Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste

by Associate Professor Josh Lepawsky

An examination of the global trade and traffic in discarded electronics that reframes the question of the "right" thing to do with e-waste. The prevailing storyline about the problem of electronic waste frames e-waste as generated by consumers in developed countries and dumped on people and places in developing countries. In Reassembling Rubbish , Josh Lepawsky offers a different view. In an innovative analysis of the global trade and traffic in discarded electronics, Lepawsky reframes the question of the "right" thing to do with e-waste, mapping the complex flows of electronic materials. He counters the assumption that e-waste is a post-consumer problem, pointing out that waste occurs at all stages of electronic materials' existence, and calls attention to the under-researched world of reuse and repair. Lepawsky explains that there are conflicting legal distinctions between electronic waste and non-waste, and examines a legal case that illustrates the consequences. He shows that patterns of trade do not support the dominant narrative of e-waste dumping but rather represent the dynamic ecologies of repair, refurbishment, and materials recovery. He asks how we know waste, how we measure it, and how we construe it, and how this affects our efforts to mitigate it. We might not put so much faith in household recycling if we counted the more massive amounts of pre-consumer electronic waste as official e-waste. Lepawsky charts the "minescapes," "productionscapes," and "clickscapes" of electronics, and the uneven "discardscapes" they produce. Finally, he considers both conventional and unconventional e-waste solutions, including decriminalizing export for reuse, repair, and upgrade; enabling ethical trade in electronics reuse, repair, refurbishment, and recycling; implementing extended producer responsibility; and instituting robust forms of public oversight.

240 pages, Hardcover

Published April 13, 2018

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The reason to give this book 5 stars is not because it's riveting. If anything, it is plodding. But that is exactly what was necessary - massive footnoting and citation and references - to clear the obnoxious and racist record accidentally created by well-intentioned environmentalists who convinced journalists around the world that Africans and Asians could not possibly be generating their OWN electronic waste, could not POSSIBLY be far better and smarter than OECD nations at repairing and maintaining their electronics, and should be expected to live in trees with nothing but banana peels and empty coconut shells in their waste stream. Lepawasky has taken the time to devastate the profiling of the Tech Sector in emerging markets, and thanks to him, other authors and documentary film makers are asking important questions about "dumping" claims and arrests of savvy African importers. Chapter 3, in and of itself, is worth the price of the book #freejoebenson.