Waste by Kate O'Neill

Author:Kate O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745687438
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

Discarded electronics are a cornerstone of the global waste economy. They exemplify a global resource frontier and the magnified risks that characterize it. Changes in how this economy works, especially through the trade, have upended conventional assumptions about the North as perpetrator and the South as victim. We see this most clearly by focusing on the demand for used electronics and the complex trade routes they take. Even understanding, however, that more electronics are repaired or refurbished than previously thought does not negate the serious risks faced by workers in dismantling used electronics, hence their framing as electronic wastes remains valid. Extracting urban ore is a multinational business also open to worker exploitation.

Governance challenges along the electronics supply chain are myriad and multifaceted. This chapter focused on the secondary resource extraction, trade, and final disposal ends of the supply chain. By the end, however, product design, at the start of the supply chain, takes on critical importance, even for global waste governance. The “right to repair” in the face of proprietary hardware is a rallying cry for organizations around the world.

The next chapters continue these themes, although in different ways. Food waste (chapter 5) is less of a globally networked commodity but displays levels of activism and governance entrepreneurship that have made it more tractable than other global waste problems. Plastic scrap (chapter 6) brings us back squarely to a central problem with the e-waste trade: how to distinguish “waste” from “scrap” at the global level. It continues the global governance discussion, focusing on specific global venues where these decisions could be made.

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