TPT November 2007

From the AmericaS

Aug. 1 by Minnesota, requiring scrap dealers in the state to keep detailed records of all transactions. Sellers must show state- issued ID’s. Dealers must pay them with checks or electronic transfers and photograph them and their cars. On 31 August, a Minnesota recycling company called police to report having bought two pieces of scrap that might have come from a statue of Buddha stolen days before from an outdoor temple shrine. The 7-foot statue had been made in Thailand for the Thai Buddhist Center of Minnesota, in Elk River; valued at $10,000, it was finished in copper-suffused bronze. A statewide alert to scrap dealers was issued, together with a photo of the stolen statue. Within 48 hours of the theft, detectives had a suspect in custody. Old factories, equipment, and vehicles from the US continue their polluting ways in developing countries Criticism of the United States by environmentalists normally turns on the country’s reluctance to take a proactive role in the international effort to control ‘manmade’ climate change. Now, the Boston Globe has drawn attention to an area in which the US is having an outright negative effect on that effort: the shipment to poorer nations of equipment and vehicles, substandard by US norms, to go on fouling the air and warming the atmosphere for many decades. Globe staffers Beth Daley and Maria Cramer described the dismantling, completed in June, of a shuttered coal-fired power plant that had belched hundreds of thousands of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air of a 19th-century mill village on the Connecticut River. The event was a cause for celebration in New England and perhaps also in Guatemala, where almost every component of the 2,600-ton plant is to be rebuilt to power a textile mill that will export its output to the United States (‘US castoffs resuming dirty career,” 19 August). Other examples of American transplants were given: a 1950’s-era paper-making machine operating in Egypt; a 1992 school bus on the roads of Costa Rica; a rock-crushing machine reassembled in Colombia. According to the Globe , “From 4-ton trucks to 40- ton boilers, US vehicles and equipment are finding a second life in developing countries – postponing meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by inefficiently using energy or directly emitting carbon dioxide.” There is nothing underhanded about these transactions. The Globe reporters explain that, when a factory closes or a school bus fleet is retired in the US, its parts often enter an international marketplace. Through online auctions and a series of middlemen, the vehicles and machines are sold and shipped around the world, usually to countries that cannot afford cleaner technology. There, the used equipment can have a second act longer than its first. But according to Armond Cohen, executive director of the Boston- based national advocacy group Clean Air Task Force, “This clearly isn’t what we want to happen. It’s troubling that we’d be handing down the remnants of our industrial-era technology rather than helping these places with cleaner options.” • The Boston Globe article cited above – sixth in a series examining the effects of climate change and possible solutions

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N ovember /D ecember 2007