1 - The Emergence of E-Waste Hubs

Summary

We review the emergence of the West Line hub that has processed most of Israel’s e-waste for over two decades against the background of the global phenomena of e-waste policies and hubs often characterised as simply dumping grounds at the receiving end of flows of contaminating processes and materials to less regulated settings (the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, PHH). Its emergence was facilitated by factors common to the occupied West Bank as a whole (de-development, lower labor costs, dominance of the informal sector, a porous border and spatial fragmentation), and others especially important in the West Line area. These include the disruption of work opportunities in Israel alongside a rise in the amounts and value of e-waste; proximity to Israeli urban centers and distance from Palestinian ones; the historical presence of a scrap trade; a population comprised of a handful of extended families facilitating trust-based economies, on the one hand, while overcoming stigma and opposition on the other; and availability of areas of governance vacuum allowing dumping and burning. The PHH’s crudely global account of e-waste hub emergence must be refined to include the context-specific presence and operation of hubs as forceful economic agents, not simply passive recipients of waste dumping.