Procurement to the Rescue of the Right To Repair 2: Chess Game To Future-Proof

While I'm a big supporter of the Right To Repair legislation, a friend in an influential position at DEP (former hire, elevated to my former position) asked the Zoom group whether Right to Repair Legislation should be their top priority.

Fair Use Review

I'm always on my guard against "Group-Think".  Here were 15-20 proponents of reuse, actively engaged in DEFENSE of repair.  What did we all have in common, and how could common thought become a weakness?

In a tweet later, @WR3A (World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association, my Twitter handle created 12 years ago) I used the words "my one qualm with #RightToRepair [as a movement] is that it is backward oriented. Trying to take back too many chess moves by planned obsolescence which were already played [successfully, by OEMs]... Each new device developed or sold is the next chess game. I recommend government procurement contracts as the opening move."

Ironically, the Right to Repair twitter advocate who responded (a friendly fire incident, if I offended) responded in a quote tweet... "Made the move to influence government buying at least 6 years ago. Have the conference badges to prove it. If only it were that easy. OEMs have made sure that the GSA won't even consider buying used equipment. If only it were that easy..." 

[as if I'd dispute it? I've got them going back to 1990]

My point about Procurement isn't about government buying used equipment. It is about strategically wording FTC-backed warranty language on things the government hasn't even purchased yet. Backward Oriented, Exhibit A?

Draft 2021 Environmentalism 4.0 DRAFT OPEN LETTER. Add your suggestion or comment, live.

As a fan of Harper Magazine's "A Letter On Justice and Open Debate", and as a career professional Environmentalist on "active duty", I humbly ask whether a similar letter may be overdue in 2021 for the Environmental Community.

Professionals are now more aware of systemic bias, cognitive dissonance, wasteful responses, externalization and circular definitions, and outright collateral damage by politically conservative and progressive "environmental causes".  The "easy" press coverage is to interview the person who represents someone most impassioned for and against the proposal. This further creates cognitive dissonance in the democracy. People become "for or against" things like "plastic", or "carbon", or "waste", without considering realistically that society must regulate its expenditures to achieve the most bang for the buck. That consideration is especially sharp in emerging and developing markets, which can now widely afford devices like cars, computers, and consumption of "fast food", but which lack the disposable income for waste collection.

This has at times resulted in First World "grabbing control" of vehicles of export, e.g. investments in equipment to "shred" devices Emerging Markets wish to purchase, in an attempt to assuage the First World's own "liability" system.  As Carbon and Climate community has long acknowledged, the sky which receives climate-changing carbon does not recognize political sovereignty.  And we need to acknowledge the same in disasters such as mining coral islands for tin, or plastic pollution which is not coming from western recycling operations, but from consumption and disposal owing to rising standards of living in the 1960s-labelled "third world".

I'm not sure this is a good idea, but I suspect that if it is, it would take someone headstrong to suggest it. Might as well be me. (Jack Straw, Greatful Dead, Europe '72)

Draft OPEN LETTER: ENVIRONMENTALISM 4.0

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Good Point Recycling in 2020: Smithsonian Immortalizes 3 staff in "Occupational Folklore" Series

For everything else being said about 2020, the vision of my company is finally less blurry.

After 19 years of tirelessly building a viable fair trade recycling and reuse model - with several close calls - we are finally being recognized in the fog, and rewarded.

In our year end letter I'll try to put together a summary, but this week is special.  The Library of Congress has published in-depth interviews and photos of three of our longest-serving staff as part of the "Occupational Folklore Chronicles", a long running effort to pursue for historical purpose what people did for a living.  This series (which features several of our clients as well) is about documentation of what it's like making a living in the waste, recycling, and repair trade.

This subseries is called "Trash Talk: Workers in Vermont's Waste Management Industry: Archie Green Fellows Project, 2018 to 2019 (21)" and it was curated as a grant to Virginia Nickerson, perhaps the most patient person I've ever met.

My favorite of the three audio interviews is Crystal, now in her 12 year at Good Point

Below are photos and links to interviews with Crystal and Sean, and some of the photos the interviewer Virginia Nickerson took as well.  The interviews and photos were taken in October 2018, released this week.  

The Ptolemy-Liability Trap: Simplified Recycling Lifecycle Narratives Tend to Revolve Around You

The Vermont free-mail, coupon-funded newspaper "Hometown" is published and mailed by the Burlington Free Press - which, with its Headliner newspaper, follows the opposite, paywall approach, online. So I'm in a bit of a quandary in presenting the snapshot, below, of the opening paragraphs of the article. Well, it's a fair use claim, and also it's common practice for newspapers to show the "lede" (opening paragraphs), so here's what catches my attention this morning.

Burlington Free Press Thanksgiving "Hometown" Edition

Joel Banner Baird of Burlington Free Press may well have started a "recycling" story for the same reason that @AdamMinter told me those stories normally appear around holidays.... they are easy to write, require little more than a google page one of research, and seem to appeal to everyone. They are not time sensitive, so a reporter can write it a week ahead, and get home for the holidays faster. But at least in the opening paragraphs, Baird bluntly avoids the normal "gotcha" narratives common in holiday journalism (someone made millions of dollars recycling trash was the go-to in the 1980s, your recyclables didn't really get recycled in the 1990s, lather-rinse-repeat for every buyers-market, sellers-market cycle). It leads, but does not bleed.

The opening interview with Michael Noel (nice holiday namesake) of TOMRA, the master-redemption center recycling provider and owner of most supermarket reverse-vendor container machines, avoids falsely choosing between either "It was the best of times."  

...Or, "It was the worst of times".

Which is the most environmentally sustainable Container for my holiday beer?

Michael Noel tells Joel Banner Baird "The short answer is, it's complicated". That is an honest answer to the decades of environmentalists (spoilt brat) privileged demands to "choose" the "best" beer container, vs. the equally misguided alt-right "recycling is Bulls**t" waste-makers. Both camps are uber-susceptible to cognitive dissonance (or perhaps vice versa, those prone to cognitive dissonance probably lean toward extreme positions). The more they choose one answer (only use this one vs. nothing matters, environmentalists are wrong), the louder they both get. Outrage is not Expertise.

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Shame Blowback: Jim Puckett's 2015 Claim to be an Authority on Agbogbloshie

"The #TechSector in #EmergingMarkets honestly believes in the #CircularEconomy. But like Copernicus and Galileo, they do not believe it revolves around you." - Robin Freeland Ingenthron

That's my favorite self-quote from the past 10 years. I got to deliver it to a European Conference on E-Waste, seated side by side with Basel Action Network's executive director, Jim Puckett. 

"Shame Blowback" sometimes takes years. But Karma Occurs. 

After the laughter subsided, I told the audience that it is a bit absurd that they are relying on the advice of two white American men to explain the situation with used electronics in Africa's Tech Sector. Adam Minter later told me that #OwnVoices was a hashtag which framed that dynamic. The following year, Emmanuel Nyaletey was invited to present to the same conference audience. 

2007 Film Falsely Claimed these were illegally dumped. Lie,

Quickie documentary videos of Africa-bound sea containers shocked Europeans into twisting the Basel Convention - which explicitly identifies intent to dump, not intent to recycle or repair, as illegal - to a snare for African and Asian and Latin Americans in the reuse sector. Joe Benson was entrapped in that snare, which was baited by Jim Puckett with false claims, delivered in less than flowering Halloweenish descriptions of African Cities ("A Place Called Away"), that 80% of the trade Africans engage in is a "sham". "Millions of tons" "pawed through" by "orphans" in "the largest e-waste dump in the world".