When You Have Time to be a Great Writer: BusinessWeek on Recycling, Part 1

September 9, 2013

Today’s Guest Blog is by Robin Ingenthron. It is a reposting from his Good Point Ideas Blog.

 This week Bloomberg BusinessWeek runs a whole chapter from Adam Minter's upcoming book "Junkyard Planet", which is coming out in November (but you can advance order it, as I have).

I've only gotten through about a third of the article, and I'm already pleasantly stunned. There's Johnson, the scrap man I know from my days at Electronicycle.  He's a Chinese copper trader, who taught many of us in the e-scrap business much of what we know about the metal chemistry of many of the electronics parts and wires we get from de-manufacturing.    Adam drove across the USA ("9,600 miles in 26 days") with Johnson in a rental car.

"It’s an essential trade. In 2012, China accounted for 43.1 percent of all global copper demand, or more than five times the amount acquired by the U.S. that same year. A modern economy can’t grow without copper. One way to get that metal is to dig holes in the ground; the other is from scrap. Since the mid-1990s, China has taken both approaches, with scrap accounting for more than half of all Chinese copper production every year (peaking at 74 percent in 2000). Because China is still a developing economy, it doesn’t throw away enough stuff to be self-sufficient.” 

That's a brilliant explanation.  I've got it here somewhere, I think to myself, tongue in my cheek... somewhere in my thousand blog posts, I've made that point.. probably repeatedly.  But like the difference between a ten pounds of copper in one kilogram, or ten pounds of copper in ten kilograms, finding that information through my blog comes at a high price, and requires a lot of mental sorting (and there's that noxious burning smell in too many of my posts).

It's music to my ears, you could say.  Music about settling accounts.

Adam's explanation, above, was so simple and factual, it gives me hope.  I cannot write that way because I have 40 staff and a $3M per year small business, and while I have a lot of delicious scraps of insight, I'm not paid to write, and so run something of a blogmill instead.  I hope that I'll create an insight, mined from my experience, and some academic or journalish will refine it into something easier to read than I have time or skill to.  I cannot ever compete with Jerry Powell, a professional journalist with a smart staff, while simultaneously signing purchase orders or ordering repairs of a Yale electric forklift in a timely manner.

I'm not a fast enough draw, a good enough shot.  But I know where the good guys and bad guys are.  I know where the bodies are buried.   I'm a witness to the collateral damage, and it has scarred me, and scarred my writing style.

I was thrilled last year when Adam was speaking at a conference, and quoted me:  "The worst recycling is better than the best mining."   At times I can come up with something simple and pithy like that.  There's treasure in the trash I post.   But I simply don't have the time to edit.   I post right here on the blog the warning from Mark Twain, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

And I think this is a really good analogy (unrefined writing to low grade scrap).  Adam is a professional writer, and I'm not.  I don't have time.  I love to do the easy part, which for me is spouting the muse late at night or on weekends, procrastinating some lawsuit or accounting.  But in the morning, I'm always left the same choice...

Sell or hoard?  

I have that choice when I arrive at Good Point Recycling, too often late from trying to file down a post that I know has good stuff in it.  At Good Point, I will find myself out of space, and one of my 40 employees will confront me again with one of the "Robin stacks".  I could sell them, or I could plan to do them in house.  But something more valuable is always there in house to be done first, the triage puts the copper downstream.

There was the stack of Apple Macintosh Plus and SEs, which I actually had moved, intact, from the warehouse I started at on Exchange Street (where wrote my first rent check 10 years ago last week, and hired my first employee ten years ago this week).  It was a Stonehenge-like pallet, the little Apple faces stacked to the outside, so the shape of the cubes leaned back inward, toward the center.   There was the stack of Wyse dumb terminal monitors, which usually arrive all at once from a big batch, taken out from a factory line which still used a mainframe computer.   There are still factories which use the mainframes, and if they lose a dumb terminal monitor, it's wildly expensive to replace it because they aren't made any more - but less expensive than converting the software and mainframe for the whole shoebox factory (or whatever).  So from time to time, someone comes out looking for a Wyse or similar dumb terminal, and is willing to pay $100 for it.  The Mac SE's someone finally scrapped.  Perhaps they hit the stack with a forklift, perhaps they just ran out of work for the day, or it was someone new.  Or I wonder, did someone just get sick of the space in the plant taken up by the Robin-Stack, and scrap it when I left for vacation?

Sell or hoard?   Scrap or fix?   Part out or shred?   Cue soundtrack.

Each piece of "e-waste" I see has its own answer.   Sometimes things that had no forseeable value, which I was certain should be scrapped ten years ago (like IBM 85XX series monochrome CRT displays, which were probably 10% of our entire volume ten years ago) stop showing up, and then become collectors items on ebay.   I wonder, at times, whether speculative accumulation, like airplane yards in the Tucson Arizon desert, are solutions rather than problems?  The 365 days "speculation" window, mines don't have to mess with it when they leave virgin leaded silicate in piles for decades.  But if it's "waste CRT glass" in a pile in Yuma, we declare it an environmental emergency.

So this post is still about Adam's article in BusinessWeek, it's still about Junkyard Planet, but it's also about the arts of finding value.    Donald Summers of BAN, or Jim Puckett, have found a couple of blogs I've written to be evidence I'm insane.   And some clients wonder, especially if I write a post about Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, what I could possibly think is worth hitting the "Publish" key.

My theory is this.  I keep things not because I know I will fix them.   I keep things because I know that someone else is fixing the kinds of things I keep, and I hope I will find time, not to fix them myself, but to meet that person, befriend them, and do business with them.

As I wrote from my archeologist (University of Norway, Bergen) friend's place in Denmark, that's a human trade that's tens of thousands of years old.  She and her husband are called out if there's a new Norway highway or railway, and someone runs across an ancient human settlement.  Norway stops the superhighway for a few weeks, so that they can drive out and study the stone tools and state of the arts.

And people who do that find ancient Asian rocks in places like Norway, which can only be explained by "transboundary movements", from stoneage or iron age times, when a "boundary" may well have been between a first-world and third-world tribe.   If by first or third world, you meant metal smelting capability.  Gitte's husband Knut and I spoke from a bench overlooking the fjord, about my work and his.  He told me they find sites of metal smelting which are deliberately disguised, hidden by man-laid rocks.  They used to think it was evidence of some kind of ceremony.  Now they think it's a cave-man's patent protection, like Italy's glass island of Murano (link and photo from a terrific blog, by the way, Cool Hunting), or the walled coffee plantations of South America (link to ucsc.edu Coffee History, with interesting observations of (Neo-Liberal Economic Policy"), or...

Dot dot dot.

The writer's crutch, the abandoned point, the hopelessness of following every one of my mind's tangents.

When you have Time to Be a Great Writer, Part 2 by Robin will appear in next week’s NERC Blog.

Robin Ingenthron in owner and operator of American Retroworks Inc., a nationally-recognized electronics recycling company, consulting office, and a respected expert in "Fair Trade Recycling."  The company operates Good Point Recycling, one New England’s leading "e-waste" recycling operations, based in Middlebury, Vermont.

Guest Blog’s represent the opinion of the writer and may not reflect the policy or position of the Northeast Recycling Council, Inc.