This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Reassembling Rubbish

Mapping E-waste as a Controversy: From Statements to Debates I

I study the geography of electronic discards, often called 'e-waste'. I am interested in many aspects of it and try to approach the issue as what Latour (2005) calls a 'matter of concern'. There are many things at stake with e-waste as a matter of concern, but one of the important ones is 'numbers': whose numbers are correct? Indeed, the quantity, quality, and- more often -absence of quantitative data about e-waste is a source of controversy for those that study it. The sorts of issues that are entrained in such a controversy include the problem of dueling experts - that is, situations where it can be difficult to adjudicate the trustworthiness of truth claims by authorities.

To help with these kinds of problems, Venturini (2010a, b) proposes to 'dive into magma'. What he means is to forgo the idea that cold, hard, indisputable facts will be found in a controversy. What there are instead are broiling hot statements (i.e., those that are controversial) uttered by specific actors in fluid debates, networked together in specific sites. Statements, debates, actors, and networks can be followed and in following them, those of us who are not experts ourselves can learn to judge which of the dueling experts are more or less partisan and thus who is more trustworthy.

When mapping a controversy it is helpful to move from specific statements to the debate(s) in which they are situated and then from the debates to lists of relevant actors. There are many places to look for statements from which to start mapping a controversy and they need not be specialized. A newspaper will do. Below is an article from Bloomberg journalist Adam Minter. His article is one possible way into mapping the e-waste controversy. In this first move I use the article to collect a preliminary list of statements or claims about e-waste. These I have highlighted in blue. A preliminary list of actors is highlighted in green. In preparation for a later move in the mapping process I have also highlighted in green specific sites mentioned in the article.

Here are excerpts of Minter's article:

U.S. Isn’t Flooding the Third World With E-Waste By Adam Minter May 26, 2013 7:30 PM GMT-0230

Every year, Americans toss out as much as 4.5 million tons of old mobile phones, laptops, televisions, Xboxes and other electronic gadgets.

Some is recycled; some is repaired and refurbished for reuse; and some is thrown into landfills or incinerators. Almost none of it, however, is “dumped” overseas.

That, at least, is the conclusion of the first comprehensive survey of what happens to U.S. e-waste after it is dropped into a recycling bin. Published in February, the study by the U.S. International Trade Commission surveyed 5,200 businesses involved in the e-waste industry (companies that received the survey were required by law to complete it, and to do so accurately), and found that almost 83 percent of what was put into American recycling bins in 2011 was repaired, dismantled or recycled domestically.

According to the same survey, only 0.13 percent of the 4.4 million tons of e-waste that Americans generated in 2011 was sent overseas for “final disposal” - a term that explicitly excludes recycling and reuse - with an additional --3 percent sent abroad for “unknown” purposes.

Reality is a far cry from the long-standing claim, first made by the Basel Action Network, a
Seattle-based nongovernmental organization in 2002, that as much as 80 percent of U.S. e-waste is exported to the developing world. Amazingly, even with the wide currency the claim has enjoyed over the years among environmental organizations and the media, it was never based on a systematic study.

Misguided Efforts

This misunderstanding has led to several efforts at erecting partial export bans on U.S. electronics to developing countries, which - -other studies demonstrate -- import them as cheap and sustainable alternatives to new equipment. As a result, perfectly usable electronics are diverted into a recycling stream, where they are turned into raw materials, rather than into markets where they can be reused for years.

There are no statistics on how many used gadgets were exported from the U.S. to the developing world in 2002. Nor, for that matter, can anyone say for sure what happened to those gadgets. No doubt, many were broken down in developing-world facilities, where low-technology and often-hazardous methods of recycling and disposal were employed (such as the use of acids to strip copper and other metals from circuit boards in open, unprotected environments).

Anecdotally, I have been told by recyclers in southern China that cheap, secondhand electronics exported from the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, the European Union were used by Chinese computer labs, offices and dormitories in the 1990s through the mid-2000s, when new gadgetry simply wasn’t affordable. (There has been no comprehensive survey to verify these claims, however.)

