Sheila Davis's 2015 commencement address

The Flipside of the Flip Phone

 June 13, 2015

 

Thank you Provost Lipschutz, Chancellor Blumenthal, College 8 graduating class 2015.

It is such an honor to speak today.

I am grateful for my UCSC experience. What I learned here and the friends that I made have stayed with me for life.

I would like to give a shout out to Toni Newman, my UCSC college room-mate. She has been a cherished friend for more than 30 years and she is here today.

When professor Lipschutz invited me to speak, he asked that I speak about what inspired me go into the environmental field. Like most commencement speakers, I feel the weight to say something inspirational.

I thought back to my own graduation ceremony in the 1980’s and, honestly, I cannot remember who spoke or what they said.  What I do remember was being surprised by a dozen family members who caravanned from LA. I was among the first in my family to graduate from college. For my family, the graduation ceremony was a big deal.   And when they found out that I was actually speaking at the ceremony, my aunts forced me to take off my flip-flops and coveralls. Pooling my cousins’ clothes, shoes and makeup, I got the full LA treatment. 

Later, my older cousin told me that she’d been inspired by my graduation to also return to college and earn her degree.

So today, I realize, as commencement speaker, that I am not the source of inspiration.   

College Eight graduating class of 2015, today you are the inspiration for us all. Congratulations!

So what can I say about my career as an environmentalist? I didn’t graduate with an Environmental Studies degree.   And honestly, I had no clue 30 years ago that I would be an advocate for environmental health and justice in the high tech industry.  Or that I would be considered an “expert” on electronic waste recycling.

When I graduated, there was no such thing as electronic waste.   Matter of fact, while I was at Santa Cruz, there was no such thing as personal computers on campus.

What inspired my career as an environmentalist? ….The introduction of the flip phone.

But, also my grandfather inspired me.

My grandfather encouraged me to speak my mind. He would come to our house most mornings, sit in his truck and honk his horn to make sure that my dad was home. My dad would cook my grandfather bacon, and eggs. And my grandfather would take his medicine:  Two fingers of Jim Beam.

He told lots of colorful stories about 1930’s Chicago politics, and he had strong views on anything in the news…Vietnam, Richard Nixon, civil rights movement, Israel. More importantly he would ask my opinion.  And he would listen.

Later in life this gave me the confidence to think that I had something to say and equally important, that those in authority should actually listen.  

I noticed that UCSC motto is now:  “The original authority on questioning authority.”

Finally, a tag-line befitting my experience on campus.

Because, that is what I did when I came to Santa Cruz.

I spent my time here protesting South African apartheid, writing and editing a “Third World” newspaper, advocating for ethnic studies, and in my spare time I attended class, or watched Star Trek.

Yes, I am a Trekkie.  So bear-with-me.

Star Trek: The Original Series was a Thursday night ritual among my UCSC housemates. This was before online streaming, TV on demand, TiVo, CD’s, and VHS. We actually scheduled TV viewing time.

We would drink beer and recite the dialogue with the actors.

Even today, I love science fiction.  

For me, Star Trek provides a powerful and positive vision of the future. My favorite author, Ursula Le Guin, said, of science fiction, “that truth is a matter of our imagination.” The Star Trek series was the first to imagine a future where African American women were in space. That was a very powerful statement at a time when African Americans hardly existed on TV.

But it was this flip phone that resembles the Star Trek Communicator that got me involved in the environmental movement.

Now, I brought this flip phone with me today for those of you who have never watched the Star Trek Original Series, or who are too young to remember the flip phone.

Now, I must explain. The Motorola “StarTac” flip phone is a remarkable replica of the person to person communication device that transmitted on subspace frequencies to orbiting vessels.

I will demonstrate how it works: “Beam me up Scotty.”

Okay, I couldn’t help myself.

That phrase and the device are iconic in our society.

So, it was almost 10 years after I left UCSC, and working as a legislative aide for a California State senator that I was inspired by the flip phone.

There was a dispute of jobs vs. the environment in the Senator’s district. The local residents in the Bayview Hunters Point community were fighting to keep the PG & E power plant open. They said it created jobs.  However, San Francisco environmentalist, mostly white, who did not live in the neighborhood wanted to shut it down.

They said it caused pollution.

I thought I could solve the problem by promoting jobs through recycling.  A new California state law mandated local governments to divert waste from municipal landfills. Attracting recycling businesses would be a win-win situation. We could create jobs, protect the environment and meet the state recycling mandate.

And this is where the flip phone comes in, because it was around that time in which I got a call from a college friend who was working at a big tech company.

He said, Sheila, guess I am working on?! And he told me about this flip phone that was modelled after the Star Trek communicators.

It would be called a “StarTAC.” And it even had what looked like a Star Trek insignia.

It wasn’t the device that inspired me. It was the capacity to imagine such a device on a TV science fiction show and for a major tech corporation to actually build it almost 30 years later.

It really made me feel like we had the power to invent our future.

Remember, when it comes to the future…..”The truth is a matter of our imagination.”

The Senator authored a bill that would explore options for building electronic waste collection and recycling infrastructure in California.

The bill made it to the Governor’s desk, but Governor Pete Wilson vetoed the bill.  The Governor’s veto message basically said there wasn’t enough electronic waste being generated to merit a recycling infrastructure.

