Geography Baiting 5: How Can You Say No?

You are approached by an R2 Certified Chicago Recycler, who has decades of experience in copy machine refurbishing.  You have seen and photographed copy machine refurbishing, overseas, yourself.

The Chicago company has news about a state-of-the-art recycling facility in Hong Kong.  Hong Kong is wealthier, per capita, than the USA.  You know it's near the center of printer parts repurposing, and demand for recycled plastic - the plastic that you know is being lost in big shredding operation.

You check the downstream.  Hong Kong Environmental Department considers printers non-hazardous waste.  The facility identified in Hong Kong is also R2 certified.  You request verification of where the focus materials (circuit boards) go, and track them to Dowa and Umicore...

"You should have refused to ship there".

Really?  Why exactly, given the information above, should we have said "no"?

We shouldn't have to make that choice.

Deflection Option:  You can say you sent it to Chicago, not overseas.  But the fact is that you knew it could have gone overseas.  You just don't believe what BAN tells us about "primitives" in Hong Kong.

If you were to say no based on the Hong Kong facility, advertised as being state of the art, able to make the highest and best end use of the printers, how would you justify boycotting them?  How can you say no?  On what basis?

I could think of only one reason.  Bigotry. Racial profiling of Hong Kong as a place with "hundreds of junkyards" and "rice paddies".   Fear of the other.

Geography Baiting 4: BAN Investigates Un-American Recycling Activities

Well, this guy must not be a credible source...

"Just a few days after arrival, the printer left Vermont and travelled to the Chicago area and then onwards to the port of Long Beach, California. It next pinged off of the coast of mainland China before arriving at the port of Hong Kong. Two days later it was in Mr. Lai’s Farm. " - Jim Puckett

He's talking about ME.

Sounds very "Un-American".  Sounds like Evidence that we are exporting 40% of our waste, according to BAN.  Or worse, sounds like companies that PAY the NGO tribute money are a "safe" solution to the Un-American problem, we must be shipping more than 40% just to buck up the average.

Caution:  Wet Taint

Sounds like.  This NGO makes a lot of noise, but the report they issued says in one place that 50%-80% of devices are exported, in another place over 80% are exported, and in the press release says 40% are exported.  In Geography Baiting #3 we showed what the actual MIT data say, and when corrected for the sampling error (not GPS tracking the 60-80% of e-waste that's almost never exported), what they actually have is data that is pretty close to the 7%-15% range of other vetted studies.

But this is about sound.  Jim doesn't want people to listen to me, he wants to discredit the blog.  So he's got a GPS on a device purchased by an R2 Company in Hong Kong, traces it to an R2 Company we sold it to in greater Chicago, and traced that back to us, who was downstream for our client in greater Boston - the one with no public drop off point - who someone told MIT undergrads to deposit the normally reuseable laser printer they were told to sabotage inside.

They did probably expose something we didn't know - that the buyer of our buyer in Hong Kong is using Hong Kong EPD's non-chemical non-hazardous waste classification of printers to outsource those devices on the cheap.  That's information, and we began acting on it last May.


But the "Geography Baiting" is making all Asian recyclers - all "Un-American" recyclers, seem primitive.  Telling readers that what happened to Robin could happen to you.  If a device might be reused, might be repaired, but someday eventually gets disposed, it will impugn you for doing business with someone who does business with someone who does business with someone overseas in the first place.  That is why they name the client in greater Boston, who is 4 transactions away.  

We do allow some printers to be exported.  Not very many.  Less than 6% of the printers that arrive at Good Point Recycling are intended or approved for reuse, and it was one of those BAN tracked to the R2 buyer whose R2 buyer sold it to someone at MLPF. 

Our problem at Good Point is that we believe in, and want to support rather than boycott, the best practices and state-of-art recycling in emerging markets.  We now know that the downstream 2nd tier audit didn't tell us everything, but we'd have no more info about that than if we had used an E-Stewards company, and BAN/MIT have not demonstrated that E-Stewards is superior to R2 in their study.  (But look at how my pal Craig Lorch is portrayed in an inset, compared to me).

Geography Baiting 3: Retribution Strikes Press Release from BAN

While we wait patiently for answers from MIT about the ethics questions we have on Senseable City's "joint project" with Basel Action Network, BAN strikes.

"40% of  e-Waste given to Recyclers gets Shipped Illegally to Polluting Operations Overseas" - Jim Puckett, Basel Action Network

Since we have sent multiple letters to MIT and emails to BAN, offering to meet to show our processes and all downstream information, we know that BAN is conscious of the false and derogatory information embedded in this statement, explained below.  The question is, do they do it purposefully to cause harm?

