September 17, 2013
Part 2 of Robin Ingenthron’s Guest Blog continues his discussion of Adam Minter's upcoming book "Junkyard Planet" (along with a few other topics relating to electronics reuse and recycling).
At Adam Minter's ShanghaiScrap.com, I remember when he went into "radio silence", unplugging from the internet, because he had to finish his book… probably culling and refining, rather than adding to the pile. Many writers have described the internet almost like a spider's web, entangling them in sticky allusions, digressions, procrastinations, obscure references, tangents, and false leads.
Every once in a while I write a long blog and just save it, hoping to return one day, and file it down to a point. I may get to it when my kids have left home, or my business is either gone or so successful it runs without me. And perhaps, psychologically, that's why I was keeping the Mac SE Plus Stonehenge stack. On a Mac SE with 30 "megabyte" hard drive, I saved my first novel, or a few chapters of it at least, I'd been writing it from my apartment in Eastie Boston, while commuting to my family in Middlebury and looking for a job, rather than consulting in Boston (Mass DEP and New Deal Software, 1998-99). Some idiot knocked down the door of the East Boston apartment and stole the Macintosh, and whatever I had backed up on diskettes must now be opened by one. I never replaced the door, to remind myself never to leave something I wanted to keep in that apartment.
That may explain why the Apple Macinstosh SE (8 mg hd) to the side sold recently on ebay for $267. Maybe someone else has something on disc they want to polish, some one-lifetime archeological data project, retrieve some lost work written in Helvetica (no photos fit on the Apple HDs in those days).
The trade is not based on the person who sold it "avoiding the environmental costs of disposal." Like Adam's paragraph explains, people buy something because they need it, not to do sellers a favor. And the poorer the country buying, the more that's true.
This is turning into another one of the "evidence of Robin's insanity blogs", a drilldown into tangents in order to make a larger parallel (lost on those who skip the conclusion). Good writing and good editing is like high grade copper. It was while researching one of Johnson's purchase orders, and looking at a scrap wire photo from Guangdong, I found that the Americans were throwing "mixed wire" together. The copper from electronic grade smelting (oxygen free copper, wikipedia) is highly, highly refined, as 1% impurity can slow electrons, causing problems like sound infidelity in musical speakers.
"The high-end speaker wire industry markets oxygen-free copper as having enhanced conductivity or other electrical properties that are significantly advantageous to audio signal transmission. However, conductivity specifications for common C11000 Electrolytic-Tough-Pitch (ETP) and higher-cost C10200 Oxygen-Free (OF) coppers are identical.[8] Much more expensive C10100, a highly refined copper with silver impurities removed and oxygen reduced to 0.0005%, has only a one percent increase in conductivity rating, insignificant in audio applications.[8] OFC is nevertheless valued by some[who?] for both audio and video signals in audio playback systems and home cinema.[8]"
{Postscript: The "low grade" copper in the scrap industry often refers to light percentage copper, like in Christmas tree lights or electronics. But the thinner the wire - the less quantity - the more likelihood it's Oxygen Free Copper. That's what Johnson Zeng buys. Americans are grading copper by quantity, not by quality, and Johnson knows the Zen of scrap copper maintenance}
The Chinese yard I visited in Foshan, Guangdong in 2002 (same year as Jim Puckett published photos from the same province, Guiyu) was surrounded by other yards, and there was a distinct burning smell in the air, perhaps from other yards. But they had a separate, unheated warehouse, where women were carefully separating out the "oxygen free" copper, and also complete wires that could be reused.
If I was poor, I thought, I'd have a choice between copper mining, and copper recycling. I'd choose this. That is just the choice China has, in Minter's paragraph at top. The best mining is worse than the worst recycling.
I decided back then that this woman, grading the copper, was an unsung heroine.
Thank God. Adam Minter came along, and is singing the praise of thousands like her, who have been treated like pond scum by the environmental community, driving about in our Prius or Honda, tsk-tsking the Chinese scrap trade.
You see, I focus on reuse because it's easier to defend, and highest value added potential for emerging market tinkerer economies. I have a higher likelihood that someone will recall they discarded something still working, than that they will know about electronic-grade, oxygen free copper bits. So I sing mostly about reuse and repair.
