Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics

Conclusion

DIGITAL RUBBISH THEORY

In these reflections on the multiple, on the mix, on the speckled, variegated, tiger-striped, zebra-streaked aggregates, on the crowd, I have attempted to think a new object, multiple in space and mobile in time, unstable and fluctuating like a flame, relational.

—MICHEL SERRES, Genesis

If you make a motor turn in reverse, you do not break it: you build a refrigerator.

—MICHEL SERRES, The Parasite

Zero Waste

Two waste fantasies occupy the imagination of Kevin Lynch at the beginning of his study Wasting Away. These are opposing fantasies, one involving a “waste cacotopia,” a society that produces waste rampantly and profligately, destroying everything it touches. The other involves a waste-free society, where there is “no more garbage, no more sewage; clean air, an unencumbered earth.” In this place, “Plants and animals will be bred to reduce their useless parts: stringless beans, boneless chickens, skinless beets.”¹ There would be no parasites, no weeds, no stray animals, no trash, no dirt, no dust, and “no spills, no breakage, no smoke or smog.” Silence would prevail, and “friction” would be “reduced to the minimum needed to keep us erect and keep things in their place.” As part of this friction-free campaign, “the edges of the continents” would even be “smoothed to reduce the tidal losses.”² This vision of a waste-free society seems as startling as the wasteful one. As Lynch writes, “One fantasy has bred another, and neither seems attractive.”³ Yet it is typically these two polarities that are presented in relation to waste, producing it in abundance, while simultaneously imagining the utopic possibilities of a waste-free society. Perhaps, however, the strange prospect of each of these worlds presents cause for reconsidering the intractability of waste; and by focusing on waste, it may be possible to unearth overlooked relations within the politics and poetics of things.

Strategies for dealing with waste often proceed by imagining its elimination: a society of “zero waste.” In resonance with the second of the two preceding waste fantasies, zero waste is a concept and movement that has emerged as a response to the profligate wastefulness of Western societies and, in particular, to the wastefulness of manufacturing processes.⁴ While the objectives of zero waste—to minimize waste in the waste stream and to develop ways of redesigning industrial processes—are important for addressing waste, “zero” may be a misleading approach to waste. Waste management and sustainable development scenarios typically consist of proposals not just to eliminate but also to make newly productive and profitable the remainders from previous cycles of production and consumption.⁵ In these scenarios, the assumption is often made that if markets emulate “nature,” then it may be possible to arrive at perfectly streamlined material economies. In this way, economies may also become “natural.”⁶ But the sense of the “natural” at work here is twofold: it is supposed, on the one hand, that the “natural” condition of environmental systems is to be at “harmony” (i.e., nature produces no waste) and, on the other hand, that material economies will ideally emulate and advance such natural harmony through the eventual progress offered by new technologies and systems.

Things wear out, fail, and break; systems of value shift and render some things worthless; transience takes hold of even the most enduring artifacts, practices, and places.⁷ Rather than encounter waste, failure, and transience as conditions in need of elimination, it may be possible to consider these conditions as constitutive elements of material processes.⁸ As I have argued in the pages here, there are multiple ways in which electronics generate waste. Rather than imagine the simple elimination of this waste, I have traced these residues from the fossils of manufacture to the sites of technological imagining. By working through these remainders, I have attempted to demonstrate that waste is more than a heap of defunct objects; it is also a mixture of flickering and mutable relations. Through waste, it is possible to think a “new object.” This natural history of electronics, then, proposes a different sense of the “natural,” which does not purify this category as an (ever-receding) ideal to move toward but, instead, considers how new natures are always in the making, emerging in that fluctuating mix of machines, nonhumans, and people. Wastes, too, are a critical part of this natural history: they are not excrescences to be weeded out at some future date. If waste, as Hawkins suggests, is “inevitable,”⁹ this is not because of some tacit agreement with rampant forces of production and consumption but because no society can entirely rid itself of waste. By acknowledging the inevitability of waste, it is possible to think of it not exclusively as a menace to be eradicated but as a formative part of our material lives.

