3 - Crude Portrayals, Crude Proposals

Summary

This chapter describes the global and local ramifications of the emergence, dominance, and policy derivatives of an e-waste dumping paradigm focused on the transfer of contaminants from the Global North to helpless “digital dumpsites”: peripheral locations suffering grievous environmental and health impacts. Though derived with only a thin linkage to realities in these locations, these caricatured portrayals resonate strongly in the Global North, and undergird key platforms of e-waste regulation, the Ban Amendment to the Basel Convention and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies now a hegemonic model for e-waste collection and recycling. Ironically, this paradigm bypasses the informal sector, its vital livelihood contributions to these places and central role within the scrap value chain, and redirects resources, attention, and agency away from dynamics and actors key to systemic reform and local sustainability. Thus, EPR’s forwarding-looking and formalizing agenda can leave the places it aspires to save with the worst of both worlds: deprived of livelihoods and saddled with the legacy of past contamination. We describe this global paradigm’s local resonances in the ironically convergent thrusts of emerging Israeli EPR legislation, local and national NGO voices in Israel and Palestine, and the sovereignty aspirations of a distant Palestinian Authority.