WR3A Adapts New Moniker

    WR3A is announcing a formal tradename adaptation and copyright of the trade name "Fair Trade Recycling".   WR3A has suspended its own certification and cooperative marketing strategy, and will instead offer its legal support and funding of R2 certification for overseas companies.  

    The cooperative marketing was a huge success from 2006 to 2010, but created conflicts of interest for members when purchase orders shrank.  For example, east coast members who were shipping to SKD factories which were offered California supply in the "California Compromise" discussion would have been negatively impacted.  


    The WR3A Board has decided that while experience and data collected from cooperative sales were outstanding, the future of the organization should follow the recommendations by University of Amsterdam researcher Brenda Wijnen, and establish independent rules and principles rather than acting as "shipper of record".   Individual WR3A members may choose to broker loads, but not under the WR3A name or umbrella.

War on Reuse 2012

Vermont:   Our exports in 2010 and 2009 were 22% (both years).  Last year was 15%... the second half of the year saw reuse rates fall through the floor... as predicted in our testimony for S.77 to Vermont's legislature two years ago.

Part of the cause is the apparent declining demand (price) of reuse product, which I've described recently.  It's actually a steady demand, but a supply imbalance from rapidly emerging markets who are now switching from CRTs to LCDs themselves (seeing used Chinese CRT TVs in South America, omg)...

As the price of reuse commodities fall, resources to defend or maintain our markets are limited. Competition from Steward-Shredders in the USA, and competition from Chinese used supply, makes this seem like a losing battle.

Vermont's legislature defined "local reuse" to be restricted (to keep OEMs from having to pay for the same TV, over and over again).  But then ANR defined "local" as "USA" (Honolulu is local to Middlebury, by Vermont statute).  Ok, we then removed any reuse from the program to make sure it wasn't charged and was outside the program.  As of now, ANR has said even that is NOT ok, and material that we didn't charge to the program is sitting in a legal limbo, collecting in boxes in the plant... or more often we just recycle it and tear it down.  We buy product for the reuse markets out of state - the 16% includes material brokered from other states into export-for-reuse markets.

Economically, it's rather short-witted for Americans to take a billion dollars of assets and ban them from reuse.  It makes recycling more expensive, makes for a criminal's "sellers market" for the remaining reuse, forces export markets to buy loads which are of lesser quality, or to source their loads from Shanghai, Seoul, and Kuala Lumpur.

Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People

Do Wealthy Nations dump on Poor Nations?  
Are e-Waste Exports an Environmental Justice Issue?

By "wealthy", let's keep it simple.  There are seven billion people.
The wealthier half have different jobs than the poorer 3.5 billion.  But environmental justice is about geography, locations, and property value.  Where do the poor people live?  Why do they have different jobs than wealthy people?  Foster the people...

Not all the wealthy live in the OECD... Mathematically, that would be impossible, as the OECD nations combine to form about 1.3 billion people.  But the OECD nations account for even less than 1.3 billion or the "richest half"... because people live in places like this - slums - within the OECD.



Kamagasaki, Japan. A slum in Nishinari-Ku one of 24 wards in Osaka, with a density of 30,000 people in every 2000 meter radius.

Now, it may be a cheap shot to compare the Japanese slum of 30,000 to a slum of 1 million in (non-OECD) India:



Dharavi, India. A slum in Mumbai with approximately 1 million people.


Before you jump to the conclusion that the OECD countries like Japan have fewer ultra poor .. below is an even larger slum than Dharavi, with 4 million residents.  It's in an OECD country (Mexico).


Neza-Chalco-Itza barrio, Mexico. A slum in Mexico city with approximately 4 million people


The camera angles get wider as you try to capture bigger slums.  The source of these photos also has the slums of Kenya, Ghana, Columbia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Brazil, and Iraq.   Not only is wealth "pixelized"... poverty is pixelized as well.

But the cities are developing.  The poor come to the slums from the countryside, as if attracted by the lights. They see electricity.  They see wifi.  They taste the internet.  The fruit of knowledge brings them to the barrio.

Wi-Fi will be in 42% of all households worldwide by 2016.