Visions of a waste-free future potentially obscure the very conditions through which waste emerges. Once waste is understood as an integral aspect of processes of materialization, it is no longer possible to imagine its complete elimination or to position it simply as raw material to be fed into friction-free futures. Instead, the persistence of waste occurs in part through the unavoidable remainders that do not easily recycle into new systems of production or that are left behind as the pollution and residue from previous activities. Waste does not consist just of the fossils from past cycles of production and consumption; it is also the remainders generated from continually unanticipated futures. When proposals are made for a “solution” to the waste “problem,” waste is often displaced back into the same productive mechanism that produced waste in the first place.¹⁰ But as discussed in chapter 5, such a “discount on the future,” as Van Loon and Sabelis characterize it,¹¹ does not account for the “costs of irreversibility,”¹² which will contribute to future complexities beyond our present methods of accounting. By appending “zero” to waste, we obstruct the possibility of considering how irreversibility and remainder emerge as integral aspects of waste.¹³

As long as our basic approach to waste depends on its eventual and continual eradication, it will be difficult to grasp the ways in which waste emerges and operates—as generative and dynamic and, as Hawkins suggests, as the “terrain of ethics.”¹⁴ Arguably, the development of apparent waste-eliminating strategies such as recycling not only obscures the inevitability of waste¹⁵ but also defers the ethical aspects of how we attend to waste—whether we bury it, ship it to developing countries, or leave it to future generations to trawl through. It may be possible to move beyond a “dos and don'ts” approach to waste, as Van Loon and Sabelis write, and instead “to generate a radical reconceptualization of waste itself.”¹⁶ Rather than consider recycling as the instant reintegration of waste into the market, it may be possible to attend to the ways in which waste—as a mutable and relational object—offers “possibilities for the unexpected, the creative and the ethical.”¹⁷ The creative and ethical aspects of waste are often typically elided, particularly in campaigns for its elimination or reintegration, yet it is from these remainders and fragments that it is possible to realize the political and poetic registers of matter. Remainders direct us not toward the recovery of “wholeness” but toward new possibilities for working with the “scatter” of the world. Waste allows the possibility for “imagining a new materialism,” as Hawkins suggests, resonating with the material imaginings put forward by Benjamin.¹⁸ But the question of how this materialism emerges and registers still persists.

Garbage Imaginaries

In many cases, attempts to imagine a new materialism for electronics extend from improving the life-cycle impacts of these devices, minimizing their ecological footprint, improving working conditions for fab workers, and banning the exportation of wastes to developing countries for “recycling.”¹⁹ In addition to stricter environmental policies and regulations, design is often seen as a key way in which to improve the environmental impact of electronics. Numerous design projects address ways in which to eliminate, reincorporate, or otherwise track remainder, from point of manufacture on to consumption and disposal. These projects, often based on life-cycle analyses, suggest that waste may be minimized by altering design approaches. This is an ideal way in which to “regulate” waste, as Molotch suggests, because “design determines about 80–90 percent of an artifact's life-cycle economic and ecological costs, in an almost irreversible way.”²⁰ Hazardous materials and landfilling can be avoided through the more careful design of electronics. In this way, Greenpeace's “Guide to Greener Electronics” suggests that electronics companies develop “a chemicals policy based on the Precautionary Principle” and phase out known hazardous materials that are used in machines, including brominated flame retardants and other “problematic substances.”²¹ A complex composite of plastics is also used in electronics, plastics that are difficult to reuse or recycle at end of life and that could be simplified for this purpose. If electronics companies were responsible both for what goes into machines and for their eventual take-back and recycling, then they might possibly begin to find it effective to make these devices less toxic at the outset.

Without a doubt, the reduction of hazardous materials and introduction of methods of recycling and disassembly are necessary developments within the world of electronics.²² Within this area, there are so many projects underway that it is tempting to make a modest proposal and public appeal for someone to write a “handbook” about green machines—the sort of handbook that could be circulated to enable new ways of thinking about electronic design and production.²³ “Green technology” is not only seen as a major area of invention; it is also a complex and interesting terrain for new design projects. In an industry that is preoccupied with continual invention—where pronouncements are made about the “convergence” of technologies, about pervasive computing, about Web 2.0 and the death of the Internet and the end of Moore's Law—it seems appropriate to consider how that invention can extend into this other terrain.