1.  It is NOT 40% of e-Waste given to Recyclers.

BAN never tracked 65% of the weight (CRT and projection TVs that practically never get exported).  They sample tracked 3 types of device (printers, CRT monitors, LCDs) and found - of those - that about 36% were exported.   36% of 35% is not 40%.

2.  Most of the 40% tracked was NOT shipped illegally.

We showed here on the blog devices tracked to reuse and refurbishing operations.  Also, Hong Kong doesn't consider printers hazardous waste and BAN attacks them for classifying them as non-hazardous waste even as BAN calls them "clearly" hazardous waste in their report.

3. Most Overseas Operations are NOT Polluting.

The one BAN focuses all their attention on - Mr. Lai's Printer Farm - is visually concerning, and it was NOT identified as a destination on our downstream tracking.  So kudos on that.  But to say it is representative of the 40% of 35% is racist and insulting.  Other devices went to places overseas anyone should be PROUD to work with.

But the point of BAN's report is clear.  They do not go after companies that pack and export.  They do not track most of the destinations.  They track my company in several pages.  It's because I spoke out about them.  I believe that is the message here, to make other recyclers afraid to speak up on behalf of the geeks of color, to intimidate those of us who object to racial profiling, who do NOT pay them tribute money via E-Stewards (using an E-Steward company shows prominently on the press release, though the GPS tracking didn't show that to be determinate).

My company baled 95% of the printers we received for shredding - some by E-Stewards, all by R2 certified companies.  Of the FIVE (5%)* our crew found potentially reuse and repairable, we either tested them ourselves or more likely sent them to another R2 company which listed reuse as a potential outcome (not 100% shredder).   It was one of those 5% nice-looking ones that we sent to a USA company, which had listed certified Hong Kong destinations as their partners.  And, notably, one of those BAN and MIT chose to send to us.

When BAN and MIT hide the data we requested since last May, it just makes it hard for us to respond.  BAN plays the Bilbo Baggins Riddle "What (data) have I got in my pocket?"   We did find some of the tracked devices DID go to the Hong Kong EcoPark. If ours did not - and I accept that now - we have to find out who misdirected it (the USA company or the Hong Kong certified company).  Even if it was legal, it may not be acceptable.

For all we know, the device WOULD have been reused and repaired if not but FOR BAN's Sabotage.  I don't open all the halloween candy I buy to make sure no one sabotaged it.  Until now, I doubt anyone has opened a repairable printer and cut up the guts to make it unrepairable.  There's a word for that, but it's not a polite one.

The point is that BAN is a bully and directs its Reports and Press Releases not to enlighten, but to casuse people to fear them, and to pay them tribute.  It is because I read the Report, studied it, tracked devices to different places, made 14 pages of comment and critique, that my company is profiled in the report.  What I want to know is why people at MIT would not see this for what it is.

We did not, NOT export the device.  We send printers we have DETERMINED to be unusable to a shredder, and that is MOST of the printers.  If BAN intended to show we export, they'd choose a printer that sells for ten times scrap value on ebay and Amazon, and they'd make it unrepairable with internal damage.  We did not export even THAT (Jim stated we "exported to Chicago" in his email).  This is a spray-paint job by BAN.  And while our Chicago partner has offered to just let me "push him under the bus" (and claim it wasn't us), I prefer to out this Senator Joe McCarthy.

At long last, NGO, have you no sense of decency?  Have you no shame?

* (Ed correction -. first edition of blog mistakenly reported on 95% not repairable by omitting the word "not". Only 5% of printers at my company have been set aside for potential reuse in 5 years)

Press Release Below.

Secret Tracking Project Finds that Your Old Electronic Waste Gets Exported to Developing Countries 40% of  e-Waste given to Recyclers gets Shipped Illegally to Polluting Operations Overseas

