Our focus in this chapter is the burn sites themselves. We describe the toxic substances released, the massive environmental and health problems these present, the importance of including remediation of these sites as an integral part of e-waste policies, and our piloting of such remediation. While such toxic sites figure centrally in the scientific literature on e-waste and iconic portrayals of e-waste hubs, figuring implicitly or explicitly as a key motivator for EPR policies that would redirect waste away from e-waste hubs, they figure very little in e-waste policies themselves. Thus, such policies risk giving e-waste hubs the worst of two worlds: relocating the sources of their livelihood away to central capital-heavy recycling facilities without removing the contamination that would continue to harm their landscapes and health for decades to come. We describe the details of our pilot cleanup of one such site, our development of a framework for scaling this up to remediate the most serious sites in the West Line, and how this scaleup fell afoul of disputes of principle regarding national sovereignty and more mundane tensions between central and local authorities within the Palestinian Authority.

This chapter describes the cross border geopolitical terrain within which we advocated Israeli and Palestinian authorities on behalf of the hub-driven path to reform described in previous chapters. The impressive entrepreneurial accomplishments of the West-Line’s informal recycling industry, and our arguments for its social and environmental upgrading came up against the harsh constraints of regional politics and policies. On the Israeli side, an increasingly tense and militarized response to waste smuggling and burning meshed with a narrow vision of Israeli e-waste management policies modeled on the internationally dominant EPR system. This impulse converged, ironically, with the stance of the Palestinian Authority. Here, officials regarded waste flows as a joint manifestation of Israeli dumping and the criminality of marginal individual Palestinians. The Authority’s battle for symbolic expressions of sovereignty in a context where it possesses almost none of its substance, formally allows the recycling of only that small fraction of e-waste that is indigenously Palestinian—a convenient fiction that blocks formal commercial recycling. For example, the foremost example of a Palestinian company performing large scale clean recycling on a commercial basis is not showcased as a way forward, but faces constant friction from both Israeli and Palestinian institutional and regulatory barriers.