Situating Electronic Waste: Overview of Experiences and Insights from an Informal Palestinian-Israeli Recycling Hub
Résumé
For over 10 years, our team has been working in the electronic waste (e-waste) repair and recycling hub located in the West Bank, Palestine, that has processed over half of Israel’s end-of-life electrical and electronic household equipment for decades. Our team’s approach uses waste as it moves across sociospatial scales and categorizations as a vehicle to analyse and constructively intervene in societies and their practices, a means to engage with the materiality of the world and make situated alliances with a diversity of humans, species, and instruments of visualization in shaping more just and desirable futures.
We will begin with our own starting point, documenting the impacts of e-waste processing on human and environmental health, the power relations at play in this value chain, and our work with inhabitants to seek alternatives to waste burning and its toxic legacies. We then describe a central theme of these efforts over time: countering a regime of imperceptibility that sustains the slow violence of e-waste harms. For example, we systematically mapped burn sites (over 12,000 polygons from 1999 to 2023) to produce a detailed time series of their shifting extent; and we carefully uncovered the passages and transactions of the flows of dis-value and value across between Israeli and Palestinian territories, and its multi-scalar political economic and epistemic bases (occupation and de-development of the Palestinian economy, polarised dumping discourses, institutional ignorance, etc.). Finally, we discuss how this materially- and community-grounded mode for understanding and changing the conditions of contamination uncovered
the limits of standard approaches and demanded an inductive integrated approach and novel methodological apparatus more responsive to grounded knowledge and concerns.
The paper uses a series of case studies and episodes (reuse of plastics containing additives, artisanal depollution, exposure of olive groves) as nodes to think through the profoundly political dimension of waste problem formation and knowledge production with broader relevance for waste processing hubs.