Leading The E-Waste Industry (Cincinnati Health Care Driving the Sustainability Change)

E-waste is discarded electronics – the latest and greatest of technology just a few years into their life cycle doomed by the newest upgrades. Our narcissistic need for trendy gadgets has increased the demand and reliance on raw materials, rare earth and precious metals. But our material supply is limited and much of the electronics currently in circulation are not being recycled. The depletion of natural resources itself is bad enough, but the vast amount of e-waste in landfills is also polluting at their worst.

In 2014, one study estimated 41.8 million metric tons of e-waste was generated – “an amount that would fill 1.15 million 18-wheel trucks. Lined up, those trucks would stretch from New York to Tokyo and back.” E-waste is the fastest growing municipal waste in the United States. Globally, the volume of e-waste was expected to rise by 33% between 2012 and 2017. The problem is amplified by illegal dumping into developing countries like China, India, and African countries. E-waste buyers in those places are often unregulated despite stringent laws in place. They extract commodities from e-waste using the most horrendous methods. Their people pay the price with their health and safety, but the world suffers from their poor environmental and social practices.

Enter the responsible e-waste recyclers. Domestic players who process e-waste locally and creating jobs, putting value back into commerce. But the US e-waste industry is no rose garden either. A recent HuffPost article pointed out that industry workers in the U.S. have been documented to have “taken home” contaminants (e.g., lead) to cause health problems in children exposed to the contaminant particles. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does require e-waste recycling facilities to provide protective clothing and respirators to their employees. But the lack of proper training among other things have attributed to detectable health effects. Or, the current protective standards are not sufficient and we need to improve those and reflect the changes in our policies and regulations.

The HuffPost article named a Cincinnati resident impacted by this “take-home” contaminant problem. Cincinnati Children's Hospital made the medical discovery. There are other e-waste recyclers in Cincinnati who are part of the responsible business community and are more than happy to hear medical data is now available to help improve our standards and hold accountable our performances. This may very well effect policy changes and put Cincinnati on the map for being the e-waste expert. Cincinnati's health care industry also can lead the world in medical research on this topic, further strengthening Cincinnati's credentials.


Remember: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Did you know Americans dump over $60 million in gold/silver every year in just cell phones. For every 1 million cell phones, 35,274 lbs of copper, 772 lbs of silver, 75 lbs of gold, and 33 lbs of palladium can be recovered. 

One estimated the value of e-waste to be worth $52 billion in 2014.

BrainBox Completes its First Milestone

We started this little company in November of last year. Our hope was to incorporate process thinking with sustainable behavior science to help promote sustainability generally.

Our first project is for Rumpke Recycling to test mailer types in two hypotheses. We just completed the final write up of this project. A copy of our final analysis report is available under Creative Commons Attribution license "CC BY" by request to info@brainbox.ninja.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The Value of Conservation - benefit that flows from nature to us.

Fairness is a fundamental component of a well functioning economy. Buyer and seller have to believe the transaction is fair in order for the transaction to work. But in the early years of our industrial process, the buyers did not understand the economics of nature being transformed for the sake of human consumption. We did not realize the cost of a new shiny cell phone meant labor disputes, social unrest, environmental pollution, climate change, and so on. But today's market place is much smarter than before. Stakeholders have the knowledge and they are incrementally measuring and demanding back the cost that was previously uncaptured. They still want their new shiny cell phone, but they want to know it's made sensibly and in the best way possible. The crowd is also more connected than ever and their reinforcing the good ideas and collectively rejecting the bad ones.   

If economics is really the currency of policy, this new demand of economic accountancy for natural resources and social and environmental impacts should shape policies around the world. But the changes are already happening. We are already seeing more stringent social and environmental standards and reporting requirements. We are also seeing the connected web becoming more exposed and responsive to any violations.    


Well, that's the price you pay for playing this game, right?

This Is About Philosophy and Culture

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a simple and contagious idea, but its operation is extremely complex. It involves both technical factors relevant to your business operation and human factors of your stakeholders. It is one thing to improve your technical process efficiency, but it is entirely another to encourage your people to make the right decisions and be empowered to fully incorporate sustainability into their routines.

You can probably hire process improvement consultants to help you find more efficient equipment and protocols, but how do you inject the right kind of company culture and philosophy to prevent the kind of greenwashing that will end up costing you in the long run?

I will venture to bet that any consultant will not know your organizational core better than you do, better than your stakeholders do. Then why would you hire someone else to come in and help you “brand” and market that brand? That’s nonsense.

What you need is someone to come in and help you map your existing ecosystem of stakeholders and better define their core value to discover your existing brand. You need a restatement of your company philosophy and you need to empower your constituents to actively change your corporate culture to become more sustainable. Your consultants should provide you with sustainability index and guidelines to rail that process to success. If you come across a consultant that offers to design a sustainability program for your company, our advice is RUN!

You want your consultant to tell you that they know how to educate and empower your human factor and coincide that with a technical process improvement to be more sustainable. At the same time, we remind you that this is easily done via social media technology and you can easily capture some marketing opportunities if you allow the organic process of empowering your stakeholders.

Of course we run into naysayers who will allege these lofty thoughts are too high-level and not practical. what would you have us do? continue without a set of good sustainable principles? Keep going without a culture that matters and a philosophy that makes sense? 

Use your available resources to make a sustainable transition. This is about innovation from the depth of your own corporate philosophy. Anything else is simply uncivilized.

Remember: “ask, think, create, and do.”

The Future of Social Business

Properly marketing on social media platforms is difficult. The current tide is moving toward quality over quantity and everyone seems to be advocating for social engagement these days. But the essence of engagement has yet to be mastered (with the exception of a few) and because most companies expect a quick ROI on their social media experience, they are not so concerned with actually engaging their audience.

This leads people down the path of ‘doing what everyone else is doing’ and inundates platforms with low quality posts that don’t create quality engagement and don’t produce any profit for the companies that use these platforms.

It is important to keep in mind social media ROI doesn’t have parameters nor is it confined to a single definition. You have to conduct an in-depth analysis of your social media presence, process, and parameters to identify expectations of your social media audience and make sure those align with the quality of information and engagement that is being posted, tweeted, and shared on platforms. 

You have to remember that social media is a catalyst for sharing information and for users to see a side of your company that they may not have been aware. Engagement must be personified. Humanizing your social media presence is the key. You cannot dismiss how you interact with your potential brand advocates.

We leave you with the opening Keynote discussion from the 2014 Social Shake-up, one of the largest social media conferences in the United States. Staying up to date on emerging trends in the realm of social media is important to your success. We hope you enjoy learning about this as much as we do.