India's billion-dollar e-waste empire
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It's telling that the journalist did not investigate and elaborate on this. The ancient feudal structures that pervaded India for millennia continue to this day. There is a veneer of democracy, but those who live here know how thin the veneer is. For example, even the choice of ISPs available in some locality is controlled by cartels. If an ISP tries to serve a locality that already has a few ISPs, their cables will be severed and their workers will be beaten up. I am talking about a city with a relatively good police presence. In smaller cities, towns, and villages, many more aspects of business are controlled by feudal structures. Every political party has a hierarchy of feudal structures, and most of them have gang-lords at lower levels.
It's also one of the big reasons why AirFibre is becoming more prominent - can't cut cables if there are no cables.
The above commentor uses "mafia" not in the literal sense but he's talking about the mafia-like system where each ISP has territories they fight over.
Tbh, it's manageable in Bangalore, since the territories are already established and there's not much interference but much more horrible in other areas - we had to suffer with a shitty ISP in my hometown for years bc they kept cutting cables & bullying any other ISP that tried to come in.
If any other internet provider enters this area, their people get beaten and their lines get cut. They cause problems for even BSNL which is a government-owned provider. They periodically cut their lines.
So yes, this is an actual mafia. I have been warned by them that I don't any choice but take their lines. They even threaten you if you take products like Jio airfiber.
The guy next door to him had a small battery recycling shop. They'd sit out on the street in the hot sun, all day long, banging open the batteries with hammers, dust and toxic stuff flying everywhere. Nasty shit, zero concern for health.
I can only imagine this happening on a global scale, with far more toxic substances.
Everyone on HN loves to daydream about automated assembly and additive manufacturing, but almost all manufacturing is dependent on dirty industries like oil (fertilizers, textiles, plastics), rare earth elements, coal (steel), and others.
When I'd visit my SO's family back in VN or my extended family back in India, it's easy to see why manufacturing is so cost effective in those countries - the only lever low margins industries have is manpower, and that requires you to devalue life to a certain extent.
This is why my parents and my SO immigrated to America.
Every one of those automotive robots uses chips that contain REEs that is heavily sourced from Myanmar (a country in a state of civil war) and processed in poorer Chinese provinces like Yunnan and Guangxi. The steel used to build the casing for those robots will have been forged using metallurgical grade coal that (best case) was sourced from Australia's Carmichael coal mine who's operator has evaded paying taxes and overriden Australia's labor unions with the full backing of both parties.
Even today, the median household disposable income in China is in the $300-400/mo range [0], and labor abuse remains a problem in much of industrial China [1]
But that's the only way you can build stuff. Commodities are inherently commodified (it's in the name) - you cannot manufacture without commodities upstream. You will always need plastics, steel, coal, rare earth minerals, etc so someone will always be commodified (or synonym - exploited).
[0] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202504/t202504...
[1] - https://www.somo.nl/the-hidden-human-costs-linked-to-global-...
A tiny fraction of mined coal is used for metallurgy. If consumption of metallurgical grade coal tripled, and consumption of coal for producing power went to zero, this would be a gigantic environmental win.
The only major producers of metallurgical grade coal are Australia, Canada, and the US. So I'm not sure the mine you mention is in fact "best case".
Ukraine used to mine its own coking coal before the war, but now, with mines ruined or captured, it imports coal from the US.
Things like nickel and REEs also heavily depend on mining in war-torn countries like Congo or Myanmar.
China has an impressive ability to cover up the truth.
The issue is most people don't. China is hard enough without Mandarin fluency, but going to urban villages where migrant workers live or Tier 3/4 cities where the majority of manufacting happens is an added level of difficult for "soft" people.
Most tourists perfer to stay in their tourist bubbles, which tend to be a monoculture globally.
Now, oil and gas field work, mining, iron and steel processing, and other raw materials extraction is either automated or high-paying unionized manual labor. The same will happen in other developing economies.
> The same will happen in other developing economies
Most western countries developed in an era where trade was nowhere near as globalized and instantaneous as it is today.
A steel mill in 1920s Pittsburg wasn't directly competing or face disruption from a steel mill in Essen, compared to today when you are competing with public-private steel mills in China, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, etc which while also unionized and (relatively) well paid jobs, are fine working 6 day workweeks and 10-12 hour shifts for a $6,000-9,000 a year salary with a pension and free or subsidized housing, and can export finished products globally in days instead of months.
Heck, even the oil industry is now outsourcing critical geological and petroleum/chemical/mechanical engineering jobs to India [0]
And this is the crux of the issue - a major reason the US and Western Europe had manufacturing dominance throughout much of the 20th century was because it had the right mix of human capital, financial capital, and technology concentrated within their borders.
This isn't true in the 2020s anymore - a lot of technologies are fairly democratized now, a lot of alternative domestic capital markets have formed, and research output and human capital has expanded massively across countries.
Heck, China, India, and ASEAN today share developmental indicators comparable to or significantly higher than the European portion of the Warsaw Bloc during the 1990s.
And even in newly industrialized countries like South Korea and Turkiye, the same abusive working standards in manufacturing industries remains, but now being powered by migrants from Vietnam/Indonesia/China or Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan respectively.
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin...
Politicians gave up and assumed manufacturing can’t be clean so they let good jobs leave while those left behind tended to die of fentanyl shipped in from China.
I noped out of a job offer recently where there was mention of occasional travel to India. Out of curiosity I pulled up Google Street View on the conpany's India office and this is basically what I saw. Not for me.
