Legalize it + Tax it + Regulate it = Profit!

My pick last year was 2018 for a nationwide reform of marijuana  laws.   I don't smoke it, I just don't want to pay the taxes to fund a war on it.  I would rather see it sold like liquor, regulated, and taxed for revenues.  We can help end the deficit by taxing cannabis sales.

Colorado, Washington are ahead of the slow and stupid curve.

Who is the biggest loser if we do that?  Drug cartels.  Just like Capone was the biggest loser at the end of prohibition.

{Postscript:  CNN published the editorial by Roger A. Roffman the same hours that I published this.   Great minds think alike.  My role in the topic is based on my affiliation with our plant in Mexico.  As the Economist notes, America's Prohibition 2.0 on Marijuana costs lives there.}

"E-Waste" Policy: NGOs Living in an RCA World

"A broken calendar is not as good as a broken clock." - Robin Ingenthron

RCA Emblem - Nipper ponders Obsoete Victrola Waste Stream

Catching up with electronics trade publication reading.  In Slashdot, I saw this article about the possible deathbed watch for Sharp Electronics.  Sharp is still a big producer in the display device field.   From ComputerWorld:

"Japan's Sharp, a major supplier of LCD displays to Apple and other manufacturers, has warned that it may not survive if it can't turn around its business, an admission that caught few off guard.

"The Osaka-based manufacture said there is "material doubt" about its ability to continue operating in its earnings report filed Thursday. Sharp added, however, that it still believes it can cut costs and secure enough credit to survive. Its IGZO technology for mobile displays is likely to be a key element of its business strategy.

"Companies with credit trouble must warn about possible concerns over their survival as part of their disclosure requirements."

Intelligent observers generalize on the decline of Japanese "Big E" - Sony, LG, Sharp, Panasonic, etc., and the rise of Samsung and Korea.  Korea is feeling its oats, in car production and electronics and music.  But how significant is this?  Time for a history lesson on Japanese and American transistor manufacturing.

My Life In Footnotes: Value Added Recycling Jobs '92

"Value Added by Recycling Industries in Massachusetts" was an article I published in July 1992, in my first few months of my appointment as "Recycling Director" at Massachusetts DEP.  Footnotes to the report live on, and I feel sure I must have a hard copy somewhere, but I cannot find it online any longer.

Drive around the parking lots of your competitors.

Count the cars.

Use the cars to estimate the number of employees.

Some staff may be absent, some may have carpooled, some processors may be more efficient than others. But generally, if you circle 100 paper recyclers parking lots, the ones with just a few cars are less likely to be baling the same amount of material.  The larger ones will actually bale more per employee or more per car perhaps (due to larger, higher efficiency balers), and the smaller ones may employ more people per ton.  But you have a point of reference.

Blog Maintenance - Searching for the Poison Pill

UPDATE:  After a couple of hours I found the "Search Engine Genie" XSS (cross site scripting) in the PAGERANK button at bottom (er.. formerly at the bottom, it's erased now).   I have a headache from reading HTML now but hopefully this puts us back in business without (ironically) punishing our pagerank.  The lesson learned in this case is not to borrow Gadget Script from third parties.  What is interesting is that the pagerank button was there for a long, long time before I got this warning.  

Dear readers, please be patient while we try to find the source of a report that an unsafe link has been found in one of the blogs.  There are a lot of comments and a lot of postings to screen through and it may take time.   This site may be taken down for several hours or days if we find the "search engine genie" hijacker is actually found here.

The good old days of letting any person comment with any link, or using links to other sites which may change ownership and become "link poison" years later, may be over.  Or this may be a false flag.  If I link to a site that I disagree with, I think of it as being transparent, but it also means that if the owner of the site I link to wants to get back at me, they can insert something at the link which poisons my blog on google.

History and Future: Reuse of Chips Without Fire

Readers may recall that a journalist confirmed one of my theses about Guiyu, China.  There had to be something else going on besides "aqua regia" (using acid to recover gold), or it would not be financially viable for Guiyu to import PCs.  Sure enough, similar to the cell phone chip reuse documented at TechTravels, there was chip harvesting and reuse going on.  That's a huge savings compared to mining.

The river in Guiyu is polluted from textile dying mills in the area, but we don't want to understate the pollution coming from circuit board residuals.   It can be pretty nasty.

You could almost make the case that Guiyu is internalizing the pollution that is being diverted from the mining communities, i.e. make the case for Chinese altruism. But can fair trade recycling find a way to incentivize Guiyu to maintain chip harvesting and reuse without shouldering the pollution of the residuals?

Circuits that come apart in water may allow the chips to be reused more safely.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), along with partners In2Tec Ltd (UK) and Gwent Electronic Materials Ltd, have developed a printed circuit board (PCB) whose components can be easily separated by immersion in hot water. The work was part of the ReUSE project, funded by the UK government's Technology Strategy Board.

Recyclable electronics: just add hot water

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), along with partners In2Tec Ltd (UK) and Gwent Electronic Materials Ltd, have developed a printed circuit board (PCB) whose components can be easily separated by immersion in hot water. The work was part of the ReUSE project, funded by the UK government's Technology Strategy Board.

Recycling this printed circuit board is as easy as
making a cup of tea - simply add hot water, and
the bonding material dissolves away leaving you
with 90% of your components to re-use as you wish

The Challenge

The electronics industry has a waste problem - currently over 100 million electronic units are discarded annually in the UK alone, making it one of the fastest growing waste streams.

It was estimated in a DTI-funded report, that around 85% of all PCB scrap board waste goes to landfill. Around 70% of this being of non-metallic content with little opportunity for recycling. This amounts to around 1 million tonnes in the UK annually equivalent to 81 x HMS Belfasts.

The Solution

The aim of the ReUSE (Reuseable, Unzippable, Sustainable Electronics) project was to increase the recyclability of electronic assemblies, in order to avoid an ever-growing volume of waste.

The project partners designed, developed and tested a series of unzippable polymeric layers which, while withstanding prolonged thermal cycling and damp heat stressing, allow the assemblies to be easily separated at end-of-life into their constituent parts, after immersion in hot water.