraud, and let every participant know who is participating in the solution.

Target Granny Mosquitos only to slow malaria

I think this story on mosquitoes and malaria is totally cool. It is the right way for environmentalists to think.

Old approach: "Mosquito bad. Malaria bad. Kill mosquito!"
Result: DDT, and resistant mosquitos. Short term gratification from flying bugs.

New: "Malaria gestates in very old mosquitos which are beyond reproductive age. We should target times/seasons/pesticides at this small group of mosquitos."

The result will be less malaria and less resistance, but will also mean less short-term-gratification. Difficult to sell to humans.

Auto Battery Fatwah. The Ayatollahs of Ewaste denounce battery takeback

E-waste too difficult and complicated? Not sure if exporting lead CRTs back to CRT manufacturers is a good idea? Let's see what anti-export people say about a simpler technology - lead battery recycling.

Once upon a time, auto batteries (which are 80% of the big heavy things made of lead) were mostly made from lead taken out of lead mines. The lead mines created lead dust and created the most toxic places in the USA. Lead mining was the bete noire of the environmental movement.

As an alternative to lead mining, environmentalists promoted lead acid battery recycling. We set up lead acid battery collections all over the USA, banned lead from disposal under RCRA. And it is considered a huge success. By the end of the 1990s, 85% of all lead batteries were recovered and accounted for, and as a feedstock they replaced lead mining. Between 65% and 75% of every lead output in the USA today, for batteries or bullets or hospital aprons, is made of recycled lead. The lead mines which bankrupted Superfund were on the outs, investment in recycling lead was in. Like laundromats, lead battery recycling becomes almost boring. AAA holds the biggest lead acid battery collections. Expect an editorial in Consumer Reports, perhaps.

So far, so good. If it had happened this year, it would be all over twitter.

Now like most metal mining, most metal refining, and most heavy manufacturing investments, production of big heavy items made of lead (like batteries) has gone overseas. That genie is out of the bottle. There is no UN program to keep Malaysia from mining, or from buying USA lead mine ore (or semi-refined ore). The most polluting industry on the planet - hard rock mining and refining - has gone to developing countries.

Well, at least those countries are really good at recycling. Even better than we are. They don't throw any metals away, ever. And the percentage of recycled lead in a new battery in China could be expected to be even higher than USA batteries.

Nope. Turns out Greenpeace and BAN.org say that sending a lead battery from the USA back to the manufacturer in Asia is illegal. We can only mine lead and send the mined lead there. That's legal, you see, because mined ore is a "commodity". Recycled ore, even if it's cleaner and environmentally preferred and unanimously supported as the best available technology for obtaining lead... that's "waste". So the Ayatollahs of Ewaste have gotten battery recycling back in the news.

Banning sale of recycled lead batteries back to lead battery manufacturers is a stupider idea than boycotting coffee to help poor coffee farmers. The scientists at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development tried to start a program to upgrade and modernize recycling in developing countries, so they wouldn't have to mine, but would improve their recycling practices.

It earned UNCTAD a place on BAN.org "Hall of Shame". Naughty, naughty UNCTAD.

Outcome? OCEAN MINING INVESTMENTS announced in Malaysia!!! Yay!!! And higher recycling costs for used batteries collected in the USA!! Brilliant!!!

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.