Hub-driven policy packages as a basis for e-waste reform: rationales and a case study

ABSTRACT

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) principles have emerged as the template for e-waste policies, centered on establishing regulated collection and recycling channels. Originating in the global North, these policies are increasingly adopted in the global South where e-waste is primarily ‘managed’ by the informal sector, centered in spatially defined hubs. These formal systems fail to achieve collection quotas, while further marginalizing informal recyclers by delegitimizing their access to e-waste. We suggest an alternative hub-centered approach to e-waste reform based on eight years of research and advocacy within the Israel-West Bank e-waste system. We offer several converging rationales for centralizing hubs in e-waste policies and a case study demonstrating an integrated hub-driven package of business, enforcement, and cleanup measures. While the unique complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian case offer an exceptional window into the dynamics of a hub-driven approach, similar packages might shape e-waste policy reform throughout the global South.

KEYWORDS:

• E-waste
• Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)
• policy packages
• informal
• Palestine
• Israel

Acknowledgments

To be completed pending review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The West Line villages consist of Beit Awwa, Deir Samet, Al Kom and Idhna

2. Under the Oslo Accord, the West Bank was divided into three geopolitical areas. Area A under Palestinian civil and military control, Area B under Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian military control, and Area C under Israeli civil and military control.

3. We will not here debate the virtues or mechanisms of decentralization, nor the ways it can degenerate into damagingly incomplete decentralization, or merely deconcentration or privatization, which transfer burdens and costs without resources and authority (Ribot 2003).

4. Trading zones are an anthropological metaphor for sites and processes of productive exchange between societies, cultures, and paradigms. These allow agreed upon rules, sites and objects of exchange despite having different meanings for each side.

5. The drastic effect of our cable grinding promotion was additional to a slow decline of waste volumes in the years prior, due to declining international metal prices and increasing Civil Administration regulation of cables importation to the West Bank. Prior to 2015, roughly ten Mts of cables were burnt daily, twice the rate when our cable grinding promotion began.