Authors:
Melissa Gregg
Electronic waste is "the fastest growing waste stream in the world" and has been so for over a decade. The earliest reference I have for this claim is a 2014 International Labour Organization report [1], though it feels like I've been hearing it my whole life.
Early awareness of e-waste's colossal reach came from foundational advocacy by the Basel Action Network, whose 2002 film Exporting Harm (https://bit.ly/3ZJxfw3) exposed the myth of electronics recycling. Footage from the documentary showed children and waste workers gleaning commodity metals from dangerous piles of digital detritus in rural China. Exporting e-waste is now against the law in many jurisdictions, with hardware manufacturers mandated to pay substantial fees to cover disposal costs. The process is known as "extended producer responsibility."
E-waste has been the basis of academic study in a wide range of disciplines, including my own fields of media, communication, and science and technology studies [2,3]. Curiosity with e-waste's seemingly intractable hold on our lives has prompted a whole new field of "discard studies" [4].
E-waste is also big business. Traders congregate at conferences such as E-Scrap, Circularity, and E-Reuse (recently rebranded as the Electronics Sustainability Summit), as well as at annual meetings for the Reverse Logistics Association. In June, I attended the ITAD & Circular Electronics Conference & Expo 2025 in Frankfurt, a kind of mega-expo of four e-waste events in one.
Speakers at these events include international nonprofits, municipal councils, standards bodies, and device manufacturers who draw from a consistent body of statistics to inspire better product stewardship and improve take-back and recycling rates. A common figure used to frame these discussions is that, on average, less than 25 percent of electronics is recycled. Even though facilities exist for people to donate, return, or dispose of old technology, consumers lack the time, motivation, and capacity to act on this knowledge consistently.
The most recent Global E-Waste Monitor [5] notes that "a record 62 million tonnes (Mt) of e-waste was produced in 2022, up 82 percent from 2010" [5]. By any measure, attempts to stem the tide of e-waste are failing. This raises a question: What if statistics aren't the best way to understand (and ultimately change) the situation?
The Information Dump
Timothy Morton [6] has a phrase for rituals of data exchange about sustainability problems that are designed to elicit shock and action—"the information dump." Rehearsing outrageous statistics is perhaps a way to simulate a sense of control over the situation. Yet, in Morton's view, this mode of conveying information is "actually inhibiting a more genuine way of handling ecological knowledge."
Right now, it's as if we are waiting for just the right kind of data, then we can start living in accord with it. But this data will never arrive, because its delivery mode is designed to prevent the appropriate reaction.
After 20 years, we can conclude that the paranoid mode of e-waste activism has not mobilized the mainstream.
It's a useful way to think about e-waste, because the annual update of disappointing figures is currently not generating much variation in response. In the U.S., that was the case even before the Department of Government Efficiency likely eliminated the public servants whose job it is to compile these statistics.
The customary recitation of poor return rates at industry conferences is perplexing, given that a 100 percent goal for product returns has never been imagined as a target by anyone with the power to put it in place. We already know that things are bad when it comes to waste's environmental harms, but the data fetish holds open the idea that we may be able to change course. It creates a futile sense of optimism, suggesting that there will be an improvement instead of acknowledging how bad things are and doing something.
Morton's solution to the knowing/doing bind for climate action is to avoid the paradigm entirely. We simply cannot know in advance how to live in the environmental future. Instead, we should learn to appreciate how we already are ecological.
When Exposure Fails
Another theorist of feeling, Eve Sedgwick, once suggested that negative effects are part of the problem when it comes to imagining life otherwise. Sedgwick is a foundational figure in queer theory, a branch of philosophy interested in how dominant patterns of social organization are maintained through sex and gender. Sedgwick's literary scholarship was attuned to the "critical habits" of her academic colleagues, and the "unintentionally stultifying side effects" of already knowing in advance what we are supposed to be mad about. Her most famous work, Epistemology of the Closet, shows how Western culture organized knowledge in such a way that sex could hide or expose the "truth" of a person.
Sedgwick's idea of "paranoid epistemology," from a later book, Touching Feeling, captures our obsession with the idea of "knowledge per se—knowledge in the form of exposure…as though to make something visible as a problem were, if not a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting it solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction." I often think of Sedgwick when people talk about e-waste, because it has been the tech industry's open secret for as long as computers have existed. As Jonathan Sterne memorably put it, "the disposability of computers may be one of the truly distinctive features of new media in our age. Or rather, it is the perception of their disposability that is so novel and interesting" [7].
As a political technique, perpetually unmasking the urgency of ecological facts as news dulls awareness of the accumulation of waste by individuals and societies over time. There is something about the temporality of outrage that needs to be understood here. Activism's necessarily short-term objectives can lead to a wider amnesia regarding the generational accomplishments of policy wins and losses. Ultimately, annual tallies of metric tonnes detach us from the ordinary ongoingness of waste as a daily practice. It is the perception that, by tracking the noxious object, such as carbon emissions, we're actually doing something to stop it.
Beyond Measure
Morton and Sedgwick help me appreciate the limits of counting e-waste as a means to fix the structural reality of forced obsolescence. Such topical treatments are compensatory gestures in the face of a bigger system that is designed to overproduce disposable devices from the start. This is what leads to paralysis about e-waste, as much as any other political issue: It's easy to believe that our own actions aren't important enough to trigger change.
After 20 years, we can conclude that the paranoid mode of e-waste activism has not mobilized the mainstream. Unveiling hidden processes of waste exports and compiling statistics to elicit shame about recycling share an outdated faith in exposure. Far better to acknowledge complicity, a concept that explains how, having fully absorbed the information about e-waste's persistence, we still proceed to act as we do. This is the territory of humanities as much as social science to explain, though these are disciplines rarely invited to E-Scrap.
Touching Feeling illustrated how disabling negative effects can be in "blocking the potentially operative goal of seeking positive affect" [8]. Learning from Sedgwick, a better path to counter the sorry statistics of sustainability activism is to demonstrate the overwhelming benefits of equitably distributed, long-lasting, low-carbon technology. As Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller conclude, "reenchantment with both low-wattage culture and nonhuman nature are prerequisites" for any ecological vision of the future [2]. Morton similarly advocates ecological politics dedicated to "expanding, modifying, and developing new forms of pleasure, not restraining the meager pleasures we already experience" [6].
These writers help us contemplate the more hopeful, even joyous computing future we can bring about precisely because it is composed of products built to endure.
References
1. International Labour Organization. Tackling Informality in E-Waste Management: The Potential of Cooperative Enterprises. 2014; https://bit.ly/3H2wcRH
2. Maxwell, R. and Miller, T. Greening the Media. Oxford University Press, 2012.
3. Lepawsky, J. Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste. MIT Press, 2018.
4. Liboiron, M. Why discard studies? Discard Studies. May 7, 2014; https://bit.ly/3Zrd99P
5. Baldé, C.P. et al. The Global E-Waste Monitor 2024. United Nations Institute for Training and Research, International Telecommunication Union, and Foundation Carmignac. November 2024; https://bit.ly/4jfHM9r
6. Morton, T. Being Ecological. MIT Press, 2019.
7. Sterne, J. Out with the trash: On the future of new media. In Residual Media. C.R. Acland, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 16–31.
8. Sedgwick, E.K. Touching Feeling:Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press Books, 2003.
Author
Melissa Gregg is a writer, ethnographer, and sustainability strategist to the tech industry, as well as a professor of digital futures at the University of Bristol. [email protected]
Copyright 2025 held by owner/author
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2025 ACM, Inc.
Post Comment
No Comments Found