It was a good deal for the U.S., too: In the 1990s and early 2000s, America didn’t really have an electronics-recycling sector, and those machines would have been put in a landfill if China hadn’t wanted them. Nonetheless, as China developed, and incomes rose, demand for those used machines dropped off.

The good news is that a similar cycle is occurring in Africa, where used electronics from the EU and the U.S. have become a critical means of bridging the global digital gap. Unlike Chinese imports in the 1990s and early 2000s, the African imports are being surveyed and quantified.

For example, a 2011 study by the United Nations Environment Program determined that only 9 percent of the used electronics imported by Nigeria - a country that is regularly depicted as a dumping ground for foreign e-waste - didn’t work or were unrepairable, and thus bound for a recycler or a dump. The other 91 percent were reusable and bound for consumers who couldn’t afford new products.

A preliminary list of statements, actors, and sites

In the above article excerpt I have highlighted claims in blue and actors and sites with green. What do we learn as a consequence? First, that in a rather short article (just over than 1100 words) there are many statements, actors, and sites in the e-waste controversy.

Selected statements (in order of appearance):

"U.S. Isn't Flooding the Third World with E-waste"

"Every year Americans toss out as much as 4.5 million tons ..."

"Some is recycled; some is repaired and refurbished for reuse; and some is thrown into landfills or incinerators. Almost none of it, however, is “dumped” overseas."

"...almost 83 percent of what was put into American recycling bins in 2011 was repaired, dismantled or recycled domestically [...] only 0.13 percent of the 4.4 million tons of e-waste that Americans generated in 2011 was sent overseas for “final disposal” - a term that explicitly excludes recycling and reuse - with an additional --3 percent sent abroad for “unknown” purposes."

"Reality is a far cry from the long-standing claim, first made by the Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based nongovernmental organization in 2002, that as much as 80 percent of U.S. e-waste is exported to the developing world. Amazingly, even with the wide currency the claim has enjoyed over the years among environmental organizations and the media, it was never based on a systematic study."

The selected statements above begin to reveal some terrain of the e-waste controversy. Notice the headline of Minter's article. It situates what follows it by making a bold statement about a state of affairs between a country (the US) and a region (the Third World). Assuming a headline is designed to catch a reader's attention, then we can infer that the debate into which Minter is inserting his article includes the claim that the US is flooding the Third World with e-waste. So here is one move from a statement to a debate. The statement, in the form of Minter's headline, is a kind of surveying device used by cartographers trying to map the terrain of an unknown landscape. Like actual cartographers, those of us who are not already experts in the terrain of a given debate are thrown into the middle of things. Just like cartographers we have to find some ways to orient ourselves without full knowledge of what the facts are (such as our location - if we knew that fact, our location, already then why would we need to map the terrain?) or who all the participants are in the debate. Minter's headline is one tiny move we can use to start to orient ourselves since a statement is always relational. In other words, statements are not made in a vacuum; they presuppose a wider conversation with other participants and an audience.

Other related moves from statements to debates can be found from the claims about how much Americans toss out and about what happens to those things when they are tossed out. Minter includes important qualifiers to his claims. He tells a reader that, "...as much as 4.5 million tons" of various electronics are tossed out by Americans. That phrase 'as much as' is important. It is a qualifier. It is a hint that the figure being reported comes with at least some uncertainty. Minter links to a US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) report for the source of the 4.5 million ton figure. So a literary technique is in play, one that involves qualification and deference to external sources that are deemed authoritative. This is the technique of modest witnessing, something that I will say more about later. For now, understand that 'modest witnessing' is a literary device that is crucial for a number of genres, including scientific writing (as Shapin and Schaffer (1985) demonstrate.)

