Worlding Electronic Waste

Chapter 3 | The Discard Test

Chapter 3 explores how a jumble of disparate people, places, and things coheres into a story about e-waste as a problem of global justice. It examines the legal proceedings of two court cases in which Joseph Benson, a Nigerian citizen, became the first person to be jailed in the UK for exporting waste. Building on claims made in previous chapters, Chapter 3 argues that electronic waste is a non-coherent entity. It is non-coherent in that two entities, waste and non-waste, go under the same name--discarded electronics. Judges and juries were confronted with the practical problem, then, of composing a judgement at a conjuncture of laws relevant to the case that build in clashing ways of enacting waste and its other, non-waste.

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