On the Social Dimensions of Disposal

[ Jonas Wenger ] Instead of a simple introduction, I would like to ask you why you are interested in e-waste and what particularly interests  you about this topic?¹

[ Grace Akese ] I am a Grace Akese. A geographer and discard studies scholar interested in political economies and waste geographies. My research focuses on the geographies of e-waste. I explore questions about where e-waste travels, the spaces and people that work with these discarded materials as they travel and the conditions (associated politics) under which it happens. I came to the issue of e-waste via Agbogbloshie, a scrapyard in Accra, the capital of Ghana, ostensibly known as the « world’s largest e-waste dump ». I lived in Accra beginning in 2006 while attending the University of Ghana for my Geography and Resource Development undergraduate program. At the time, Agbogbloshie was primarily known for its vibrant wholesale food market and informal settlement Old Fadama. Through the advocacy work of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) such as Greenpeace International and Basel Action Network (BAN) on the global flows of e-waste,² the scrapyard adjacent to the food market and informal settlement quickly became of interest to environmental health scientists, slum tourists, international journalists, photographers, and social scientists. In less than a decade, the scrapyard achieved global notoriety as an « electronics graveyard »³, « a digital dumping ground »⁴, « a high-tech hell »⁵, and, more recently, « one of the ten most polluted places in the world »⁶, to name a few of the popular narratives. My work is concerned with practices of knowledge-making that are central to the representation of informal e-waste hubs such as Agbogbloshie as « problem spaces » in need of interventions. I explore how advocacy groups, institutions (academic scholars), and individuals frame the content and relevance of knowledge about informal e-waste sites to elicit certain forms of interventions and how, within this context, the knowledge they produce itself becomes a site of struggle around which contentious politics take place.

[ Blanca Callén ] My name is Blanca Callén. I am a social psychologist and I do research in the field of Social Studies of Science and Technology. Within this field, I have always been interested in collective political action and citizen participation, as well as in informal or « lay » knowledge that has not usually been recognised as epistemologically legitimate. After researching on free software, I became interested in the material dimension and the more « dirty » and invisible side effects of cyberculture. This led me to investigate informal responses to the problem of e-waste in Spain, outside institutional trajectories. During my fieldwork, I came across experiences of creative hacking, device repair and recovery, and metal collection and economic reactivation of « waste » by migrant people – many of sub-Saharan origin – living in Barcelona. In this sense, looking at e-waste (and what happens around it: Practices and knowledge production, the bodies and agents in charge of it, or the dialogue between the « legal » and the « illegal » world …) as a heuristic, helps me to better understand how, under which conditions, and at the expense of what and whom, we are sustaining unsustainable lives. For this analytical work, I have been greatly helped by feminist theories of the economy and the ethics of care. Also, as a result of this research, I got to know The Restart Project (London) and on my return to Barcelona in 2015, together with other people, we set up the Restarters BCN collective. Since then, we have been organising many Restart Parties (free public events where technical volunteers help participants repair their appliances) and promoting the creation of communities of repairers in different neighbourhoods of the city.

[ Jonas ] There seems to be a huge range of how e-waste is addressed,  as raw material, toxic health hazard or neglected data carrier etc. Is there anything specific to electronic waste compared to waste in general, which makes it especially interesting to you or important for everyone respectively?

[ Grace ] I approach e-waste from the interdisciplinary field of discard studies. Broadly, the field of discard studies takes a critical approach to the study of modern waste. Scholars in this field « question the premises – the assumptions of what seems natural, normal, logical, and inevitable – of waste to investigate the wider systems that allow things to seem natural, normal, logical, and inevitable in the first place ».⁷ Discard studies, therefore, open the black box of waste. What is often perceived as just material waste and thus often prescribed technical fixes (i. e., via waste management) are complex histories, geographies, and politics which must be grounded. Informed by this sensibility, I consider e-waste as infrastructure and take into account the geographies constituted in it and by it and what discarded materials produce besides waste. My research shows that electronics that original users have discarded move in complex circuits of value via reuse, repair, repurposing, and remanufacturing practices that transform and recirculate them. What is treated as waste in one place can be transformed to value in another hence the need to rethink the nature of discarded electronics in specific geographies. Furthermore, looking at the politics of e-waste, I ask the question: who benefits and who suffers from the spread of environmental damage, as the toxic traces of e-waste become more ubiquitous yet unevenly distributed?

