(re) blog: dialogue with Redemtech

Serious Good Contest: A Love Pandemic

Wow! It is gratifying to know how many people really want to help others! Is it the season, or for any reason? (I intend to find out during the next few months!)

Doing Some Serious Good

All you need is love. John Lennon sings it. Dave Matthews sings it. Redemtech sings it.

Today we launch our new relationship with Habitat for Humanity International, to change the lives of thousands of Habitat Families across the country, and eventually across the globe. Ours is a mission across the great divide that is digital.

My Personal Recession

The outcome of receding usually is bad.  Glaciers, shorelines, rainforests, gums – all bad.  On the other hand, some recessions can be a blessing, like when floodwaters recede. 

Rivers that become too swollen from their copious consumption, brim over their banks and cause vast destruction.  And then they recede leaving behind less than was there before. 

I’ve never suffered a flood thankfully, but I am imagining that the initial feeling of catastrophic loss is eventually replaced by a sense of the possibilities of a new start, realizing that our possessions are not as important as the people we love, safe and sound and near. 

Maybe we have a chance to reevaluate our flooded lives in this recession and reconsider our needs.  Maybe we should stop gorging long enough to see the lovely “slow-down” that might not just be economic. 

E-waste Exports ARE Dumping

Now that an ewaste export ban has been drafted in Congress, opponents are adding a new twist to an old argument to justify their toxic trade; they claim that THEIR ewaste exports only go to responsible recyclers in developing countries, and that such legal sales must be permitted AS A MATTER OF FREE TRADE.  This position is tantamount to asking for license to dump hazardous ewaste in jurisdictions where the locals have no recourse for the toxic exposure they suffer.

A Yardstick Is Your Bridge to Greener IT

Alas, everyone in IT these days yearns to be green. But beyond using less electricity, very few tech professionals know how to become more earth friendly. A first step is to replace the whole "green" concept with something more measurable and therefore manageable--like sustainability. We are sustainable when our practices do not permanently deplete our natural and financial resources. Relying heavily on non-renewable resources, IT can never be 100% sustainable, but improving sustainability will reduce both environmental impact and operating costs. Before organizations can work toward such benefits, they must understand where they are starting from. 
 
Even a rudimentary sustainability assessment will provide most organizations with a beginning roadmap for improvement. There is likely to be some low hanging fruit. Examining asset lifecycles, reuse strategy, and surplus management is a good place to start. If you are your organization's evangelist for sustainability, identify a few projects that can yield quick, quantitative returns, then make sure everybody hears about them; nothing engenders support for a more robust approach than a little demonstrated success.

Redemtech has developed a free Sustainable Computing Assessment in partnership with GreenerComputing that is a perfect launchpad for your sustainability journey. With about fifteen minutes, and some detailed knowledge of your organization's hardware infrastructure, the Assessment will produce scorings in key areas such as energy, reuse, and social responsibility. It will also report average scores in each area, so you can revel in just how sustainable you are compared to peer respondents. Then, Assessment yardstick in hand, refer to IDC's whitepaper on sustainable computing Beyond Power for a discussion of the many possibilities to improve the sustainabiliy of IT.

60 Minutes Hits the Toxic Jackpot

The CBS News program 60 Minutes just ran a hard-hitting segment titled The Electronic Wasteland on the toxic e-waste trade between the United States and China. It was classic 60 Minutes, featuring human suffering, an apparently unscrupulous businessman, the Chinese underworld, and an intrepid reporter—Scott Pelley—exposing it all. For insiders in the electronics recycling industry, this is an old story. A majority of recyclers increase their profits by shipping hard-to-recycle commodities to buyers in developing countries where the lack of worker safety and environmental regulations have created an e-waste gold rush. Tonight, CBS News became the latest company to profit from this toxic trade.

Beyond Green: Roadmap to Sustainable Computing

Thanks to everyone who attended our presentation at the recent Gartner IT Financial, Procurement & Asset Management Summit in San Diego. Our material was based on a new IDC whitepaper by David Daoud, Beyond Power: IT's Roadmap to Sustainable Computing. We ran a little long, as always happens when people with passion for a topic are given a podium, so I promised to do our Q&A online.

Low Value E-Waste Processing: Are U.S. Scrap Metal Smelters the Missing Link?

In 1977 - before cell phones, CDs and a then-bearish 15-17-cent-a-pound Lead (Pb) market - for a short time I worked overseeing a lead products warehouse. To my surprise, the warehouse consisted of more than 50 lead-base products. Back then, the range of products derived from recycled lead from our smelter next door amazed me. Lead came (the kind you find in Tiffany glass), as well as oil drilling bits, sheet lead, oxide, pigments, an assortment of solders, varieties of lead alloys and ship/boat anodes. One of the best features of the job was interacting with customers and truckers from all across the U.S.

BusinessWeek Exposes the e-Cycling Integrity Gap

I am happy to report that times have changed. When we started Redemtech 10 years ago, many corporate clients questioned the need for responsible electronics recycling. It was common practice in 1998 to use the dumpster for asset disposition, and exporting ewaste to developing countries was perfectly acceptable: not anymore. Most companies now demand responsible management of their surplus electronics, and a few service providers like Redemtech have invested tens of millions to deliver truly accountable results. As BusinessWeek discovered, we are the exception.

A Low Bar Is Worse than No Bar

Earlier this year, I found myself in a hotel bar debating the EPA's prospective certification for electronics recyclers with a respected colleague. He has been personally involved with development of the "Responsible Recycling, or "R2" standard, and was proud of his participation in the grand coalition of manufacturers, industry interest groups, and non-profits. There were many times, he said, when it appeared that diverging stakeholder interests would derail the whole idea of a national standard for e-waste recycling. "In the end, we compromised our principles, but after all," he rationalized, "Minimal standards are better than no standards at all." In the best tradition of large bureacracies, the EPA now appears ready to create a certification which will simultaneously fail in its worthy environmental and social objectives, while delighting those industry interests devoted to keeping e-waste recycling as profitable as possible.