Wi-Fi network use will nearly double in homes around the world come 2016, according to new Strategy Analytics research. Already used in some 439 million households worldwide, equivalent to 25% of all households, Wi-Fi home network penetration will expand to 42%, reaching nearly 800 million by 2016, according to the “Broadband and Wi-Fi Households Global Forecast 2012” report.

According to the International Energy Agency, over 80+% of the people in the world already have access to electricity.

Based on this updated analysis, we estimate that in 2009 the number of people without access to electricity was 1.3 billion or almost 20% of the world’s population. 

Juan takes two LCD TVs, makes one (Lima).

The percentage of individuals with access to internet is lower than the percentage of households with wifi... because poor people have more people per household.  Still, internet access is growing much faster than electricity did.

So if the majority of the 83% of the world which is not OECD has electricity and internet, just where are the photos of primitive, informal recycling taking place?  The slums.  The NGO cameras show, close up, what the satellites keep us safely apart from.

One of the best things you can do to set the table for formal reconciliation is to focus on something you both care about.   I care about children in slums and rural poverty.  At bottom are slides of satellite photos of the largest slums in the world.

Here are my pictures inside.  Closer yet.  Names.  What people are doing. Who they are.  Who we are.

Earth Day: Pre-Apology to EWaste Watchdogs

I've been working all week on a formal apology - or rather, a "Separate Peace" letter for Basel Action Network.   I'll never try anything like the California Compromise with them again.  Whether the "outing" of the Indonesian SKD factory was the direct result of my sharing the information about them with BAN, or not, they were callous at best and continued to not lift a finger to help my friends...

But I learned last week that the Indonesians are shrugging it off.   They appreciate my attention to righting the infamy.  It hurt, the stupid anti-reuse policy cost them tens of thousands of dollars and forced shutdown of a recycling operation for Indonesia-generated e-waste.

But they are getting over it.  Seeing them calm and laughing and making do reminds me of what I loved about my years in Africa.   People didn't hold grudges so much, didn't take themselves all that way too seriously.

And so the point has come that I need to move on.  If USA wants to keep thinking Egyptians are burning the computers they bought for $30 in a landfill and that Egyptian authorities in 2008 were concerned about the environment, well, we think plenty of stupid things and that's number umpteen on some list.

The trick writing-and-rewriting an apology is that it has to be done well.  If you are not really ready to apologize and are going to work in some blame-deflection, then don't do it yet.

This was my family's hostess, a really beautiful young South American woman.  She used to import used USA electronics, and built a business with 6 employees.  Then she bought used Chinese TVs as Chinese cities all moved to flat screens.  Then she bought cheap Chinese-factory refurbished flat screens.   She'd like to start a factory making new product in Peru... but for now she's helping her brother open a restaurant in the shop they used to sell CRT monitors in.

Sssssssssssssssssss.........

Sobering Next E-Waste Decade

The "e-waste trade" was mis-characterized from 2000-2010.  While about 15-30% of exports were scrapped, the scrap was not particularly dangerous (not found to cause the water pollution in Guiyu, and most lead poisoning comes from burning heavy insulated electric cable, not lead solder or CRT glass).  There was a lot of fodder to write about, in a debate whether the export glass was 80% empty or 80% full.

There is a change I can report on, from my trip to South America.

da pond ain't so small, eh?

During most of the past decade, the USA, Europe and Japan represented "the only game in town" for large scale refurbishing factories.  Contract manufacturers (takeback) operated 3-shifts per day, refurbishing and upgrading white-box computers and displays for "good enough" markets in India and China.  They depended on wealthy nations with 10 years of surplus in order to operate at scale and meet demand, just as they had depended on those nations as consumers for their scale of manufacturing in the 1990s.

When California took itself off the market, it had supply-demand effects on NJ and VT, because there were only so many places a buyer could go for the supply.   Forced to buy from less reputable suppliers (as during any prohibition), quality of imports actually suffered due to the West's anti-export campaign.

During that period, China and India did indeed have their own e-waste and surplus, but it wasn't enough to actually export out of country.  What was generated domestically was used or recycled or disposed of domestically, in Dharvi or Guiyu.

That last part is changing.  We are not the only game in town.  My trip to South America really brought the changes home.