Unruly Performativity and Tactics of the Wastebound

It is safe to say that right from the moment when, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the category of “electronic waste” was introduced in Western countries to name a new subtype produced in growing amounts by the Global North, managing this kind of waste has become intertwined with various forms of neocolonial exploitation. Testifying to this is the story with which Josh Lepawsky begins his Reassembling Rubbish (2018), a study of how electronic waste circulates through global, legal, and illegal trade routes, as a normalised part of the world market. In his sociologically and ethnographically informed research, conducted among other places on some of the world's largest electronic junkyards in the Global South, Lepawsky questions the relationship between: the scientific methods of assessing the amounts of e-waste transported globally along trade routes; the common ideas based on those findings spread in textual and visual forms in the media; and the public policies and preventative measures implemented by activists, NGOs, and state institutions. In this context, he traces the emergence of the term “electronic waste” to the year 2000, when it appeared in an article in the journal Electronic Business ( Lepawsky, 2018 : 1). Prior to that, from the 1970s onwards, defunct or obsolete equipment was referred to as “electronic scrap”. The difference in the naming was indicative of how the same material remnants of consumer culture were seemingly framed in public discourse in the United States and European countries. Scrap did not arouse environmental concerns, because it was considered to be predominantly a potential secondary source of base and precious metals. What would happen with scrap, if it were not reused, rarely provoked ecological alarm. Electronic waste, on the contrary, indicated discards which at the turn of the twenty-first century started to fill landfills in such quantities that their accumulated toxicity came to be discussed as a potential health and environmental hazard in the decades to come. Accordingly, discarded electronic equipment treated as scrap was regarded as a resource, whereas when qualified as waste it had to be carefully disposed of and managed ( Lepawsky, 2018 : 3).