An initial analytical cut through BAN's claim tells us the following:

That BAN attributes the statistic of 50-80 percent to 'informed industry insiders' and 'very knowledgeable and informed industry sources', yet does not state who the sources are except in one instance (a phone interview with Mike Magliaro). Notice a very important shift that occurs within BAN's report then: a single attributed source is pluralized. The one becomes the several. This is a move that suggests there are many experts that make the same estimate about e-waste exports as Mike Magliaro does, yet the BAN report only cites one. This shift of one-to-many is a move to note since it may start to hint at the relative partisanship of the report.
The photograph of asset tags that appears on p. 14 contains three such tags: one from the City of Los Angeles, one from the State of California, and one from the L.A. Unified School District. Together with the caption, the report implies that these tags are a mere selection out of an undisclosed number of such tags collected and photographed by BAN. So the photograph and the caption work in combination to expand or pluralize the evidence said to support the 50-80 percent estimate. Thus, as in the previous point, three instances are made more plural. At the same time the report gives no information about how the asset tags were collected that would let a reader know whether those that are pictured on p. 14 come from some sort of systematic sample or not. Here again is a signal about the degree of partisanship in the report.

There is more to be said about the BAN report and the trace it leaves in the e-waste literature. I will return to that momentarily, but for now let's turn to Minter's article and its use of the US International Trade Commission (USITC, 2013) report to examine statements and the debates in which they are situated.

As reported by Minter (2013), the USITC's report is referenced to lend credence to the claim that "almost 83 percent of what was put into American recycling bins in 2011 was repaired, dismantled or recycled domestically". Minter does not quote the report, nor give a page number for the figure of 83 percent. However, when I search USITC's 250 page document the only reference to a figure of 83 percent that I can find occurs in a footnote on p. 4-10 (that is page four "dash" ten). The sentence and footnote read as follows: "Consistent with their primary activity, refurbishers accounted for the largest portion of UEP [Used Electronic Products] exports related to refurbishment and repair in 2011 - 72 percent by volume, or 60.2 million units.³²" (USITC, 2013). Footnote 32 reads, "Low-precision estimate, with an RSE [Relative Standard Error] of 83 percent" (USTIC, 2013: 4-10). Now, the figure described in footnote 32 is interesting. There the reference to 83 percent is to a measure of statistical error, not to a measure of what proportion of UEPs were recycled domestically in the US. An RSE of 83 percent is very high. The lower an RSE is, the more precise a result is statistically speaking (the USITC report gives a nice example in Box 1.2 on p. 1-8). However, in the 'Key Findings and Observations' section of the USITC report, we learn that exports of UEPs from the US amount to "7 percent of total sales" of UEPs (USITC, 2013: xiii). The corollary of the 7 percent export figure is, by straight arithmetic, that 93 percent of total sales of UEPs are domestic to the US (a figure confirmed by data given in Table ES.1 on p. xiii of USITC, 2013). So whiter the figure of 83 percent? The following seem possible:

Minter mistook a measure of statistical error about exports for a measure of domestic recycling. This possibility seems unlikely given the other possibilities below.
Minter miscalculated the 83 percent as a corollary to the 7 percent figure (if so and the USITC figures are correct, then the picture is even rosier than Minter claims - almost 93 percent of 'what was put into American recycling bins in 2011 was repaired, dismantled or recycled domestically')
Minter has a source related to USITC (e.g., one or more of the authors of the report) who gave him the 83 percent figure
Minter has a source for the 83 percent other than USITC and is misattributing it to that report.

If the first possibility is as unlikely as I think it is, then it would seem that, according to Minter and USITC, somewhere between 83-93 percent of "of what was put into American recycling bins in 2011 was repaired, dismantled or recycled domestically" (Minter, 2013). We are now confronted with a range more or less diametrically opposed to the range supported by BAN (50-80 percent exported). To use one Venturini's (2010b) metaphors here is a fault line in the e-waste controversy. On one side of the fault, BAN claims 50-80 percent of electronics collected for recycling in the western US are exported to Asia. On the other side of the fault, Minter's evidence indicates that between 83-93 percent of electronics collected for recycling in the US are repaired, dismantled or recycled within the US. On each side of the fault we can trace out a constellation of statements and the actors that make them, something I will do as we move along this path. But before doing that, I want to push harder on the issue of partisanship.

