Preface:

Summary

The preface describes how a chance story about black rain interfering with the traditional drinking water collection from village rooftops, led us to a massive but little-known Palestinian e-waste hub in the southern West Bank, employing a thousand people who work to collect, refurbish, and recycle a large portion of Israeli e-waste, creating livelihoods in a setting of few options after prolonged Israeli occupation of the West Bank. We describe our efforts to learn with and from these communities about the dynamics and scale of the informal e-waste value chain, and its serious environmental and health consequences, and to forge and test a vision for development that would preserve this precious source of livelihood while eliminating its crippling harms. We overview the intertwined stories we tell in the book about our years of community-based research and advocacy, and their lessons for different audiences.