So, yes, e-waste is indeed multifaceted, if you think of it as a placeholder for practices of discarding electronics. What I mean by this is that e-waste is not a thing with essential properties like waste, but an effect of the way electronics are discarded. This multiplicity means for me that the material stuff of e-waste is not my sole focus. I am not interested in e-waste (as waste) as a primary object of study, although the material properties of this waste, such as its heterogeneity and toxicity, cannot be disentangled from its geographies and politics. Instead, what interests me are the broader systems, such as the economies, forms of harm, and the ways of life, in which this material is immersed and which constitute certain politics in particular places.

[ Blanca ] I think that Grace’s response, based on the geographical vision of e-waste, exemplifies very well the importance and usefulness of situating e-waste as a heuristic or privileged point of view for the analysis of the contemporary world and its power relations. Because by placing this element in the focus of transdisciplinary analysis, we can access richer and more complex understandings of our ways of life. And to this end, I believe that e-waste, unlike generic waste, has much to say: firstly, because it is the type of waste that has grown the most in recent years in all parts of the world. Secondly, because the consumption of gadgets and electronic devices is still associated with a widely and deeply internalised imaginary of development and progress, which is difficult (but very necessary and urgent) to problematize and which justifies ways of life that we can no longer afford. And thirdly, because the potentially toxic character of this type of waste, unlike generic non-organic waste, reveals a new ontology of waste. I mean: initially and still today in many contexts, the treatment and management models for e-waste have been the same as those applied to furniture management. In other words, e-waste has been treated as « inert » matter with no agency or capacity to affect. However, through its potential toxicity, it opens us to a much more « living » dimension of waste that provides an opportunity to rethink the intimate,⁸ everyday inter-dependencies we establish with « things ». For example, if we eat contaminated rice irrigated with wastewater that came from soil contaminated by illegally exported e-waste, we can conclude, in a way, that we are or are becoming, on a molecular level, the computers we once threw away. This would help us to recognise much more clearly the material continuities (intimate and global, at different time-space scales) that exist between apparently isolated entities. And it would lead us to question certain modern dichotomies that we still carry with us, such as the hierarchical distinction between « living » and « inert », the human exceptionalism or the ethical models (strongly humanist, anthropocentric, and utilitarian) that underpin our relations with objects. How to live and coexist with « others » – objects and waste –, is an urgent question that e-waste invites us to ask ourselves. I also believe that repair, as a collective political response to the problem of e-waste, can help us think about how to take responsibility for our actions and « staying with the trouble »⁹ of the eco-social damage we inflict. 

[ Jonas ] W hen trying to grasp the issue of e-waste, I am unsure on what to focus on. The reports on Western countries dumping waste in the global south for local workers to handle under horrible conditions are widely known. On the other hand, there are reports on an old colonial mining company in Belgium, which switched its operations to recycling and is now apparently buying old mobile phones from West African countries. Should I think of the e-waste complex as a struggle for access to mining precious raw materials built into discarded objects? Or as toxic objects societies try to discard as soon as they can to the detriment of less wealthy and powerful people?

[ Grace ] You are right. For a long time, there has been the so-called « e-waste problem », which often goes like this: Millions of toxic e-waste are illegally shipped from Europe and North America to Africa, which poisons and kills marginalized populations. Yet, there is more to how electronics manifest as problems beyond this dominant framing. You highlighted some of them, with the Belgium example raising questions around resource distribution and access to critical minerals. I find it useful to think of e-waste as what sociologist Samantha Macbride calls « modern waste »-materials whose distinctive characteristics include growing amounts, high toxicity and heterogeneity.¹⁰ These characteristics are not just banal. They matter. They foment particular geographies of flow(s) and accumulation(s). For example, in the early 1980s, when e-waste became a public concern, discussions framed these materials as primarily hazardous waste (see the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal). However, given the rate of e-waste generation and the material diversity of electronic devices, there are changes to how they are perceived. Some countries have considered these materials as sources of critical / strategic minerals and thus restricted their flows for the past decade. These flows and accumulations are not stagnant. There are always in the making, emerging and changing. We are therefore likely to see other ways that these materials will be captured and released.

