Let’s start with two photographs. The first was shot by me in China’s Hunan Province. It shows a warehouse that contains roughly 5,000 old locally-collected televisions awaiting recycling. This photo only captures a portion of what is a big inventory, and a big operation. Every day more arrive. Most people outside of China have never…
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I’ve been cloned … on twitter. [UPDATED]
A few months ago a friend emailed to say that he’d searched for me on twitter and found twenty accounts using my name, photo, and bio. I looked, and he was right: I was being impersonated. But here’s the thing: the actual twitter handle – the thing that starts with an @ – wasn’t some…
More iPhone, More Carbon.
Earlier this week, when Apple announced that it was building a solar-powered data center in Mesa, Arizona, I immediately thought of their phones. To be sure, there’s much to admire in Apple’s commitment to reducing its internal carbon footprint. But that admiration needs to be tempered by an equally relevant set of facts: the carbon…
Native advertising?
This morning while browsing the New York Times I came across this stunning full page Apple ad. Terrific collaboration on the part of two of America’s top lifestyle brands. [and a nice explainer on native advertising, here at the Guardian]
The Environmentally Unfriendly, Pre-Mature Afterlife of the iPhone 5s
What’s the lifespan of an iPhone? Is it measured in the lifespan of the handset? Or is it measured in the lifespan of the battery? Most iPhone users will likely answer that the lifespan is determined by the battery, if only because – unlike the Samsung Galaxy S4 – consumers can’t change an iPhone battery…
Paul Krugman’s Communist Viagra Peddlers
Paul Krugman has seen the enemy, and that enemy is a Communist Viagra salesman. At least, that’s the message conveyed in the esteemed Nobel Prize winner’s Saturday blog post at the New York Times, “The Hacking of Michael Pettis.” For those who don’t know of him, Michael Pettis is a finance professor at Peking University,…
Suspend Me On Twitter (Updated)
[UPDATED BELOW] On Friday afternoon I logged into my twitter account and was promptly informed that my account had been suspended. I’d been given no notice, no warnings, no indications whatsoever that something might be amiss (for the record: I am not a spammer, an account churner, or a follow-back participant; I don’t engage in…
What Henry Blodget Didn’t Get About Foxconn
On Friday, China Labor Watch, a New York-based NGO that claims to be “dedicated to promoting workers’ fair redistribution of wealth under globalization,” announced that a “large-scale strike” had shut down a Foxconn factory that manufactures the iPhone 5. The group didn’t cite its sources for the story, but that didn’t stop several major news organizations…
The Land of a Million Scrapped Televisions
Below, a photo I recently took in a warehouse roughly 80 km from an inland Chinese city with a population around 8 million people. If it’s not clear in the image, those are televisions. Tens of thousands of scrapped, no-longer-wanted televisions. So let me ask a question of you, dear reader: based upon the information…
Why are new Samsung and HP computer parts being dumped in Guiyu? Follow the bar codes …
Several months ago I had the opportunity to travel to the notorious southern Chinese e-waste recycling hub of Guiyu. It was an interesting visit during which it became apparent that many assumptions currently held about e-waste processing in China are no longer current. Of these, perhaps the most important is the blanket assumption that foreign…