Extended responsibility or continued dis/articulation? Critical perspectives on electronic waste policies from the Israeli-Palestinian case

Abstract

Extended producer responsibility policies and interventions propose a template for electronic waste management with considerable and growing discursive and policy traction worldwide. Originating in the global North, they increasingly implicate countries and sites in the global South, in particular, people working in informal electronic waste hubs that process Northern electronic waste. This paper examines the implications of extended producer responsibility in one such place through the lenses of critical waste studies and the dis/articulations approach to global commodity chains, which can usefully be extended to analyze the afterlife of commodities. From Israel and the Palestinian Authority's perspectives, recently activated extended producer responsibility legislation is a common-sense way to rationalize the management of electronic waste. But from the cluster of Palestinian villages that has processed the bulk of Israel's electronic waste for more than a decade, extended producer responsibility constitutes the most recent in a series of external driving forces that have disarticulated and rearticulated their landscapes and livelihoods from external economies over the last half century. The restricted scope of reformist extended producer responsibility policies notion of “responsibility” combined with the asymmetrical terms of dis/articulation between North and South is likely to result in outcomes that not only downgrade the informal sector's position in the value chain, but also undermine their ability to upgrade the electronic waste sector in a way that could avoid further pollution. We consider the options at this junction using the heuristic of suggesting what a more temporally, geographically, and sectorally conceived “extension of responsibility” might mean for extended producer responsibility.

Resource extraction and intersectoral research: Engaging accountable relations in the Environment Community Health Observatory Network

“…Accountability itself has been explored in cross-cultural research and by community-engaged scholars (Latulippe, 2015), particularly Indigenous scholars (Daigle, 2016; Hunt, 2014) and scholars of colour (Naylor et al., 2018; Pulido, 2017b). Those working for environmental change have rooted questions of accountability in theoretical traditions core to the ethic and ethos of environmental studies, such as environmental justice (Pulido and De Lara, 2018) and liberal concepts of consumer responsibility (Davis and Garb, 2019). Encouraging critical engagement with accountability has opened opportunity to explore, for instance, fallacies in equating social licencing with accountable relations (Overduin and Moore, 2017).…”

A model to rapidly assess informal electronic waste systems

“…And, the majority of EPR programs, especially those implemented in regions with a predominant informal sector, have achieved little success in this regard. Case studies from China (Akenji et al, 2001; Kojima et al, 2009), Thailand (Manomaivibool and Vassanadumrongdee, 2011), Romania (Ciocoiu, 2012), and Israel (Davis and Garb, 2019) highlight challenges to achieve high collection rates when competing with informal recyclers.…”

“…Without discounting the harmful working conditions and environmental pollution of informal e-waste recyclers that have played a key role in spurring e-waste policies that create formal management systems, recent literature has argued that the historic and future livelihoods of those collecting and processing e-waste along with their experience and expertise have been neglected by these policies (Davis and Garb, 2019; Gidwani, 2015; Reddy, 2015). As a result, EPR-based e-waste policies risk leaving them increasingly disadvantaged by eliminating their livelihoods, leaving them with a legacy of pollution and injury, and implementing a new regulatory structure that marginalizes and even criminalizes their practices (Davis and Garb, 2019). Indeed, there is a growing understanding of the necessity to partner with the informal sector, and at the very least, incorporate them into existing formal e-waste management systems to achieve collection quotas (Davis and Garb, 2015).…”