Emerging proposals for “green electronics” or “green ICT” (information and communication technology) include schemes that address the material composition and manufacture of electronics, from computer keyboards made out of carrot and spinach extracts to mobile phones that “plant” sunflower seeds when they decompose.²⁴ Microchips that are oxidized through ultraviolet radiation, rather than energy-intensive furnaces, are now in prototype stage; PCs are available in die-cut cardboard, rather than a composite of plastics; and mobile phone prototypes “self-recycle” by popping apart when heated, for ease of disassembly and recycling.²⁵ An extensive number of electronic design projects also focus on ways of improving energy consumption within the operation of devices.²⁶

Other projects document or propose interventions within the life cycles of electronic devices.²⁷ Some designers have gone so far as to suggest that design not only should alter at the manufacturing phase but should also extend into “everything that happens after that.” In this sense, designer Ed van Hinte writes, goods should not be “impenetrable boxes” but, rather, should have “a career plan.”²⁸ In this scenario, design extends to consumer use, commodity alterations, and eventual dismantling. Other projects draw attention to the expanded circuits and possibilities of things beyond the manufacture stage by using electronics to track trash, so that electronic devices may even become the means for possible infrastructures of reuse.²⁹ These tracing and tracking projects pay particular attention to the object—electronic or otherwise—as it cycles from manufacture to use and death.

Still other projects reconsider the relatively functional role of electronics in our lives and draw out the more imaginative and uncanny dimensions of these devices.³⁰ Repurposing obsolete electronics through reverse engineering and hacking has been one strategy not only for unpicking the assumed functionality of these devices but also for extending the practices of reuse and recycling beyond the simply material toward new technological deployments.³¹ Concepts of “reuse,” “appropriation,” and “maintenance” are emerging as practices for investigating the possibilities of sustainable computing.³² Electronic capabilities may, at the same time, enable other modes of encounter with environments, and much of the literature on “sustainable HCI” (human-computer interaction) has dealt with not just issues of green machines but also ways in which social networking, citizen science, and ecological monitoring and information may persuade and raise awareness about environmental issues.³³

Together, these projects address everything from materials and manufacture to systems and new imaginaries for the use and abuse of electronics. It is a significant step toward a more “green” and creative approach to electronics. Yet the question that remains within such initiatives is whether attention to waste, as well as the extended political and economic effects of electronics, will provoke us to think about technologies differently. Designs for green electronics may be most successful when they consider not only the material effects but also the extended social, political, and imaginative terrain of electronics. This means that it may be possible to do more than just alter electronics to contain fewer contaminants, have an ease of disassembly, and be more readily reusable; we may also reconsider how electronics materialize and rematerialize across multiple spaces and practices. This natural history of electronics, then, raises questions about how to go beyond the gadget as it passes through its life cycle. Such a conception of electronic technologies potentially settles on one dimension of the life and death of these devices. However, a complex circuit of places and politics, materials and ecologies, and uses and manufacture makes possible and sediments into electronics and electronic wastes. As a thing and technology, electronics and electronic wastes are the sites of stories that exceed product life cycle and that ultimately connect up lives, labor, and imaginaries.³⁴

The natural history of electronics developed here draws on these proposals and suggests that one way to develop “sustainable” electronics would be to address the multiple materialities, politics, ecologies, economies, and imaginings that give rise to electronics.³⁵ These technologies are not only a part of natural-cultural arrangements; they also provide insight into the ecologies we inhabit. In this sense, there are opportunities to engage with the creative and ethical aspects of electronics and electronic waste not just through improving electronics manufacture but also through linking up ecologies—political and otherwise. Supplying ICT for the developing world is just one way in which electronics can be deployed not so much for another round of consumption but, instead, to connect up communities who may not otherwise have access to electronic communications and to make these technologies less toxic in the process. Soenke Zehle suggests we revisit earlier proposals for an “environmentalism for the net.”³⁶ Such an environmentalism might consist of “info-political initiatives” that encompass not just the digital commons but also the “broader agenda of economic and environmental justice.”³⁷ In this way, applications are being developed through original uses of renewable energy—wireless that runs on wind power—that begin to take up a digitally relevant environmentalism that expands beyond but also encompasses less deleterious and resource-intensive manufacture and energy processes.³⁸

