Between Toxics and Gold: Devaluing Informal Labor in the Global Urban Mine

ABSTRACT

Environmental discourses on electronic waste have converged around two framings of e-waste as a significant global concern: as a polluting and hazardous waste product, and as an under-tapped source of value: an “urban mine.” This paper argues that the discursive shift between these two framings is not based in material differences between either the electronics themselves or related labor processes; instead, the major determining factor in e-waste’s categorization as hazard or resource is based on the category of labor working on it and where it is located. Drawing on research in India’s used electronics industry, this paper argues that when associated with informal labor in the Global South, e-waste is easily devalued and judged a hazardous waste through devaluing the labor that works on it. The conflation of pollution with informal labor in the Global South offers such a powerful narrative, particularly in governance and industry circles, that it has become a significant way to devalue e-waste in the Global South, opening up “new” frontiers of value that would otherwise be captured by local, predominantly informal, industry. Thus, environmental concerns about the hazards of e-waste can be used to secure corporate e-waste markets through devaluing informal labor.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal labor
• devaluation
• electronic waste
• urban mining
• refurbishment

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the e-waste and used electronics traders, recyclers and workers who allowed me to enter their worlds, and to Shashi Pandit for inviting me to the meeting with the Italian trader. My thanks as well to Federico Demaria and Seth Schindler for their helpful comments, as well as to two anonymous reviewers for theirs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Both Labban (2014) and Knapp (2016) note that this mine is not comfortably “urban” but rather uses the figuration of the urban to represent a division between the natural and human worlds, in which virgin mining is positioned as “spatially opposed” to urban spaces (Labban 2014, 564).

2 This is probably a conservative estimate, as that would mean approximately $700,000 worth of gold at early 2018 prices, or less than $1 of gold per smart phone. According to an expert at Sims Recycling Solutions—North America, a single smart phone should yield around $1.34 worth of gold (depending on gold rates). See https://blog.dell.com/en-us/how-much-gold-is-in-smartphones-and-computers/.

3 Different data sources offer sometimes widely divergent estimates. For example, EPA data estimated that 40% of e-waste in the US was recycled in 2013, up from 10% in 2000, although this likely includes more private take-back recycling programs than the UN data (see www.electronicstakeback.com/designed-for-the-dump/e-waste-in-landfills/ for an analysis of EPA data). In general, I approach data on e-waste cautiously, and I believe it is safe to assume that the majority of e-waste in the US and EU isn’t separated from MSW.

4 As with most niche interests, there is now a good number of instructional videos and DIY pages that offer instructions on at-home gold recovery from electronics, including Wikihow, Instructables and Wired.

5 This has been exemplified by the Basel Action Network, an American NGO that continues to work towards ending the global trade of electronic waste. Complicating this narrative, recent studies indicate that the geographies of e-waste are constantly changing and that the geographical imagination of global e-waste flows, based in and reinforced by the Basel Convention, is no longer accurate (c.f. Furniss 2015; Lepawsky 2015b; Gregson and Crang 2015). Recent observations are that much e-waste trade is between countries in the same economic category (for example, South-South trade or trade within the European Union) and that waste “dumping” from the Global North to Global South has significantly diminished (Lepawsky 2015a; Kahhat and Williams 2012). The inaccuracies of the waste dumping narrative, and its staying power in popular media and broader e-waste discourse, have been addressed in Pickren 2014; Reddy 2015 and Tong et al. 2015, among others.

6 This statistic is based on data from before the implementation of India’s E-Waste Rules, which I discuss further below. While the new Rules seek to formalize the industries, my research did not show evidence that much had changed in Delhi’s informal e-waste businesses. Reddy (2013) did find evidence of significant change in Bangalore.

7 I discuss the diverse processes of electronics reuse, remanufacturing and repair in detail in Corwin (2018).

8 Interview, Bangalore, July 13, 2016.

9 For example, according to US EPA regulations on waste, hazardousness is based on four categories: corrosivity, ignitability, reactivity and toxicity. This means that in the United States, not all battery waste is generally considered hazardous (specifically, alkaline batteries are not). In the US there is no national law governing electronic waste and it is regulated at the state level (and sometimes at the municipal level), creating a patchwork of laws.

10 E-waste, like other scrap materials, is always bought and sold in India; while formal e-waste recyclers often argue that the informal sector can offer better prices because of the cheap and hazardous methods of recycling, my observation was that the informal sector’s diversified reuse industries are what drove the higher prices.

11 See http://www.attero.in/about-us.html.

12 Visit on November 14, 2012.

13 The history of colonial relationships and virgin mines continues to this day in global e-waste politics. Umicore, a major e-waste recycler, is the most recent corporate iteration of Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, a colonial mining company that operated copper mines in the former Belgian Congo. Union Minière rebranded itself as a “specialty materials company” in the 1990s and completely divested from mineral extraction by the mid-2000s. Umicore now refers to itself as a “global materials technology and recycling group” with a turnover of €11.1 billion, according to its website (http://www.umicore.com/en/about/history-today).

14 See https://weee-forum.org/iewd-about/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Division of Social and Economic Sciences: [Grant Number 1627551].