[ Blanca ] As Grace comments, I believe that the ontological definition of e-waste and the routes of transit, flows, detours and accumulations of e-waste is much more complex than the dominant discourses proclaim, and the experiences you both comment are good examples of this. They demonstrate how the changing definition of e-waste and the qualities attributed to it (also as technologies allowing more specific treatments become available), affect the ways in which it is mobilised, distributed and socially perceived and valued. What seems clear is that we are dealing with a relatively young, complex and highly changeable matter whose behaviour we cannot fully predict and which therefore requires us as researchers to pay attention to its changing effects on the geographic, economic, sociological, and ecological layers of the world. In this sense, I think a challenge for us as e-waste researchers is to identify these other unexpected or subversive practices or trajectories that might turn the game board by responding to certain hegemonies or power relations, or by empowering historically marginalised communities. In my fieldwork with informal waste-pickers in Barcelona, for example, I could observe how they recovered and selected some objects and appliances that they later transported to their countries of origin to repair and resell, generating an emerging economic circuit from waste of « zero » value in Europe. Also, the high rate of copper recovery in Spain could not be understood without the meticulous, invisible and socially and economically unrecognised work of these people. Other works, such as that of Josh Lepawsky, also serve to make the South-South journeys of electronic waste visible.¹¹ Sebastián Carenzo and María Schmukler’s work (2018) in Argentina with « Reciclando Sueños » cooperative is also very inspiring.¹² Although they do not specifically deal with e-waste, in Latin America there are great examples of how academic knowledge (often following Participatory Action Research methods) is put at the service of and works hand in hand with the communities of recyclers to help legitimise and make their work socially and economically recognisable.

[ Jonas ] Even though recycling is a big business, you seem to be interested most in the informal handling of e-waste as well as in the  labor conditions surrounding it. Why is that? Following up on that, there is a wide range of terms describing the handling of e-waste. I am thinking of dumping, dismantling, mining, recycling, hacking, DYI, repairing etc. Do these terms describe different situations or is it an issue of methodology or political viewpoints?

[ Blanca ] In my case, the interest in informal responses to e-waste came from the realisation that the institutional channels for the management and treatment of e-waste in Spain, although necessary, are deficient and do not work properly. There are still many « leaks » in the « pipeline » that waste should follow and some fraudulent practices have been detected in the responsible companies in charge of collection and management. There is also a huge opacity in the economic management of these circuits (even for the public administration itself! which tends to outsource these services); and waste has historically been a very lucrative business for a few (it is no coincidence that the country’s larger construction companies have a branch dedicated to waste management). Apart from that, in those places where there was a shift from informal, ‹ retail › models of waste management (e. g. by organised waste pickers) to more centralised and institutionalised ones, done through containers by big companies, there are lower recovery rates (see the work of organisations such as WIEGO). This indicates that perhaps there is something to learn outside the formal circuits or from informal experiences. Maybe, from there, useful and more heterogeneous practices and knowledge in front of e-waste are already being generated (or have the potential to do so). The history of politics and social movements shows us that innovation and change rarely comes from institutions or through mechanisms dedicated to social reproduction.

In this sense, some of the terms you mentioned are conceptual tools that help to better describe what is happening, beyond the « macro » models of business or government management. But undoubtedly, there is also a political and epistemic decision, as researchers, to want to approach the margins or the places where, apparently, nothing happens or should happen. But watch out, because assuming this and considering that knowledge is not produced in informal or everyday spaces, or that consumers cannot also be active repairers and experts of their own problems, is also a particular political and epistemic point of view. That is to say, through the research questions we ask and the methodologies we use, we are doing politics and contesting and re-creating the world we live in (and want to live in), in a performative way.

[ Grace ] In my work, I use ‹ e-waste processing › rather than recycling to describe the activities of the workers at Agbogbloshie. I borrow these terms from the workers themselves. At Agbogbloshie, workers generally refer to themselves as scrap dealers. These workers salvage discarded materials containing scraps and process them into their material components of iron, steel, aluminium, copper, plastics etc. They ‹ deal › in scraps; hence the term scrap dealer and processor make sense in their world.

Terms such as ‹ recycling › or even ‹ e-waste › are not common at the site. These are terms that, as researchers embedded in certain conversations, we carry to the field. For example, at Agbogbloshie, reference to terms such as recycling are found only in edifices such as the ‹ model e-waste recycling facility › by the environmental NGO Pure Earth. Workers therefore associate ‹ recycling › with green e-waste interventions and formalization efforts from outsiders.

[ Jonas ] W hen talking about the issue of e-waste from a leftist perspective, the topic of repair and DYI often comes up. While I understand the idea of radical appropriation of knowledge and objects, I am not quite sure why repair (or maybe care for objects) cannot simply  be commercially exploited by corporate actors in order to make more profit or to greenwash their business with an advertising strategy?

[ Blanca ] Of course, it can and does happen and there is an appropriation or co-optation of repair or the idea of object care by companies and the market. We are already seeing this in many big companies, which have activated repair services for their devices and, thanks to the approval of the European « right to repair » law, are going to be obliged to offer spare parts for several years. In other words, as you rightly point out, it is a move that brings them a double benefit: it is a new market niche, and it also facilitates their greenwashing.