September 15, 2016. Seattle, WA. Utilizing high-tech methods to track high-tech wastes, the environmental watchdog, Basel Action Network (BAN) as part of their e-Trash Transparency Project, funded by the Body Shop Foundation, planted GPS trackers into 205 old printers and monitors and then delivered them to charities and recyclers. The new report, entitled Scam Recycling: e-Dumping on Asia by US Recyclers, revealed that of those that were handed over to American electronics recyclers, 40 percent did not get recycled in the US as expected by customers, but were instead exported to highly-polluting and unsafe operations in developing countries -- mostly in Asia.   "The American public continues to be scammed by unethical companies greenwashing themselves as 'recyclers'," said BAN Executive Director Jim Puckett. "The toxic chemicals released by the crude breakdown of our old electronics in the junkyards in Hong Kong not only harms workers and communities abroad, but comes back to hurt us as well. We are the only developed country in the world that ignores this problem. It's time to stop say 'enough is enough'." Among the findings of the report, BAN found that: 40% of the 152 deliveries to US electronics recyclers went offshore -- mostly to China 96% of the exports are likely to be illegal under international or US law  93% of the US e-waste exports moved to developing countries 75 companies were involved in a chain of transactions that led to export of e-waste.* Many recyclers involved in export made website claims of never exporting "R2" Certified Recyclers exported at greater than average rates, e-Stewards Certified Recyclers at less than average Hong Kong electronics junkyards expose workers and the environment to dangerous toxins such as mercury.  The exported tracked devices, travelled to Hong Kong (37), Mainland China (11), Taiwan (5), Pakistan (4), Mexico (3), Thailand (2), Canada (2), and one each in United Arab Emirates, Togo, Kenya, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic. MIT's Sensable City Labs worked in partnership with BAN to produce an interactive online map  to show the pathways of all of the 205 trackers. Most of BAN's trackers had found their way via ship and truck to 48 different sites in a semi-rural part of Hong Kong known as New Territories. BAN travelled there and visited the precise locations where the trackers ended up. They found massive volumes of LCD monitors, printers and other electronics being smashed each day and broken apart by hand in hidden junkyards, allowing the release of printer toners, and mercury phosphors easily inhaled by workers both unprotected from, and unaware of, the hazards.   BAN also looked at the electronics certification programs designed to improve ensure recycling management. The "R2" certification program created as a result of an EPA convened multi-stakeholder process has about 5 times more certified recyclers than the e-Stewards program (a more rigorous standard), but it was found that "R2" members had a higher rate of being associated with export than even uncertified recyclers. Recyclers certified to the e-Stewards Standard had the lowest export rate. The e-Stewards Standard was created by the Basel Action Network together with industry leaders. It is designed to be fully consistent with international law and is the only e-recycling program that utilizes tracker technology to verify conformity with the standard. The BAN report calls for the following key recommendations: All consumers and businesses concerned about preventing pollution of the global environment should make exclusive use of e-Stewards Certified Recyclers .   President Obama should sign an executive order to prevent US government e-waste from being exported overseas.  All others can sign petition for this .   Manufacturers, governments and recyclers should commit to full transparency of where they send all of their hazardous electronic waste. Hong Kong government should ban all imports of hazardous e-waste and close the informal New Territories junkyards. Download the report here: http://wiki.ban.org/File:ScamRecyclingReport-web.pdf  (low-resolution ver.) http://wiki.ban.org/File:ScamRecyclingReport-print.pdf  (high-resolution ver.) For more information: Jim Puckett, Executive Director, Basel Action Network Email: jpuckett@ban.org Phone: +1 (206) 652-5555

Geography Baiting 1: MIT Senseable City Lab "MoniTour" Goes Offline

Has the correspondence from Unwitting, Unwilling Research Subjects finally got traction at MIT's Legal Office?  After 3 months of silent treatment, communications from MIT and BAN reignite the blog.

It is the end of summer vacation for Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Senseable City Lab. Professors have been on vacation, with little time to return calls or respond to our letters of May and June 2016.  But last week got a response back last week from MIT's Legal Department, saying that all future inquiries and correspondence should go through them.

This is one week after we cc'd MIT's Senseable City Lab Director, Carlo Ratti, in response to an email to Yours Truly from my an old pal, Jim Puckett, Executive Director of Basel Action Network.  BAN's parterner status with MIT is described in MIT's MoniTour website. You know, http://senseable.mit.edu/monitour

**** static ****

EDIT:  The website is restored now, and may have been unavailable only via my chrome browser which appears to be failing at several sites.  Speculation that MIT had taken the site down was wrong.

The site is 404, not available.  Could be a fluke, a temporary outage. But has been at least 3 days now. It might be premature to correlate MIT's shuffle with the written correspondence I've recently received from Basel Action Network and MIT's Legal Office.  But I predicted in my first response to the @KCTS PBS 9 airing of the "sting" on overseas electronics reuse, repair and recycling - MIT does not have a dog in this fight.  MIT has thousands of international students who know intimately the warts, beauty, sweat, and ingenuity across the oceans, and we predicted that MIT Ethics Committees would hold Carlo Ratti's Senseable City to a higher standard than to draw inferences on the "circular economy" based on BAN's notorious geography-baiting.

It's not exactly race baiting, since we don't know who in the USA owned or touched a device.  But BAN's descriptions of Hong Kong Province - which is wealthier per capita than the USA - with words like "primitive" and "rice paddy" should have been caught internally by MIT, without the help of a Vermont junk dealer's blog.

