Abstract
The global economy of e-waste recycling has received much attention in recent waste studies literature. This article gives an account from the inside of two different sites within a leading high-tech recycling and smelting company in which such e-waste is assessed; and discusses the valuation of electronic waste in the course of its industrial processing. Based on a two-month long ethnography by way of an internship, the article examines how the recycler manages to distinguish and separate out valuable ‘scrap’, in contrast to valueless ‘waste’. The article subdivides the inquiry into two questions. What practices are involved when transforming e-waste into scrap and waste? And how can we appreciate differences in how they are configured? The study of two different facilities in operation next to one another provides additional leverage to the inquiry since the valuation practices involved when assessing the incoming e-waste differ between them. Differences are tied to specificities in how the electronics are sorted out, shredded, and smelted. The article shows how these processes of deformation are linked to the valuation practices and the accounting system of the company. Calculations, it is argued, succeed only because things are literally broken.
Highlights
E-waste, short for electronic waste, is a staple feature of today’s global economy
Various actors are interested in mining this waste stream, because it includes a high amount of precious materials such as gold, copper, or cobalt as well as lots of sellable aluminium and plastic
Vast smelters have been processing e-waste since it was first thrown away about half a century ago. Before this waste stream grew significantly and new legal frameworks were established (Knapp 2016), it was mostly the so-called ‘informal sector’ in the Global South that appreciated these materials
Summary
E-waste, short for electronic waste, is a staple feature of today’s global economy. It is the material flip side of the seemingly immaterial IT industries (Gabrys 2011). In the second facility, which I will denote the sampling site, e-waste deliveries are assessed by sampling, and it manages about 80 tonnes of materials per day. The allocation and counting of the materials are used to adapt the separation machines (some sorting technologies may not be needed for less complex e-waste deliveries), but as I will show further below, this is crucial for the accounting system to be able to allocate value.
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