From my point of view, the fact that repair becomes mainstream, that producers take responsibility for the effects of their products and that more spaces, tools and conditions are created to facilitate repair as a response to consumption, is something to be celebrated. But at the same time, it is dangerous to be established simply as a trendy gesture or as long as it brings some economic profit to these companies, because then, the advances that are made will be superficial, insufficient, temporary and irresponsible.

This is why it is also important to understand that the act of repairing, per se, is ambivalent in itself and is no guarantee of a profound social or socio-technical transformation of the e-waste problem. We don’t need just individual gestures but a repair culture and also, repair, must be combined with other kind of preventive responses. In this sense, we cannot ignore the particular conditions in which the act of repair takes place: from where is it promoted? With what aims? How is knowledge about reparation produced and transmitted? What role do the users, producers, governs, etc play? What rights and responsibilities are granted to each one? What results, on a technical and material level, but also epistemically, culturally and socially, from each act of reparation? Or others … Because the answers to these questions, w hen we apply them to a community context – similar to experiences such as Repair Café, Restarters, etc. – are radically different from those we get w hen we question a company. But perhaps also, not everyone has the time or can participate in these community experiences. Nor can everyone afford to pay a professional repair worker for their services. So perhaps it is healthy that there can be an ecosystem of heterogeneous initiatives that can respond to the multiple needs around repair and that guarantee the right to repair, as part of our culture. Not only in individual terms (of my right as a particular user), but in collective terms as a co-responsibility, because, on a global scale, we cannot afford to squander our resources.

[ Jonas ] Waste seems to be an entry point for political resistance against social or environmental grievances. Moreover, the way people handle waste is, at least in Switzerland, a social marker of proud and orderly citizenship. Why is the way societies deal with their discarded objects such a focal point for protest and social distinction respectively?

[ Grace ] I think this is because waste is ultimately about power. This is a point that scholars have made starting from Mary Douglas’s famous proposition that « dirt is matter out of place ».¹³ Dirt is a « by-product of a systemic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements ». Thus, where there is dirt, there is a system that needs to be policed to keep things deemed inappropriate out. Anything that threatens the system has to be kept out, necessitating constant inclusions and exclusions, which are not only conflicting but sources of uneven distribution of goods and bads. Of course, the dirt that Douglas theorizes is not the same as waste and, significantly, not the same as modern waste such as e-waste. But her insight underscores the power relations inherent in any system that discards.

[ Blanca ] Indeed, as you say, rubbish condenses all those power relations that, through practices of vision and concealment, inclusion and exclusion, sustain and reproduce the hegemonic social order. And not only rubbish, but also the bodies, agents and places through which it passes and which it interpellates. Waste, residues and rubbish (the inappropriate, as Grace says) operate as the « other », in a symmetrical, antagonistic and specular way, of what we keep, care and create (the appropriate), so the struggle to define what we reject, is also the struggle to define what we accept and who we are.

[ Jonas ] In Grace’s work I read about the issue of informal workers’ refusal to cooperate with researchers, since academic or journalistic attention is often met with distrust and skepticism. I assume this is a general issue w hen researching informal labour relations. Would you mind sharing your experience with that issue or how it affects your own work?

[ Grace ] Agbogboloshie has been under the Western gaze for the past two decades. International interest in Agbogbloshie within global e-waste science, politics and advocacy emerged in 2008 w hen the Environmental NGOs Greenpeace International conducted a toxicological study of the soil at the scrap yard. Before, Basel Action Network had raised the alarm about the potential adverse environmental and health consequences of the global flow of e-waste to Africa. Greenpeace grounded BAN’s concerns w hen their study at Agbogbloshie reported over 100 times the background levels of contamination for lead and cadmium in the soil at the scrap yard.¹⁴ Since then, the site has gained a unique research appeal. In addition to on-the-ground academic fieldwork, a bundle of interests including developmental organizations, ENGOs, local and international media, artists (photographers and musicians), international recycling businesses / advocates and slum tourists intersects at Agbogbloshie. This creates a situation where the workers and their activities are constantly scrutinized, especially in the international media. Unfortunately for the workers, much of the reportage on the site are negative, often highlighting the environmental consequences of e-waste processing.

Given this context, workers have become critical of the researcher’s presence and actively question if not outright refuse to engage with them. As noted earlier, I have been researching the site for almost a decade and experienced this change in research myself. For me, the workers’ refusal is generative. It was not just a no to my research request but an opportunity to focus on their concerns. It made me reflect on what is at stake in the site functioning as both an object and subject of global e-waste science and advocacy.