Some of the most compelling projects to be found working in this area establish creative ways to make the environmental, social and environmental relations that emerge through electronics a site of reinvention and provocation. The “Zero Dollar Laptop” project, a collaboration by Furtherfield, Access Space, and St. Mungo's charity for the homeless, offers a series of recycling workshops that engage with obsolete electronics. The participants engaged with the project recycle outdated laptops, and install Free and Open Source Software on the machines to enable the use and creation of media files, and to provide access to the Internet. Obsolete hardware and software offer up a set of new resources, as this project demonstrates, if the terms of use shift to engage with alternative economies and exchanges. In a different approach, Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji have made the material and energy requirements of computers evident in their “Coal Fired Computers” project, which demonstrates how central coal power is to the manufacturing and firing of computer circuits, since coal still provides a considerable amount of power to our modern energy economies.³⁹

The focus in this study has been to unpack the black box of electronics by charting stories that converge in the saturated soil of Silicon Valley, in the run of numbers that flicker across NASDAQ interfaces, in the global trawl of waste shipments, in the defunct machines gathering archival dust, and in the thick sludge of the landfill. In considering these places and stories, where the debris of electronics collects, I suggest there are other ways of thinking about material culture through these remainders. Electronics constitute “materializing and transformative processes.” Such processes, as Buchli writes, give rise to “new kinds of bodies, forms of ‘nature’ and political subjects.”⁴⁰ The processes whereby materials congeal and fall apart are essential for understanding things as matter. The ways in which electronics stabilize and destabilize are bound up with technological trajectories and markets, methods of manufacture and consumption, and imaginaries and temporalities.

There is even potential in this space of imagining to consider the fantastic qualities of electronics and for a material imagination that surpasses the strictly instrumental and the progressive.⁴¹ Remaining in cast-off objects is that same “wishful” element that Benjamin saw as most potent at the moment of their introduction. The fossils in his natural history were not without fascination; in fact, they depended on it. Without a doubt, there are many approaches to electronics that may begin to find the advantages of operating in these fields, beyond the appeal of novelty and functionality and toward a kind of garbage imaginary. So perhaps what we need are electronics that exploit and expand on the cracks, the failures, and the garbage, as a way to move toward the creative and ethical aspects of electronics and electronic waste, as a way to imagine new material relations.

This garbage imaginary is a fitting place to conclude this study into electronics and waste. The “cultural imaginary” of garbage, as Shanks, Platt, and Rathje write, “is at the heart of the composition and decomposition of modernity and modernism.”⁴² A garbage imaginary might emerge not just by seeing the matter of things, the fields through which they circulate, and their modes of transformation and animation; it might also emerge, as Lynch suggests, by “wasting well.” If waste is inevitable, then it may be possible to begin to address how matter transforms and to draw out the moments and movements where energies, resources, values, temporalities, and spaces shift. In dirt, there is potential. Dirt rituals have existed for quite some time. To this extent, Lynch even considers the fascination of “collision derbies and the art of piano-smashing.”⁴³ It may be possible that we need more and better ways of encountering the ways in which things run down and wear out. With a less exclusionary sense of waste, it might be possible to see that matter moves in “gradations” and, thereby, to devise “ceremonies of transformation.”⁴⁴ By registering the ways in which materials transform—the processes of materialization through which things sediment—it is possible to take greater responsibility for our material lives.

But in these moments of transformation, the smashing ceremony that resonates the clearest is the one described by Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” He describes how, “on the first evening” of the “July revolution,” the clock towers in Paris “were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places.”⁴⁵ In this moment, time no longer progressed along a chronology. With the clock towers shot out, the empty space of progressive time was stopped in its tracks. In the absence of progressive time, a shift in the experience of time could emerge. In the “now” of suspended progressive time, the “new” could materialize through other temporalities, not as a space of transition or even revolution, but as a space of material relation and imagination. This is a transformation that takes place not simply in succession but through a generative and waste-based imaginary that involves the politics as much as the poetics of materials. That imaginary, as described here, settles into a natural history of electronics.