But we know he was wrong. So, I convinced several San Francisco Bay Area cities to  collect electronic waste at the curbside and see if we could create jobs through collection and recycling of electronic waste.

The amount of e-waste collected from the residential curbsides was astounding. 

But when we got the stuff back to the warehouse I discovered that I was embarrassingly wrong about the economics. And even today it makes my heart sink to think about it.

Although, the volume of waste was massive, the cost to responsibly recycle it was prohibitive. The pilot project discovered it would cost the cities almost $700 per ton to responsibly recycle the e-waste.

Electronic products like TV and computer monitors contained high quantities of lead, cadmium and dangerous heavy metals that required special handling and had to be disposed of in expensive hazardous waste landfills.

However, I was told that I could get paid 2 cents a pound for the electronic waste if we shipped it to China. What were they doing with the stuff in China? Nobody could or would tell me.

That’s when I hooked up with Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, and other environmental groups to investigate.  We tracked the shipment of waste from the US west coast to Giuyu, China.

What we found was appalling. The farming village of Guiyu had been taken over by electronic waste from the US. They farmed no more.

Children and entire families sat on the ground while smashing TV’s and monitors with hammers. The village farmland was charred from burning wire cables, the air was unbreathable from burning plastics, and the water was blackened from chemical run off.

It was underside of the high tech industry. The flipside of the flip phone. 

The scenes resembled dystopian futures familiar in popular films, sooty soil, black smoke, filthy water. Think---Blade Runner, The Terminator, Children of Men, Road Warrior... you get the picture.

Well, the computers companies did not get the picture, even after they saw the photos and the videos from Guiyu. They were adamant that electronic waste wasn’t their problem. They just made the computers. It was someone else’s problem to dispose of them.

This was another devastating blow.  I had hoped to create local jobs through recycling. But I knew that not a single safe job would be created, unless the manufacturers took responsibility and paid for recycling or, at least, made an effort to re-design the products so that others could make money safely recycling.

So, I found myself part of an effort to get some of the biggest and most profitable tech companies in the US to take responsibility for their waste.

Here, I will not sugar coat environmental work.  It’s hard to get and keep the public’s attention on these issues. Environmentalist really only have two major leverage points to get companies to change:

Change the market demand. Or, change the law.

We launched the Computer Takeback Campaign to promote market awareness about recycling and to get the companies to take back and responsibly recycle their products.

This was during ancient times, before: Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

That meant drawing attention to our issue by dressing up in computer waste and staging a fashion show in front of Michael Dell’s wife’s clothing boutique. 

Getting interns to dress up- like an iPod at the Apple convention and hold banners that said ‘You have toxic trash in your pocket.”  And flying airplanes over Stanford University’s graduation ceremony where Steve Jobs was the commencement speaker, and stringing a banner that read “Hey Steve, don’t be a mini player,”

Our policy campaign got jump started when I found a loop-hole in California hazardous waste regulations that triggered a landfill ban.  The landfill ban paved the way for California to pass the first e-waste recycling law in the nation. The Computer Takeback Campaign went on to pass e-waste recycling laws in 26 other states across the nation. And today most major computer manufacturers have some sort of recycling program available to their customers.

Here I am after more than 15 years. I’ve seen tremendous change in the laws and level of awareness when it comes to electronic waste. But it feels like we’ve only begun. The electronic industry still refuses to take full responsibility for the lifecycle impacts of their products.  Responsible electronic recycling still cost upwards of 50 cent a pound and the city of Guiyu, China still looks the same today as it did more than 15 years ago, if not worse.

But, I am still fascinated by the confluence of human health, technology and the environment. I’ve learned that these are complex systems.  And progress on these issues is part of a learning continuum.

Recently, I’ve been working on issues of sustainability in the solar industry. Although, solar photovoltaics are thought to be green, and create green jobs, solar modules have similar chemical composition to electronics and will have similar environmental impact when thrown away.

Luckily, we can take what we’ve learned in the electronics industry and apply it to solar. We don’t have to wait for solar panels to show up in Guiyu, or Nigeria, Ghana, India or other regions all over the world where electronic waste is still being dumped.

Next year, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition will release the first accredited solar sustainability standard and subsequent green labeling system.

I am also working with UC Santa Cruz students to reverse engineer small off grid solar products so that we can determine the best way to design recyclable and reusable solar products for the 1.4 billion people without access to electricity.

So, I remain inspired by the flip phone and our capacity to invent the future.

Think about it, the Star Trek communicators were first seen on TV in 1966. The Motorola StarTAC was released on January 3, 1996. It took three decades from the date the Star Trek TV show aired to the creation of the flip phone.

I am here to tell you that you must think long term about the environmental issues that you are passionate about, and you must be in it for the long haul.

I realize that most of you are just trying to make it through the next 30 minutes of this ceremony.

Thirty years may seem unimaginable.

But your first step is to imagine a future that you want to live in.

And then, you must be prepared to take a trek into the unknown. You too will undoubtedly, work in fields that have not yet been invented, or fill jobs that you write the description. I am not saying that there are no environmental jobs. I am saying that the most interesting careers will be in the fields in which you challenge the status quo, seek solutions and fill that space.

I am so proud and privileged to be the droning voice, over the loud speaker that performs the count down for your mission launch.

Good luck,

Live long and prosper.