USA Today Recognizes Fair Trade Recycling!

Breaking news!   Banning Exports is a Bad Idea

PLEASE take the time to read the excerpts below, and if you agree with them, post a comment at the USA Today web site.  41 African traders have been arrested for "e-waste" dumping in the past 13 months, based on hyperbole.  A major United Nations Environmental Programme research team spent 2 years examining seized sea containers and found 91% reuse - higher than brand new product sold in Africa.   The World Bank found 6.9 million households in Lagos had TV, and the ones burning at dumps were mostly generated by cities like Lagos, NOT imported.   BAN has reviewed the UNEP study and applauded it (though they still say 80% of it is burned as junk in this article!)

Please also support and join fairtraderecycling.org  Exports aren't perfect, but shredding working equipment and forcing Africans to buy in back alleys is not making them better.  Legal and safe reuse and recycling is our goal.

EXCERPTS USA Today "Used Electronics, Opportunity or Waste?"

"Two years ago, Ingenthron launched a movement he calls Fair Trade Recycling to influence public opinion on e-waste. Fair Trade Recycling is based on the same Fair Trade principles Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has used so effectively with coffee, working to ensure growers the Waterbury company buys from in Central America and around the world receive a fair price for their beans and are able to steadily improve their living and working conditions."

"Katharina Kummer Peiry served as executive secretary of the Basel Convention for five years, from 2007 to 2012. Peiry, a Swiss attorney and specialist in international environmental law, helped to create the Basil Convention when she joined the United Nations Environmental Program in 1988. She believes public opinion is lagging behind the facts on the question of whether e-waste is being dumped.

"My perception is this issue was a significant issue 10 years ago but the situation has now changed in that the material price has gone up," Peiry said. "New technologies not available at that time make this material quite valuable. It doesn't make sense to dump it."

"Peiry says Basil Action Network has a "very strong stamp of credibility" built up over time and has been able to seize the high moral ground in the public discussion of e-waste. That concerns her for the same reason Ingenthron is concerned. She's afraid the legitimate and productive trade in recycled electronics will fall victim to concerns about dumping.

"There's a strong perception in the United States that the Basel Convention prohibits exports," Peiry said. "That's not the case. At this point there is relatively little awareness in my perception that discarded electronics are not always a problem, but can be useful."

"Josh Lepawsky, a professor of cultural, economic and political geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, is hoping to shed some light on the dumping debate with a $469,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Ottawa. Ingenthron is a collaborator on the grant.

"Lepawsky and several of his graduate students have already done field work in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangaladesh, and reached conclusions similar to those drawn by Katharina Kummer Peiry.

"When we surveyed the people in this trade most of their imports were coming from elsewhere in Asia, principally China," Lepawsky said. "There are shipments that come from the United States to Bangladesh, but in terms of sheer number, they're in the middle to low end."

"Lepawsky and his students also found that most of the so-called e-waste shipped to Dhaka was being repaired, recycled or refurbished in some way, a business that presumably will disappear if a ban on exporting electronics is put in place.

"If the dangers of in-ground smelting need further study, Lepawsky is less reluctant to give his opinion of the consequences of banning e-waste exports.

"Bans are going to do something along the lines of the following," Lepawsky said. "They will harm people's livelihoods who are already at the margins in terms of economic survival. On that account, they may not be the best thing to do."

USA TODAY - Dan D'Ambrosio 9/27/2013

BullyBoys 14: Environmental Justice, Diapers and Cell Phones

Look out, this will be a strange blog post.

See, it started out as an email to a pal who is publishing a paper on the e-waste trade, and he wanted some comments.  And it's a really intellectual kind of a paper, you know?  Real Ph.D stuff.  And I start out by trying to make some intelligent comments.

Then that isn't working, the email's getting really long, and really meandering all over the place, and I'm gonna have to cut it.  But then it wound up in this really incredibly important place, explaining two things that I realize I thoroughly believe.  

• The poorer a person is in an completed exchange, the more likely they are to be the expert, and the more their opinion should be valued.

• Activities that reduce property value tend to take place in areas with lower property value. 

