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I call bullshit. Sounds like "Dream Arcades" is trying to find out creative ways to announce that they will jack up their refurbishment prices--and their profit margins...

1) An Indian manufacturer named "Videocon" still manufactures CRTs. So, while it's not Sony or some other high-quality manufacturer, they are still making them. In fact, as of a year ago, they were accepting leaded CRT glass for recycling into new CRT TVs. https://resource-recycling.com...
2) There's a warehouse in Columbus, OH, which will likely become an EPA superfund site, that was run by an electronics recycler called Closed Loop--which went bankrupt. It's full of old CRTs that I can imagine could be reused with some minor disassembly & testing. https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

It's an international group which helps defend falsely accused "geeks of color". Here are two recent examples of FTR projects.

1. Ambassador program flies students and techs overseas to meet and qualify buyers of used tech who people are afraid to sell to based on "ewaste" myths. http://resource-recycling.com/...

2. Defense and petitions of UK TV repairman and ex-pat Nigerian Joe Benson, imprisoned in UK for "e-waste crime" based on "common knowledge" that 80% of exports of used equipment to Africa are burned in primitive dumps. FairTradeRecycling got the UN to fund actual research of the containerloads in question, which revealed 91% reuse and repair, better than brand new product, and found the African geeks who buy and repair used equipment were earning 6 times average wages (Ghana, Nigeria). http://resource-recycling.com/...

Disclosure, I'm the founder.

It's an international group which helps defend falsely accused "geeks of color". Here are two recent examples of FTR projects.

1. Ambassador program flies students and techs overseas to meet and qualify buyers of used tech who people are afraid to sell to based on "ewaste" myths. http://resource-recycling.com/...

2. Defense and petitions of UK TV repairman and ex-pat Nigerian Joe Benson, imprisoned in UK for "e-waste crime" based on "common knowledge" that 80% of exports of used equipment to Africa are burned in primitive dumps. FairTradeRecycling got the UN to fund actual research of the containerloads in question, which revealed 91% reuse and repair, better than brand new product, and found the African geeks who buy and repair used equipment were earning 6 times average wages (Ghana, Nigeria). http://resource-recycling.com/...

Disclosure, I'm the founder.

The nightsoilmen (toshers) processes, while imperfect, were much less toxic than what they were replaced by - Whitehead's flush toilet (which drove them out of business). The outflow from flush toilets in London were directed into the same dry pits as the toshers worked from, making the pits impossible to manage. With no downstream plan for the new flush toilet technology, "The Great Stink of London" came from the stormwater runoff into the Thames, which caused thousands of death in cholera epidemics.

You are right, the work should not perhaps be romanticized, but was not given any incentive to improve... it was flushed away by the new million dollar flushable toilet technology industry. The fact is that the toshers/nightsoil industry created better than average pay in London, certainly much better than blackleg coal mining. But the marketers of "flush toilet technology" stigmatized them, and the sewage treatment plants of today are seen by many in the environmental community as a "correction" to a technological advance. http://retroworks.blogspot.com...

During the mid 1800s another "technological advance" was the sale of mercury as a laxative. I guess it gives great bowel movements (Lewis and Clark's expedition can be tracked today by the mercury laxative residue - they ate a lot of elk and not much fiber). What I find fascinating are the parallels between the toshers and the past decade of private sector electronic waste management. Most of the "export market" buyers of used CRTs turned out to be not primitive wire burners but factories formerly licensed by Proview, BenQ, Wistron, Foxconn etc., which were purchasing very specific models of CRT for refurbishment and sale to markets like Cairo, Lagos, Jakarta and New Dehli. Like the nightsoil workers, they were flooded with product and then denigrated as "primitive recycling". The CRTs were diverted to a shredding industry designed for scrap metal. Leaded glass cullet doesn't shred well, and the glass diverted from reuse private markets still lies around. At one of the largest sites, in Hallstead PA, floodwaters engulfed the CRT cullet piles twice in the past decade, leading to the closure of the recycling facility last summer. http://resource-recycling.com/...

The reader comments are far more intelligent than the original false claim here.

- the lower cost of flat screens has created homes with more screens. same toxicity or perhaps worse per pound.
- the light weight screens of today are not built to last as long as the heavier CRT screens
- flat screens are not made to be modular or easy to repair, and it rarely happens
- even in countries that ban exports of dead flat screens under the Basel Convention, significant toxic waste is exported to Asia and Africa
- about half of the states in the USA don't regulate e-waste
- the USA refuses to ban toxic exports under treaties, we also won't ban landmines etc etc.
- Most ewaste is passed from customers to a series of waste traders. Those "safe" drop off spots have almost no laws that keep the waste from going to Asia or Africa as toxic e-waste
- Auctions of Federal computers often get exported as dead e-waste
- Only one city has any statute to prevent the series of waste traders from unethical export
- E-waste is extremely complex, from the birth and assembly of the components, beyond the death, transport and disassembly of the device. The toxins live far longer than most of us would guess.
http://resource-recycling.com/node/1877
http://ban.org/ban_news/2011/110317_call_to_stop_exporting_ewaste.html
http://www.teachchange.org/ewaste