Visualizing Agbogbloshie and Re-envisioning E-Waste Anthropology

Chapter 5 engages a critical discussion of the visual economy of e-waste ruination in Agbogbloshie. It explores how, through ethnographic research in general and participatory photography in particular, images make meaning and shape e-waste imaginations. Circulating e-waste images of Agbogbloshie, the author argues, expose the power and utility of e-pyropolitical imagery to make, tell, and even distort and mystify life in Ghana’s e-wasteland. The chapter interrogates the e-pyropolitical gaze conditioning how digital rubble and toxic colonialism are seen. Countering the e-waste “crisis of representation” in Agbogbloshie, the author considers the possible role of participatory photography as an alternative technique of e-waste visualization, in addition to considering the ways in which these worker-based forms of witnessing e-waste can help justify and provide a methodological grounding for the very decolonization of e-waste studies in Ghana in particular.

The Politics of Waste and Social Inequalities in Indian Cities

Waste studies is premised on the understanding that waste is not essentially dirty or invaluable, but rather an arena through which classification, social boundaries, and state-making takes place. Mary Douglas’s structural approach in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (2002) forms the cornerstone of waste studies by seeing waste as “matter out of place.” It explores the social function of waste as posing a problem of the unknown, disorderly and disturbing. The terming of something as “disorderly,” “risky,” “insanitary,” or “polluted,” Douglas argues, constitutes dominant power structures of states and scientific and religious institutions that determine the drawing of individual, social, and cultural boundaries. Douglas’s insights are used to recognize the ways the categories of value-non-value, norm-exception, structure-deviation, nature-culture, and object-subject get made. As a constructed category, waste in the context of Indian cities is seen to exacerbate existing class inequalities as well as to express and reify caste structures, together constituting a distinct postcolonial urbanism. Urban waste practices lay bare disjunctures of India’s postcolonial modernity in the everyday functioning of the state, labor, and economy for urban sanitation, which deploy caste-community labor of the former untouchable castes for waste-work. At the same time, colonially constituted sanitary science and advanced waste technology adopted by municipalities frame a circular relationship between poverty and disease, deeming the urban poor, their dwellings in crowded slums, and the work of sanitation as the cause of filth, squalor, and the contamination of cities. The prevalence and dominance of particular cultures of sanitation can be linked to social location, including an intersection of caste, class, minority, linguistic, and gender identities, requiring a political understanding of social interests within urban governance and the science of sanitation. In describing these disjunctures at the heart of India’s urbanism, this review will outline five conceptual tropes through which waste in Indian cities has been viewed: (1) as a common resource in a fluid terrain of property rights; (2) as informal and enabling the right to the city; (3) in terms of the colonial making of waste infrastructure, as highly unequal and differentiated; (4) as socially reproducing stigmatized caste labor through a social division of purity and pollution; and (5) as involving multiple stakeholders, including private initiatives, neoliberal policies, international networks, and global circuits.

Sorting, shredding and smelting scrap

The global economy of e-waste recycling has received much attention in recent waste studies literature. This article gives an account from the inside of two different sites within a leading high-tech recycling and smelting company in which such e-waste is assessed; and discusses the valuation of electronic waste in the course of its industrial processing. Based on a two-month long ethnography by way of an internship, the article examines how the recycler manages to distinguish and separate out valuable ‘scrap’, in contrast to valueless ‘waste’. The article subdivides the inquiry into two questions. What practices are involved when transforming e-waste into scrap and waste? And how can we appreciate differences in how they are configured? The study of two different facilities in operation next to one another provides additional leverage to the inquiry since the valuation practices involved when assessing the incoming e-waste differ between them. Differences are tied to specificities in how the electronics are sorted out, shredded, and smelted. The article shows how these processes of deformation are linked to the valuation practices and the accounting system of the company. Calculations, it is argued, succeed only because things are literally broken.

USE OF WASTE OF NON-COLOR METALLURGY IN THE PRODUCTION OF CERAMIC BRICK ON THE BASIS OF FOREST-LIKE LOAM

The article is devoted to environmental aspects of ceramic brick production using non-ferrous metallurgy waste. Studies show that the use of polymetallic ore dressing as a tailing agent and the tails of gravity of zircon-ilmenite ore as a plasticizing part makes it possible to obtain ceramic bricks with improved technical characteristics, eliminating the use of traditional raw materials. The study used regression analysis, with the help of which mathematical models were obtained that were not included in the series of the experiment of ceramic masses