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.

We build on Chapter three’s description of e-waste hubs as vital economic actors, rather than simply dumping sites, and Chapter four’s account of a consensual development vision for the West Line hub, to argue for the pragmatic and ethical necessity and advantages of centering e-waste hubs in e-waste policies. Existing EPR e-waste policies, generated in the Global North and adopted globally, usually ignore informal actors and dynamics, or propose formalizing them in a way that redirects attention and resources away from the value chains and sites that have historically collected and recycled most of the world’s e-waste. A hub-centered policy would boost the effectiveness and coherence of e-waste policies by accounting for and building on their entrepreneurial agility and expertise, decentralising decisions and interventions to actors with nuanced local knowledge, greater accountability, and long-term stakes in policies that not only propose solutions in the center but grapple with existing capacities and toxic legacies in the periphery. We briefly describe the interlocked arms of the West Line model for such restructuring elaborated in the following three chapters: curbing destructive practices through local enforcement; remediating past damage; and preserving livelihoods though environmental upgrading of the recycling processes.

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.