WR3A Reports on Asia Site Visits, New Membership

Robin Ingenthron and Lin King, officers of the non-profit World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A) visited several Asian electronics refurbishing plants in May and June of 2005. The duo interviewed and inspected factories and retailers in Hong Kong, Guangdong and Singapore in an effort to learn out the need for “fair trade” standards for used I.T. equipment.  

Ingenthron of Good Point Recycling, Middlebury, Vt., and King of the University of California, Davis, had arranged visits with Asian WR3A members that are trying to buy computer monitors for their stores and factories. The monitors must be SVGA with no screen burn, and many factories exclude some computer monitors made from certain types of CRT tubes. As reported last winter, WR3A has received nearly 2 million computer monitor purchase orders.

Ingenthron and King organized the trip to assure American WR3A members that such orders were legitimate. King, recycling coordinator for the University of California at Davis and an American-born native speaker of Chinese, made certain there was no misunderstanding. Following the trip, King gave a slide presentation to California's Resource Recovery Association. His goal is to sign up American generators and get them to pressure their recyclers to meet WR3A's "fair trade" export standards.

A well-known critic of "e-waste" exports, Craig Lorch of Total Reclaim, based in Seattle, was invited on the trip to lend an unbiased perspective. Lorch, whose company currently does not export intact units, was invited to see the factories. Total Reclaim was impressed enough to join WR3A following the visit, according to a press release from the association.

WR3A's fair-trade standards address the contents of export containers to ensure that the material being sold meets the importer’s requirements and act as a mediator for disputed loads. According to the association, factories that rebuild TVs and monitors from used CRTs are willing to pay WR3A members more for the monitors based on the guarantee that the loads are clean and legal under terms of the Basel Convention.

According to Ingenthron, revenue from refurbishing just one out of five monitors will reduce the cost of recycling by 60 percent. "Legitimate recyclers need some reuse revenue to compete with less ethical firms. The cost of destroying good CRTs is bad for the consumer, bad for overseas market and bad for the environment," Ingenthron says. "Eliminating trans-boundary shipment of toxics along for the ride is a win-win scenario."