It just occurred to me that perhaps the world isn't deglobalizing, it's just that America/Americans are deglobalizing. Globalization is here to stay, even increase, with or without American. Unfortunately it seems America is writing itself out of that future.
A bit ironic when we consider that not long ago America forced countries open, to increase trade and globalization. American companies relied on these new markets to sell their goods.
But maybe we no longer have anything to sell to the world.
To be honest all southern countries have this risk. When I lived to Italy I was suddenly introduced to domestic scorpions. So while all of Europe is roughly similar there are some things you might be not aware of and those are more abundant in the south.
Politics mostly is why I'm singling Turkey out though.
I have a disability and traipsing around the developing world just isn't something I care to do anymore.
My personal situation aside, I was aghast that a company would move its operations to an unregulated slum just to eek out a few extra dollars of profit (under the guise of 'globalization'). Whatever facility they closed in the US or UK suffered for this and I didn't want to be a part of that.
The Indian government explicitly exempted specific types of e-waste from import fees and provided additional subsidies such that such waste would come to India in order to be reprocessed [2]. Additionally, the Indian government is allocating around $200M in subsidies explicitly for companies to import, recycle, and process E-Waste within India [3][4] plus additional funding to add capacity.
These are the exact same steps China took in the 2000s as well with almost the exact same word-for-word criticism [5][6], yet it helped them solidify their REE and Green economy to what it is today.
And this is why rare earth processing left America - it is a VERY VERY VERY dirty industry with very low margins. There is no way to get around treating unskilled workers in this industry as expendables - even safety gear can destroy the margins in this industry.
You need to choose between whether you want sub-$10K EVs and low cost solar panels like in China and India OR strong worker protections in their upstream industries like REE processing. You can only choose one.
That said, for every abusive processor, you have less abusive one's as well [7][8]
[0] - https://mines.gov.in/admin/download/649d4212cceb01688027666....
[1] - https://primuspartners.in/docs/documents/Final%2020%20Aug_Ra...
[2] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2112...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
[5] - https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum...
[6] - https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/asia/18iht-waste.1....
[7] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oesZJxrVgeU&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5t...
Actually, there is. The way is called tariffs - an instrument to offset externalities like environment and labor protection dumping.
The entire processing chain's IP and production capacity is in Asia. Even in South Korea and Japan, workers in these industries are given third world safety protections with temp workers imported from Vietnam, Indonesia, and poorer areas of China, as was seen with the Hwaseong battery factory fire a couple months ago [0][1]
Throwing environmental and workers rights tariffs on REEs and e-waste processing means the upstream supply chain for the entirety of electronics, automotive, aerospace, and every other manufacturing industry is ground to a halt, and you have to depend on foreign countries anyhow but with even less leverage.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/world/asia/lithium-batter...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/world/asia/south-korea-li...
Recycling batteries is an indispensable part of making them. We can make the process safer, but we can't easily pull valuable resources out of a landfill.
Already, e-waste processors in India have startup to upskill into manufacturing NdFeB magnets [0] which are currently entirely monopolized by China.
Also, batteries are an example of E-Waste that India is incentivizing to come to India.
> Being that entire shanty towns (people included) in India have disappeared as the landfill they were built on shifted due to rain
India is in the midst of a shantytown razing program similar to what China did in the 2000s [1]
To become a developed country by 2047, India needs to make some sacrifices that the US did and China is currently doing.
[0] - https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/trafalgar-sets-sights-o...
[1] - https://scroll.in/article/1084230/why-the-judiciary-is-respo...
It's even more unethical to prevent the global poor from building industry that might meaningfully improve their quality of life.
With globalism, we got cheap goods and didn't worry about [domestic] worker safety. But, i don't doubt that innovation will happen if we bring stuff back on-shore. There's no motivation to improve processes and innovate if you can just cheaply externalize everything.
Commenters here both want dirt cheap green tech AND workers rights, but it's a choice between one or the other becuase low margins industries are inherently exploitative, because there are no other levers.
Saying improving processes and innovation is just a "deus ex machina", because any sort of automation depends on these upstream components as well.
I agree that bringing industries back on-shore can help spark innovation, but we also need to be realistic. Most REEs (ignore lithium) just don't exist in large quantities in the US, Canada, or the EU, and we simply cannot onshore EVERY industry, because margins are so low that tariffs don't alleviate them either.
You can't compete when manufacturing in China and India are themselves in the midst of transitioning to automation as well, further driving down margins.
We need to be strategic about the industries we target with tariffs AND incentives, but also recognize that vast swathes of low margins low skill manufacturing and resource processing is never returning to the US unless we adopt the same kind of labor whitewashing practices Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea does [0][1]
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/world/asia/south-korea-li...
[1] - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/03/29/national/probe-...
The market dynamics and strategy needed to build e-waste processing capacity is different from that of assembling ICE cars which is different from that to develop fighter jets.
Does it makes sense to spend money rebuilding our capacity to sow clothes again, or does it make more sense to invest in semiconductor packaging? Should we invest in plastics mould injection capacity or plastic fiber manufacturing?
These are very complex questions that require domain experts working with policymakers to define requirements. Aside from the CHIPS and IRA, we haven't actually attempted industrial policy in recent years.
We also need to accept that certain industries will never return to American shores no matter what.
Not to mention that it can take 10-30 years to open a new mine, between all the environmental reviews and court challenges.
I'm always amazed that people will prevent mines from opening in the US on environmental grounds, then continue to happily buy 99% of everything from overseas, where the environmental and labor regulations are significantly weaker, and governments even more prone to covering up wrongdoing.
For instance, in Delhi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fojw7yviYU