[ Blanca ] In my case, I conducted my research fieldwork with informal waste-pickers in Barcelona a long time ago. After this, I know many other social researchers, design students, architects, photographers and artists have approached this collective in the city, but I don’t know what kind of responses they have received.

To understand my particular experience, I need to contextualise the situation of the people I worked with. At that time, about a hundred people from different parts of the world were occupying an industrial complex of several warehouses. This space was their home but also functioned as a center for informal economic activities around scrap metal and waste recovery for more than 300 people. It also occasionally hosted parties organised by residents and was a well-known place on the activist circuit in Barcelona. They were in a critical situation because they lived under the constant threat of eviction and some of them, who acted as leaders, had been creating alliances with neighbourhood groups, some social associations and activists for some time. Also, one of these leaders, together with a group of pickers who lived there, was in the process of creating a cooperative of pickers, in order to try to regularise their situation.

In this sense, I think their political strategy of creating alliances with different people outside the space fitted well with my participatory vision of knowledge production, based on the articulation of partial and situated knowledge and the idea that the research space has to be useful for all the people involved, not just the researchers. So, I posed my research question to this cooperative project leader and between the two of us we agreed that my research would be used to pass information on to them about learnings and other experiences of self-organised waste recovery and recycling. During a few years, the time of their attempt to work as a cooperative, we did this and our collaboration was used to put them in contact with, for example, the unions of waste-pickers in South Africa or to participate in public events in defense of their work. He, for his part, provided me with access to the camp and contact with people I accompanied in their day-to-day work and taught me the waste-picker’s labor. Some time later, they were evicted and I stayed in contact with some of them, until the cooperative project disappeared and my closer contacts left the country, thus losing our relationship.

[ Jonas ] While I think the argument that formalization often results  in further aggravation of the situation of workers and tends to escalate power imbalances through centralization is convincing, I also  wonder whether favourable descriptions of informal labour relations do not, at times, romanticize what ultimately are very precarious conditions or power imbalances on a smaller scale respectively? How do you deal with the notion that there are also leftist, emancipatory reasons to demand formalization from the perspectives of workers, as it promises to provide social security, pensions etc.?

[ Grace ] The issue of formalization is crucial regarding e-waste in countries in the Global South, such as Ghana. In its attempt to formalize e-waste management in the country, Ghana passed the Hazardous and Electronic Waste Control and Management Act and Regulation (ACT 917 and LI 2250, respectively) in 2016. In what is essentially an EPR model, these two legislations demand producers and importers of electronic devices pay a levy that will fund the construction of a national formal recycling centre as well as regulate and build the capacity of the informal sector to deal with e-waste in an environmentally sound way. The issue with formalization policies is that in an attempt to ‹ green › a sector deemed dirty, they create incentives that attract larger firms rather than those at the bottom who are confined to the most polluting of processes such as cable burning. Agbogbloshie is at the centre of informal e-waste processing in Ghana. However, as I write, the site has been razed down by the same government seeking to « build the capacity » of the workers.¹⁵ While formalization makes sense in policy, often their actualization w hen attending to realities on the ground makes it impossible to see them worthy especially for those at the margins.

[ Blanca ] What Grace explains is very similar to what happened, for example, in Egypt with the work historically done by the Zabbali community. With the centralisation and outsourcing of its management by the institutions, it fell into the hands of three or four large international companies, thus destroying their livelihood but also achieving worse recovery rates.

I do not think that a false debate between the formalisation of the sector or the maintenance of romanticised precarious lives can be posed. I consider that what is important is to ask about the specific ways in which these informal jobs are to be dignified, always relying on the experience of the informal workers themselves and being the protagonists of the decisions that affect them. « Nothing about us without us », as other collectives claim. If we look at experiences of self-organisation through the creation of trade unions in places such as Argentina, India, Brazil or South Africa, we will see that without falling into paternalism or romanticisation, they have been able to define and create the conditions for their own social and economic recognition. And how these practices, in many cases, have been able to articulate and complement other more centralised and formal mechanisms of waste management.

So, for this to happen, we must first recognise and legitimise their expertise, without paternalism or romanticism, and generate spaces for dialogue in which their knowledge on the ground, together with other knowledge (technical, legal, labour …), can be articulated to jointly define and create their dignified working conditions. On the contrary, attempts to regulate the informal work sectors that have not involved the people themselves have resulted in failures or, as Grace explained, in the extension or expansion of the monopoly of large companies, making these communities even more vulnerable.