The first is really kind of the complete opposite of the whole EU, Interpol, Basel E-Steward thing. But the second says that nevertheless, there is a point to environmental justice.  

You don't fix the second problem by Bullyboy-ing Joseph Benson.

Open Minded Electronics Importer Gets R2 Shaft: CEFAD

There are way too many trolls on the internet.  People who are either super sure of themselves, or who get off somehow by acting that way, appear to go out of their way to shock and provoke insult.

trolling e-waste downstream markets

There are also too many wishy-washy agreeable people, people who 'like' whatever is being said today by the people they are near, most comfortable with repeating second hand impressions as fact.

And then there are really principled people, who really think they are good and fair, who really mean to do well, but they are caught in a tide of group-think.

Some of us cannot even see how our perceptions of reality have been caught in a kind of cultural gravity that general impressions cannot escape.   Many of these people are even agents of conscience, trying to make the earth a better place, as best as they know how.

It was someone like the latter to whom I sent the email (bottom, in yellow) for someone's first R2 (Responsible Recycler) end market report two years ago.  I have changed names, hotlinks, and email addresses, otherwise this is exactly what we sent.  This is a real case of "collateral damage"... no one meant to do anything but good...

Someone I wrote about in September 2012 is now out of business.

Boycotting the Third World? My Thought Crime About That

This weekend, USA Today and Burlington Free Press are were supposedly running two stories about my company, and about the Fair Trade Recycling summit.  Both stories were to feature interviews and quotes from Jim Puckett, who might say that my company is doing something wrong, even illegal.

A normal delay?  Did my blog signal someone to say something to someone?  What are the ethics (and smarts) of pre-defending yourself in a blog for a story yet to be published?  



I don't ship to these places any more.  I wish I could.

My company only exported 8 percent of goods intact last year.  That's 92 percent domestic USA processing.  And most of the 8 percent intact units went to Mexico, an OECD country, where the manual disassembly is a decent job compared to local mining jobs.   What we are actually doing that bothers people is defending people overseas, representing them to be not evil.  "Apologists" was Puckett's word.  I haven't seen the article yet, but I've seen what Basel Action Network has said about me and my company in print before, and heard him say I was promoting illegal acts to my face last week.

That's not an attack on what Good Point Recycling does.  That's an attack on our belief in other people.  Most of the intact units exported come from other recyclers out of state, material I buy tested working (including some e-stewards) and broker.  We do 2 shipments a year to Africa, and I brag about them, but they are less than a half of a percent of our 13 million pounds.

Still, I'm awake at 4 am wondering what the effect of a BAN accusation will be on my company and its employees.   Jim Puckett's quote is that I'm doing something illegal because the Basel Convention is going (in the future) to be amended to make export for repair or recycling illegal in the future.  His claim is false on its face value.  But when it runs in a headline, my company and employees will certainly be injured and be held to more scrutiny.

My belief that something should remain legal in the present doesn't mean I do it now, or will do it if it's illegal in the future.   If his quote runs, where is the line being drawn?   I don't ship to the factories in the photos above because Vermont doesn't want me to.  But it sucks, they are good companies, and the glass is just winding up in glutted piles.  But that's my OPINION, my belief.    Jim has said it's illegal.  My opinion is a transboundary movement.

Lines On Maps: Where the OECD was Hatched

Simple, Jim P. of BAN told me.   Follow international law.   He said he agreed with 95% of what Oscar A. Orta's presentation on "Fair Trade Recycling" said.  He applauds the Chicas Bravas.   But he said the Basel Convention Ban Amendment is simple.

That's a mouthful.   The Declaration of Independence Declaration of Independence Amendment (proposed, not passed) is what to follow.   Not the actual Basel Convention, Annex IX, B1110, which allows export for metal recycling and export for repair and reuse, which says nothing about "functional".

Definition of 'Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - OECD'

A group of 30 member countries that discuss and develop economic and social policy. OECD countries are democratic countries that support free market economies. [Investopedia.com]

See the video at the bottom for the 1000 years history in Europe that culminated in the OECD.