But I do so knowing that I risk leaving the scrap peddlers, like Johnson Zeng, Jameson, Ting, and the Copper Stripping women of Guangdong behind, treading in the water. No room for them in my reuse lifeboat. I live with the distinctions that R2 and E-Stewards are comfortable with, not throwing the reuse out with the bathwater. But inside the bathwater, there's actually a lot of things we risk throwing away in a shredded mess.
I'm confident, after reading the first chapter, that Adam took the time to write a short letter. I'm thrilled to see another, more efficient life raft, speeding to where the scrappers tread water. Like Allistair Cooke's Letter From America, Junkyard Planet will open your eyes. See the days photos, and see them, this time, with the respect the copper wire strippers deserve.
If I ever lose my business, as we all will someday, as we lose our own lives, and face our own mortalities, I may have time to hone a lot of short letters. If E-Stewards thinks they can stop me by eliminating my 40 employees' jobs, they are delusional. It's my employees' jobs that take most of my time. The blog spews like passionate holy vomit, a firehose of insights. I just don't have time to refine it yet, I just haven't had the time to sort through it. But whether I trade the information in this blog to a refiner (like sometime reader Adam Minter), or find myself with the time to edit myself, there is no escape.
Value.
Value is found in quality.
People who recognize quality that other people don't, get ahead in life.
Call them tinkerers, fixers. The ability to see value or quality, as Pirsig describes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is a quiet gift.
Adam Minter's family is from a Minnesota scrap business. So for once, we get a reporter who can distinguish between value and dirt, and get the quality of the image, rather than quantity of impressions made by scary black and brown poverty. He is not like the writer from Unforgiven.
I can see people. I can see people for what they can do, not for what they cannot do. And on this network of people - Middlebury College interns with short times of attention, illiterate Vermont unemployed, geek immigrants from Ghana, retired womens coops in Mexico, shiny brilliant metal specialists from China, and computer display experts from Egypt, Peru or Indonesia, I have found value on this Junkyard Planet, and with it we have given the world's emerging classes an taste of Internet, a genie that dictators like Mubarak cannot put back into a bottle, which ewaste priestatollahs cannot shame world demand away from.
There has been collateral damage. But there are millions and millions of us. History will trample the false prophets who denounced recycling as "waste", the regulators who want Ebay items shipped only by "registered waste transporters", the red-tapers, the anti-gray-marketers.
They may well underbid me to take me out. But I've already written enough here that even if they kill me, the raw material has been harvested, and the truth is coming, unedited, from the dirty yards where Recyclers and Fixers are Saving the Junkyard Planet, whether Interpol, EPA, EStewards, CAER.org, or others get it or not. You can try to shred my business, but you cannot compete with my knowledge.
Frank: What do you want? Who are you?
Harmonica: Dave Jenkins.
Frank: Dave Jenkins is dead a long time ago.
Harmonica: Calder Benson.
Frank: What's your name? Benson's dead, too.
Harmonica: You should know, Frank, better than anyone. You killed them.
Frank: Who are you?
Harmonica: Jim Cooper, Chuck Youngblood.
Frank: More dead men.
Harmonica: They were all alive until they met you, Frank.
Unforgiven, Once Upon The Time in the West, Little Big Man. Revenge movies about times that are past, times that are changing. Old guard, replaced in each conclusion, by the impression of modern development, trains, writers, builders. Old cowboys winning or losing a very last battle, a justice finally, if belated. And each film, with its historical perspective, at the same time acknowledging that the future generations won't remember the names, and will be foggy recollecting who was on which side.
Environmentalists, sustainability coordinators, read Adam's book, if you don't have time to read this scrap-heap of a blog. I write for my own pleasure, like a monk chanting verses, preparing my way. Whether you read Persig or not, listen to the Tibetan chant or not, have high quality oxygen-copper audio or not, the truth is the light, and the money-changing tables of the planned obsolescence pharisees are going to be swept away by something they never thought of and did not respect, some carpenter kid, some cell phone repair whiz. Someone's coming.
ZaMM/wikipedia:
"Many of these discussions are tied together by the story of the narrator's own past self, who is referred to in the third person as Phaedrus (after Plato's dialogue). Phaedrus, a teacher of creative and technical writing at a small college, became engrossed in the question of what defines good writing, and what in general defines good, or "Quality". His philosophical investigations eventually drove him insane, and he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy which permanently changed his personality."
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.
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