Someone commented that MIT might be engaged in a "cover up", but my friends in academia share my optimism.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's gravitas was clearly accepted as peer review and diligence by the reporters, and from MIT Senseable City Lab's response, it clearly was not merited or intended as such.

Google cache of the MIT-based webpage shows the original text which described the now AWOL web page as "A joint project between the Basel Action Network and the MIT Senseable City Lab".  And that's not BAN's claim, it's MIT Senseable City Lab indicating it's a "joint project" partner.  (copy and paste below, so you can recreate your own 404).

Monitour / MIT Senseable City Lab

senseable.mit.edu/monitour

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A joint project between the Basel Action Network and the MIT Senseable City Lab ... this site in graphic form and will also be released in a series of reports by BAN. ... City Lab 2. a PDF copy of the publication is sent to senseable-press@mit.edu.

You've visited this page 2 times. Last visit: 8/27/16

Carlo Ratti's only direct response to my 14 pages of inquiries was 2 paragraphs. It could have been even shorter:  "It's BAN's project, not MIT's".  Or "People don't track People, GPS devices track people," or "GPS tags don't track people, they track peoples stuff".  "MIT just gave BAN the tools to track unwitting, unwilling participants, we didn't do it ourselves."

But Carlo Ratti spoke to PBS and clearly reviewed the pages on the now AWOL website stating that destinations, like Hong Kong, were "previously unknown".  The gist of my letter was:

"how did MIT determine my business transactions were 'previously unknown', unless it meant 'unknown to MIT and BAN', which isn't much of a defense of the ethical 'unwitting subject' test."

In fact, I'd been to Hong Kong (and Taiwan) one month before the PBS story aired.  Here's Video of Hong Kong from April 2016 below - with my 15 year old son, who I had taken to meet and have dinner with one of the best and brightest video display engineers I'd ever met (in Taipei).  Does the wifi-enabled, air-conditioned luxury ferris wheel ride among skyscrapers depict "typical Hong Kong"?  Of course not. Nor does +KCTS 9 film of a printer scrap yard in Yuen Long.  "Geographical Profiling" shortcut of the necessary effort to track each and every recyclable through each and every technician, and not to depict Asians as "primitives" with just obscured little points on a map.

You can't "obscure" destinations in Hong Kong on your website and then use photos of one location to "profile" anyone who does business with Hong Kong.  That's Geography-Baiting journalists and readers, appealing to their worst fears about recyclers and refurbishers in emerging markets.  You didn't show the Geeks of Color.

You can show Deliverance to depict America, but you've got to show Big Bang Theory, too.  Otherwise, it's propaganda, which BAN has been accused of for a long time, plenty long enough for MIT to vet them as a "joint partner" in describing emerging market "shantytowns" and "rice paddies" and "orphans" and "Sodom and Gomorrahs" and "E-Waste Hell" etc., etc., etc.

How does MIT's partner characterize the people who live and work in and built this location?

Value Added By Reuse, Repair, Recycling and Mining

Not much value added (wikipedia anti-art)

My epiphany came sometime between my experience in Cameroon Peace Corps, my ~5 year term as a truck driver / consultant at Earthworm Recycling, and my MBA at Boston University.

VALUE ADDED

I realized that the recycling I was dedicated to was preserving value once added to rocks by mining and smelting them, value added to trees by cutting and cutting the bark off and bleaching them to fiber.  I realized that the Africans I met who were fixing stuff discarded by others were, with their intellects, capturing added value.  I realized my grandfather in the Ozarks was preserving otherwise depreciating added value by fixing expensive stuff like car engines rather than discarding them.   I realized the "Hillbilly Highway" between poor places and rich cities was a two-way street, with value of labor flowing out and value of devices flowing in.

The dirtiest recycling is cleaner than the cleanest forestry/mining/extraction.
The dirtiest repair is cleaner than the cleanest recycling.

Geographical relocation of devices has to do with the value of the "value added".  In America, I could save $100 by keeping my smart phone or my CRT display just a year longer.  But at a certain point, $100 isn't worth the deferred satisfaction.  That economy is a privilege, which may be earned or may be inherited.

Someone in a poor country may not have that privilege.

The $100 I forgo is 5% of total annual household income for 3 billion people.

Here is what a printer looks like going through a shredder.



Now, the shredding pretty much ruins the plastic.  When the prices of metal is high, that's more than worth the cost of manual disassembly.  When the price of metals falls (as is the case the past 18 months), the value of the plastics becomes relatively important, and the price of labor to hand dismantle the devices becomes more salient.

Liability takes away from added value.  So NGOs are funded by industries that provide less Value Added in order to impugn reuse or recycling industries which have an advantage in adding value.  Effectively, the value of your "stuff" depreciates faster when it crosses a national border.