Madame Gasket E-Waste Tom Waits

"You know what I call robots that can't afford upgrades?  SCRAP METAL!"
- from "Robots", see trailer below.

Mutual Confirmation e-Waste Bias

Confirmation Bias [wikipedia.org] ("a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true").

My bias is for global trade, interaction between people.  Having lived in and frequently visited the developing world, I am indelibly in favor of nice, smart, African/Latino/Asian geeks, who study their hearts out reading technical books.  When I trade and do business with people from foreign cultures, we take risks on each other, and achieve mutual benefits.  When trust is rewarded, "good karma" results.


BAN's bias is against globalization, against free trade on an uneven playing field, against externalization of value and cost.  Jim Puckett, their bloke spokesperson, is as honest in this bias as I am in mine.  He is distrustful of globalization and trade, so distrustful that he wants "repair and overhaul" to be considered "waste management".

BAN has signalled a willingness to compromise, in an attempt to reconcile the truth of existence of Geeks and Techs of Color with the bias against trade.  They have begun to acknowledge the refurbishing market... but would terminate, among other things, the Rolls Royce aircraft refurbishing factory in Singapore.


Jim has been polite to me, even gracious, and has offered other compromises.  

Photographer Pieter Hugo: Racist much?

Pieter Hugo spent a year taking photographs.

Photograph after photograph shows practically no volume at all of used electronics.  None of MELTWATER of Accra.  None of internet cafes.  He was out to make money.

Photo after photo shows heartbreaking eye shots of people scrounging and scavenging.

Pieter Hugo will make a lot of money on his photos of these people.  And then he'll leave.

Based on the ratio of his photos to the actual geek/scavenger ratio in Accra, Hugo apparently has no moral compunction about that major, detailed study which was released, specifically about Ghana, showing that 85% of used electric and electronics products imported were good, only 15% waste.  If he is advertising himself as someone with a year of experience in the field, and he does not fairly show what is happening, he loses the qualifier "accidental" in my book.  He will destroy people.

Confirmation bias

I urge you all to look at his slide show on Newsweek.  Have you never seen so few electronics and so many pictures of desperate black people?

Fareed Zakaria, stop this madness.   Please Fareed, I am BEGGING you.  Stop this madness.  I realize you are not editor there any longer, but you are one of the journalists I hoped would weigh how planned obsolescence in hindsight is trying to take the internet away from geeks of color, by taking a small percentage of the fallout and casting it, in racially charged photography, as indicative of the norm.

WR3A Plans Major Announcement at E-Scrap 2011

Are you planning to attend the 2011 E-Scrap / Resource Recycling Conference in Orlando this year?

If so, make time for WR3A's Annual Meeting for all members (date, time and room to come).  We are planning a major announcment at the show.

Here by the way is a powerpoint presentation WR3A gave to the California sustainability conference in Long Beach two weeks ago.  The layered photos aren't working (the last on the layer covers the others) but the text and ideas about Fair Trade Recycling look great.

Wr3 a trimmed_ca_2011

View more presentations from retroworks

"Green" Expert Certification

I was proofreading Monday's piece on the "green-ness" of flat TVs vs. older technology.

HypnoToad Certified

CEA claims that new electronics are more "environmentally friendly" than the ones they replace.   The post considered the history of "green claims" (using 1990s "packaging" claims as a starting point), and how "green experts" grab whatever measuring stick they have handy to propose a ruling... based on their "expert opinion".

EPEAT is one attempt at third party certification of these claims;  it is a little bit like "energy star".  Like R2, it's based on meetings, conference calls, and consensus.   E-Stewards is designed (behind closed doors) as a certification approved by another set of "experts".   Here is the big question:  Who is the "expert" and on the basis of what facts do they tell us about our best environmental choices?

• See book vs. kindle.
• See ROHS solder vs. (recycled content) lead solder.
• See recycle vs. reuse.
• See export vs. shredding.
• See rare earth auto battery vs. improved gas mileage.
• See "paper or plastic" bags.

On Monday, I discovered a flaw in my own "pro-CRT-refurb" philosophy, or at least a clarification to be made.  As it turns out, I've done a pretty good job of selecting partners, who were selecting the best and highest quality boards.  But in defending them, I've defended the entire refurbishing industry - including those who use the same cheapo boards that cause the fast-failing LCDs to grunt and die.  It may be time to roll the film and invite in the Monday morning quarterbacks.

"Green Expert" has a double meaning.  A lot of our experts are "a little green" in the field of environmentalism. And by that I mean, immature.

"In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."  - Socrates in Plato's Apology