 WR3A is a Fair Trade association established to improve the export markets for surplus electronics and e-waste. WR3A was established in 2006 following a visit to China by a group including a USA electronics recycler (American Retroworks Inc.), a University of California Davis recycling program director, and a Seattle recycler with a zero-export policy. The group visited three of China’s semi knock down factories. Those factories purchased USA computer monitors which still have functional CRTs. The CRTs are knocked down to the bare tube, which is inserted into a new TV or monitor case, complete with new tuner board, etc. WR3A founders observed that the junk CRTs imported into China’s Guiyu province were leftovers of functional CRTs purchased by the factories. While the Chinese government, which invested and owns new CRT manufacturing factories, shut many of these operations down as gray market activities in 2006, many of the assembly factories were relocated to other countries. WR3A proposed to form a coalition of USA companies to export only the good CRT monitors directly to the reuse factories, removing imploded, damaged, screen-burned, older, or non-compliant raster (e.g. Trinitron) CRTs from loads destined for CRT factories. The USA companies which remove and recycle the bad 1/3 of CRTs would benefit from higher prices, and the Chinese factories would bypass the sorting villages such as Guiyu. The WR3A was swamped by orders from Asian factories that year. The Chinese government, which took over most of the new CRT manufacturing capacity worldwide in the 1990s, opposed the import of used CRTs. Many of the factory owners, relocated their businesses in 2006 and 2007 to countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Others relocated their used monitor sourcing operations only to Hong Kong and Vietnam, trucking the CRTs overland to Chinese factories. The USA has its own factory, Video Display Corp of Tucker, Georgia. The organization is pursuing a strategy of increasing used electronics exports through fair trade agreements, under the principle that if used computer exports are outlawed, only outlaws will export used computers From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : Trade and repair of trailers and semi-trailers (no caravans) |