In contrast to the BAN report, the USITC document is at pains to demonstrate its methodological rigour. It has a chapter section (p. 1-7 --- 1-11) and at least four appendices (Appendices A, E, F, and H) devoted to describing its methods. These methods include a survey of businesses in the UEP business, the use of both public and confidential census data on exports of a variety of electronic products, a public hearing, visits by the report's research team to various types of facilities in the UEP sector (e.g., recycling plants, asset disposition firms, original equipment manufacturers), and a literature review that included BAN's (2002) report. All of these methodological approaches have their pros and cons and the report makes at least some of these explicit. It notes, for example, that several participants in the public hearing voiced concerns about a survey approach since they found it unlikely that respondents would accurately report export activity that might raise doubts about the legality of that activity (see USITC, 2013: 1-8, footnote 28). Whatever the various shortcomings of these methods may be, the move made by the report is to make those shortcomings public, that is, to make its partisanship explicit. Here is a signal, perhaps, about the degree of partisanship in play when two sources, BAN and USITC, are compared.

Taken together, then, we can recognize forms of writing - even literary techniques or rhetoric (in the positive sense of that term) - at play in all of these documents: the BAN report, Minter's article, and the USITC report. In this sense, they are all the same. Their use of numbers all rely on modes of representing those numbers in such a way as to bolster their claims to trustworthy knowledge. This literary technique is what science and technology studies (STS) scholars like to call 'modest witnessing' (see for example Shapin and Shaffer, 1987; Haraway, 1991). In short, modest witnessing is a literary technique in which the author(s) of a truth claim present that claim in such a way as to suggest that the claim would be judged true by anyone who followed the same methods as the author(s) and, more importantly, that the claim so judged does not come from the author(s) but from some other authoritative source(s) such as instruments and/or acknowledged experts (STS scholarship has a long critical but also celebratory engagement with modest witnessing; see Shapin and Schaffer, 1987 and Haraway, 1991 for a taste). In controversy mapping rather than look for the source which (supposedly) offers raw, unvarnished fact versus biased opinion, we can activate our tools of discernment and ask ourselves which source appears more partisan than the other(s)?

Given that all the documents discussed so far rely on the same rhetorical moves, it begs the question of why there is a dispute, a controversy, over numbers about e-waste. Let's trace the influence that a particular floating statement has had in the controversy: the claim about what happens to 50-80 percent of the electronics collected for recycling in the US.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page is referenced by:

