Paper short abstract:

Professional recycling is said to be the remedy for the global issue of electronic waste. However, results from an ethnographic study reveal that the evaluation of such waste is a complex challenge. It calls for multiple machine setups and non-formalisable knowledge to sense the limits of its value.

Paper long abstract:

Electronic waste (e-waste) is important for recycling policies and industries. Metals, in general, are being processed for more than a century. Yet it took a while to utilise the waste casted off by the electronics industry, which has begun expanding in the 1980s. In fact, today there is a political consensus to foster high-tech recycling of e-waste to reduce hazardous impacts (cf. Lepawsky 2014, Gabrys 2011) even though the process to recycle such leftovers still is difficult to establish.

Many studies discuss problematic recycling practices of the "informal" sector in the global south. Yet, surprisingly, in-depth accounts of "formal" recycling are absent. What are the boundaries the latter is facing? This question is a pressing one, because the industrial solution pushes away alternative practices (like refurbishment). To close a gap in waste-research I present insights from a two-month-long, participatory, actor-network theory (Latour 2013) inspired ethnography of a leading European waste recycler.

There are merely a handful of firms, globally, that have the capacity to invest in such recycling. E-waste is complex to handle—and a value hard to yield. A major part of the organisation of the value chain, my findings suggest, deals with (re-)evaluation. Contracts have to be reorganised regularly. Different kinds of discards are assessed separately—in different machine setups. And workers are sensing when scripts must be recalibrated. Here one finds engineers specialised in novelties and their limits, who are, however, confronted with a public that ignores the fuzzy, embodied and non-formalisable practices they are engaged in.