How do we know e-waste? Electronic discards, the double social life of methods, and their gamut of Othernesses.
Again the point may seem abstract, but it is a crucial one for coming to appreciate the work that methods - any methods - do toward partially formatting the thing they claim to only study, that is, the work they do toward rendering determinate a world (or worlds) that might be fundamentally indeterminate. Here is an example of what I mean. In 2011, a group of Chinese scientists published a paper describing a novel bacterium "isolated from a sludge sample collected from an electronic waste recycling site" (An et al 2011: 9148). This bacterium is able to biodegrade tetrabromobisphenol-A (TBBPA), a brominated flame retardant. In effect, this bacterium, an unknown strain until An et al's (2011) study, can metabolize and breakdown a compound that has been shown to be a human endocrine disruptor, accurately toxic to algae, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish; and which leaks into and bioaccumulates in air, water, and soil. Yet, this bacterium, a form of life of which we have little understanding and over which we have little control, has learned or is learning to live off of compounds in discarded electronics (and much else besides, TBBA is a widely used flame retardant).
Understanding this much brings us to Othernesses not just beyond how we know e-waste, but fundamentally outside our capacity to know at all. As Myra Hird (2012) argues, bacterial interactions with our discards, such as leachate from landfills, occur along biological, chemical, and geological horizons fundamentally beyond our capacity to know. Yet as Clark and Hird (2013) remind us, human life is premised on, not just interdependent with (though it is that too), bacterial life. There are possibilities for Othernesses of e-waste here that are so Other they are fundamentally unknowable. Indeed, it seems indeterminacy - the opposite of what our methods attempt to institute - is a fundamental property of that which is enacted as waste (Hird 2013). And what of the highly asymmetrical ramifying relations (very firmly in favour of bacterial, rather than human flourishing) that might result? What might these 'dark ecologies' (Clark and Hird, 2013) be and mean when they are something other than we can fully know?