Mapping E-waste as a Controversy: Following a Floating Statement A floating statement can be any kind of utterance--in text, image, audio, what have you. The point of paying attention to them is to develop an understanding of the conditions that enabled a floating statement to be uttered. In the case of the BAN statement about 50-80 percent of e-waste being exported, understanding those conditions is simple up to a point, after which things get decidedly more complicated. On another part of this path I explored how the literary strategy of modest witnessing is at work in Minter's (2013) article, the United States International Trade Commission (2013) report, and the BAN report Exporting Harm (2002). To follow a floating statement, it needs time to travel and here is where some differences come in with these three documents. Exporting Harm and its claims about the 50-80 percent export figure have been in circulation for over a decade. This makes the report's travels much easier to trace using classic techniques of citation analysis. A visual summary of the process can be found below and a more detailed explanation follows.
Now, just because a document is cited a lot does not by itself mean that it is influential. All those other papers citing the BAN report might be doing that so as to show the report's shortcomings. However, as someone who knows the e-waste literature well (I'd like to think), I also know that the BAN report is often cited as part of what I might call the justificatory sweep of many e-waste article's opening paragraphs where they 'set the scene' for the reported research that follows in a given paper. What does vary somewhat in how the BAN report is cited in the literature is the degree to which the 50-80 percent export figure is taken as established fact. Sometimes a paper will cite the BAN report as if that 50-80 percent figure is well established fact. Other papers will cite the report with some kind of qualification. This is what I and my co-author did in our first paper on the e-waste trade (Lepawsky and McNabb, 2010). There we qualified our citation of BAN (and other related environmental NGO reports) by writing that these groups "allege" the veracity of their estimates of e-waste exports. It was the BAN report that had initially drawn my attention to e-waste as a matter of concern, roughly around the time I was finishing my PhD in 2005. In reading the BAN report and others, I was interested, for sure, in their claims but I did not yet understand the trustworthiness of those claims. In that uncertainty was a good chunk of the impetus behind developing a research program around e-waste. By following BAN's claim that 50-80 percent of e-waste collected in the western US is actually exported, a very interesting trajectory emerges: by 2009 that figure reaches the status of fact in a US Congressional hearing on electronic waste (United States Congress, 2009). In that hearing the Basel Action Network is referred to explicitly in the "Background" section of the hearing as follows: "According to the Basel Action Network (BAN), approximately 80 percent of the e-waste directed to recycling in the U.S. is not recycled, but is instead exported" (United States Congress, 2009, no page number). Note some important shifts that occurs here. It is the upper estimate (80 percent) of the BAN figure that is reported. It is qualified with the adverb "approximately". And export is taken to be evidence of an absence of recycling ("...not recycled, but is instead exported"). Later in the hearing in the text of a prepared speech Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas states, "It really is stunning to know that United States exports 80 percent of its electronic waste to other countries" (United States Congress, 2009, no page number). So, within this hearing we can witness the variable veracity (what Latour would call the 'factishness') of the 50-80 percent figure claimed by BAN. In the hearing background material that figure is an approximation. For Representative Johnson it is a known fact. Thus, since the release of Exporting Harm in 2002, the 50-80 percent export figure as a floating statement exhibits several variations and a range of veracity: "[i]nformed industry insiders have indicated that around 80% of what comes through their doors will be exported to Asia, and 90% of that has been destined for China" (BAN, 2002: 11) "[v]ery knowledgeable and informed industry sources, however, have estimated that around 80% of what is diverted to recycling [in the US] is actually exported to Asia" (BAN, 2002: 14). Then, in the 2009 US Congressional hearing: "According to the Basel Action Network (BAN), approximately 80 percent of the e-waste directed to recycling in the U.S. is not recycled, but is instead exported" (United States Congress, 2009, no page number). "It really is stunning to know that United States exports 80 percent of its electronic waste to other countries" (United States Congress, 2009, no page number). Instead of a matter of fact--if by fact is meant a settled issue on which everyone agrees--it is helpful to conceptualize the 50-80 percent figure as a matter of concern. That way, we can continue to follow the action that the travels of that figure leaves in its wake (as Latour might say)--and learn from what that action reveals about e-waste as a controversy and the degree of partisanship of the various actors in the debate.
Mapping E-waste as a Controversy: From Statements to Debates II As I suggested in my discussion of Adam Minter's (2013) article, an important part of the e-waste controversy is the trustworthiness of statistics cited to characterize the scope of e-waste as a problem. One of the key figures that circulates in the peer reviewed literature about e-waste is the claim from BAN (2002) that 50-80 percent of electronics collected for recycling in the US are exported. I have followed that statement along a trajectory into the realm of formal politics where BAN's figure plays an explicit role in framing the debate about e-waste in the US (United States Congress, 2009). What happens when we follow another trajectory, one defined by the peer reviewed literature that cites BAN's (20020 report Exporting Harm?

U.S. Isn’t Flooding the Third World With E-Waste By Adam Minter May 26, 2013 7:30 PM GMT-0230

A preliminary list of statements, actors, and sites

Selected statements (in order of appearance):

Actors and sites (in order of appearance):

This page has paths:

This page is referenced by: