Are electronics the new rags, cherished by collectors?

Wouldn’t it be cool if recycling went back to the days of draft horses clomping along streets with husky-voiced men yelling, “Computer chips … iPhones … solar panels.”? Are today’s rag and bone men cut from the same cloth as Jewish immigrants of old, where in the late 1800s through 1960s, in places like Newark or Cleveland, they barked out in slow cadence solicitations for old stuff or newish junk – to be tossed out and heaped into their wagon because of perceived obsolescence? How far can recycling, reusing, reclaiming and repurposing go to capture all the wasted stuff we toss away? Ask Seattle’s Craig Lorch, who has become a rag man of sorts, at least where refrigerators and other electronics are concerned. “I saw the first real change while traveling in Central America and Mexico in the 1980s,” said Lorch from his cluttered office at Total Reclaim, where a new-looking 1920 fridge sits in one corner and a Tesla tube on another shelf. “For centuries, tamales were wrapped in corn husks. Tossing the husk out a bus window, no big deal, and it’s gone. Then there was a shift where everything started being wrapped in plastic. I could see this was a terrible direction those countries started to take.” Plastic bags, canisters, and bottles ended up everywhere, even at some of Mexico’s shrines – the pyramids of Chichen Itza and Tulum. I’ve scuba dived off Playa del Carmen through wispy “forests” of plastic attached to stag-horn corals. Total Reclaim is the brainchild Jeff Zirkel and Lorch, who was pursuing a graduate degree in policy analysis at the University of Washington in 1991. With an engineering degree from the University of Michigan, Lorch was interning at King County trying to address “what to do with all the old refrigerators.” Twenty years ago the pair lugged fridges with a pick-up truck. Now Total Reclaim has about 140 employees in four locations in the West, and a pneumatic crusher turns refrigerators into compact rectangles of metal and plastic. The issue of how to capture refrigerants – CFCs like R11 and R12 – had to be dealt with since they were implicated in destroying the ozone layer, and the Montreal Protocol called for their elimination and safe recycling. At the Seattle plant, Lorch showed me the refrigerant reclaiming unit, where refrigerant –250,000 pounds last year – is filtered, “distilled” and put back into commercialization at or above industry standards. Some of their biggest customers are commercial fishing fleets. Before shipping out, one boat might purchase 30,000 pounds so their flash freezers will keep crab “fresh.” One of the more telling components of Total Reclaim’s work is e-waste – televisions, computers, screens. It’s one of many Seattle recycling facilities, but Lorch’s operation last year took in 50 million pounds of e-waste. Metals are culled from everything, even tiny motors for automobile mirrors. Lorch looks at global policies that might increase recycling and cause manufacturers to internalize costs for end-of-life materials. The current question within recycling circles is “to charge a fee or hide the surcharge” to move and process the waste. Collection sites, Lorch stressed, are overburdened and essentially not paid enough to handle all the waste. At U.S. landfills, millions of tons of e-waste are dumped yearly, and millions more tons are exported to developing countries and are not treated in an environmentally sound way. It’s no surprise to people like Lorch, who calls himself one of Seattle’s liberals and doesn’t want to be in the business of collecting junk to see it become toxic slurry or sludge after being dumped in another country. Lorch also owns the bike warehouse and is a board member of Columbia City’s Bike Works, a non-profit bicycle shop-cum-community-development organization. (see related story here.) We ended up pontificating on larger questions tied to junk and plastic, and a world where garbage patches in oceans can be spotted from satellites. Places where six times the amount of plastic particles vs. marine organisms show up in test containers throughout hundreds of square miles of ocean. We talked of stewardship, product design, manufacturer’ responsibility, consumption and the expanding human population desiring the next new thing. So how do we undo this cycle of consumption? Lorch sees “it” — as Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” lays out — our materials economy can’t fit into a fixed system of limited resources and unlimited marketing. Both Lorsch Leonard posit that it’s a sophisticated loop, tied to economies of scale and disposability derived from an American mindset precipitated a century ago. Historian and author Giles Slade sees it similarly: “A lot of sophisticated people devoted a lot of time and thought to developing this system. We need to look at the problem creatively and rethink it. Our whole economy is based on buying, trashing, and buying again.” Lorch possesses the philosophical and physical deconstructionist’s tools: conveyor belts, negative polarity units to remove aluminum, crushers, compactors, chippers, separators and human workers orchestrating it all as the dusty grey, white and black plastics disengage from metals and glass. Computers are gutted and microprocessing boards are minced into 2-inch chunks. Gold and other metals are removed from motherboards and chips, so the bulk of that computer chum is sent to Canada, Sweden or Belgium for refined refining. Polystyrene and other forms of PVC are broken up and tweaked into pellets, the size of trout food. Lorch attributes his interest in recycling and future thinking to his background in policy analysis and strategic planning. He realizes his ethos – regulation presents opportunities – runs counter to typical business models of fighting taxes, fees, regs and mandatory measures. He also comprehends the magnitude of coming challenges. For instance, of the 15-20 million compact fluorescent lights thrown away yearly in the Northwest, only 1-2 million get recycled regionally. We didn’t get to talk about Slade’s new book, “Made to Break,” an elegant, cogent look at the history and consequences of our addiction to buying the next big or small new thing. Lorch understands the enormity of the stuff flowing through our lives: “It happens in an unthinking manner. I’m not surprised there are acres of cell phones and that the public is surprised by the magnitude of all of this – three- or four-mile long trains a day loaded with stuff going to landfills in Seattle and King County.” But he’s tapped into this ingenuity of an idea like recycling television plastic and turning it into a resalable, usable product. Certainly, today’s recycling world is run by high rollers making millions on the paper-textiles-metals market. Even timeless rags retain a place in modern “textile” recycling circles. One industry journal, Recycling International, chronicles international conferences and trade shows where movers and shakers in scrap — paper, plastic, lead, cardboard, stainless steel, ferrous and non-ferrous scrap – predict trends, deconstruct markets, and predict global consumption patterns. It’s a far cry from the old days, even my relatively young old days: I spent four years growing up outside of Paris, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. A variety of tinkers, rag and junk men with roots in Turkey, Algeria and France came around the international enclave where we lived soliciting us for old stuff, junk, things that they could find a reuse or repurposing advantage to. “Loques” and “Peilles” were yelled out from these guys leading horses pulling wagons full of twisted iron, engines, appliances, wood, chrome bumpers, anything, and, yes, even in the 1960s, bones – for soap making.