Author's response to reviews of <i>Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste</i>Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Wasteby Josh Lepawsky, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018, 240 pp., paper $42.00 (ISBN 978‐0262535335)

Lepawsky, Josh

doi:10.1111/cag.12587

Cited by 21 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…Indeed, the project of awareness has been too easily articulated to discourses of individual responsibility. Here we follow cultural geographers such as Josh Lepawsky (2018) and Max Liboiron (in Hess and Hutton 2019), who in their own ways show that individual consumer actions are ineffective as a means of addressing global problems of resource use, pollution and waste. Paraphrasing Liboiron (in Hess and Hutton 2019), while individual musicians and fans may choose not to buy vinyl records, to adopt less constant listening practices in relation to streaming services, to write forms of music that style themselves as engines of eco-criticism – such acts do not amount to much.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Are the widely accepted ideals of more music, more storage, more bandwidth, more devices – more everything – sustainable? Can listeners delaminate the idea of better from the expectation of more, calling for what Lepawsky (2018) calls genuine and extended producer responsibility throughout music's supply chains and waste streams? What might the mechanisms of such a shift look like?…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, the rapid fashion cycles and planned obsolescence of these devices mean that well-resourced consumers, especially in the Global North but also elsewhere, purchase tons of them – and that those consumers often quickly dispose of them, thereby contributing to the problem of electronic waste (cf. Lepawsky 2018). While people use their phones and computers to do many things besides listen to music, that does not absolve (listening to) music from various social responsibilities.…”

Section: Environmental Costmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The cost of music

Brennan

Devine

2020

Pop. Mus.

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What is the cost of music in the so-called Anthropocene? We approach this question by focusing on the case of sound-recording formats. We consider the cost of recorded music through two overlapping lenses: economic cost, on the one hand, and environmental cost, on the other. The article begins by discussing how the price of records has changed from the late 19th to the 21st century and across the seven most economically significant playback formats: phonograph cylinder, gramophone disc, vinyl LP, cassette tape, compact disc, digital audio files on hard drive, and streaming from the cloud. Our case study territory is the United States, and we chart the gradual decline in the price of recorded music up to the present. We then examine the environmental and human costs of music by looking at what recordings are made out of, where those materials come from, and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Despite what rhetorics of digital dematerialisation tell us, we show that the labour conditions in the digital electronics and IT industries are as inhumane as ever, while the amount of greenhouse gases released by the US recording industry could actually be higher today than at the height of any previous format. We conclude by asking the obvious (but by no means straightforward) question: what are musicians and fans to do?

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Environmental Costmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The cost of music

Brennan

Devine

2020

Pop. Mus.

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“…I pursue three arguments, structured around (while also unsettling) the linear narrative of removal: first, detailing the practices of planning, preparation and re-containment, I argue that removal is materially impossible. This speaks to the diverse scholarship on disposal that has demonstrated how things cannot disappear; attending to objects such as ships (Gregson et al., 2010a), clothing (Stanes and Gibson, 2017), electronics (Lepawsky, 2018) and personal belongings (Crewe, 2011), studies of disposal have argued that objects can only be transformed. In the latter half of the paper, I then turn to the production and circulation of visual representations made to evidence removal.…”

Section: The Matter Of Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I examine the removal process by ‘following’ the disposal of the stockpile across time and space (Cook et al., 2004; Gregson et al., 2010a). Hazardous material flows are always uneven, but they rarely follow simple North-to-South waste narratives (Lepawsky, 2018). The ethnography spanned Greece, Tanzania, Poland, Belgium, Sweden and the United Kingdom, assembling a material biography of unending transformation which extends over thirty years.…”

Section: Re-assembling a Stockpilementioning

confidence: 99%

Toxic sights: The spectacle of hazardous waste removal

Balayannis

2020

Environ Plan D

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This paper examines the geographies of hazardous waste removal. Over the past decade, studies of disposal have demonstrated the myriad ways in which things can never disappear – they can only be transformed, transmuted, combusted, combined or any other manner of material change. This paper aims to develop understandings of the material politics of disposal by considering the matter of representation. It does this ethnographically, by following a chemical stockpile though the process of removal from its storage site in Tanzania. In examining everyday disposal practices, this paper highlights the materialities of hazardous waste in ways that have been epistemologically side-lined. Locating the analysis at the intersection of matter and representation, the paper illustrates the centrality of paper-work, diagrams, photographs and standard operating procedures in performing removal. It argues that removal is achieved through a bureaucratic spectacle; a process which obscures lingering residues and compounds their toxic effects. By attending to chemicals through the mundane work of removal, this paper opens up different lines of inquiry for studies of waste, and enriches understandings of materiality by considering how visual representations make a difference.

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Extended producer responsibility’s effect on producers’ electronic waste management practices in Japan and Canada: drivers, barriers, and potential of the urban mine

2023

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Electronic waste is the fastest-growing domestic waste stream globally, continuously outstripping projections. With increasing ubiquity of complex computing, many non-renewables are contained in end-of-life electronics, creating a vast urban mine, potentially hazardous, depending on treatment. The aim of this study is to compare how Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy is applied in two case countries, Japan and Canada, the practical implications of EPR policy design on producer operations, and how EPR affects electronic waste management improvements in each case. These cases share international obligations for electronic waste management but employ contrasting EPR policies. These policies are widespread in both cases, yet are not presided over by larger, regional obligations. Therefore, country-level interviews with electronic waste management stakeholders focusing on how EPR regulation affects producer practice were conducted. The physical application of EPR, as seen in Japan, drives design changes by producers intending to simplify downstream treatment, while financial responsibility in Canada, creates greater concern with cost-savings for producers, complicating end-of-life processing. EPR implementation, along with specific geographical factors, also create contrasting resource recovery results between countries. Regulation primarily drives EPR implementation in both countries, which is consistent with the literature. This study presents new drivers and barriers, namely pre-emptive legislation, and no incentive to improve, classifying the Japanese and Canadian systems as suffering from externalities on an insular system, and lack of harmonization, respectively. This research addresses a gap in comparative studies across regions of physical and financial EPR effects on producer practice.

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Author's response to reviews of Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic WasteReassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Wasteby Josh Lepawsky, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018, 240 pp., paper $42.00 (ISBN 978‐0262535335)

Cited by 21 publications

References 10 publications

The cost of music

The cost of music

Toxic sights: The spectacle of hazardous waste removal

Extended producer responsibility’s effect on producers’ electronic waste management practices in Japan and Canada: drivers, barriers, and potential of the urban mine

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