Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics

THREE

Shipping and Receiving

CIRCUITS OF DISPOSAL AND THE “SOCIAL DEATH” OF ELECTRONICS

Nothing good is endless in the computer world.

—J. DAVID BOLTER, Turing's Man

The “Social Death” of Electronics

Electronics eventually circulate toward other spaces of exchange that are situated far beyond those apparently dematerialized interfaces discussed in the last chapter. Electronic technologies that once powered markets reach obsolescence and are discarded. The outdated debris of computer monitors, printers, hard drives, power cords, peripheral storage devices, mobile phones, and servers that make up electronic networks eventually lingers in assorted stages of disposal, from the warehouse to the rubbish bin. Disposal is a continuation of the transmission and processing of electronics, albeit within distinctly different formats. Disposal is formative in the making and unmaking of the materiality of electronics. The practices of disposal involve multiple modes of material disassembly and depend on interconnected geographies for the circulation and recuperation of discarded devices.

Two narratives concerned with the practice of disposal indicate the potential scope of these material and geographic circuits and practices of disposal. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes a metropolis, Leonia, which refreshes itself by discarding all its objects on a daily basis. So persistent is the process of using up and expelling goods that this becomes Leonia's defining attribute, its apparent source of pleasure. The city's constant stream of refuse is transported by anonymous workers to unknown places located on the urban periphery. Yet the practice of expulsion grows to such epic proportions that an increasing quantity of debris accumulates and threatens to unleash in a cataclysmic landslide. In the process of disposing of its remains, Leonia unwittingly constructs orders and spaces of enduring and even menacing materiality. At the same time, the city establishes circuits of disposal that become defining routes of renewed consumption, duration, and value. These circuits are invisible, overlooked; yet the remainders that move through these spaces of disposal give Leonia its “definitive form.”¹

Similar daily rituals of consuming and wasting emerge in even greater relief in Cornucopia City, an imagined geography that postwar cultural commentator Vance Packard describes as an example of the furthest extreme of overproduction. In this metropolis, temporary buildings are constructed from papier-mâché, and the factories produce a heap of products that are trucked directly to the dump before they are even able to inundate the consumer market. Through his concocted city, Packard expresses a perceived “crisis of production,” a crisis that threatens to saturate markets to such an extent that it overwhelms the possibility for consumption to keep pace.² In these cities, disposal, invisible and abundant, is continual and essential to the renewal of production and consumption. Yet there is more to the process and geography of disposal than this loop between production and consumption. As abandoned goods make their outward journeys, they undergo transformations and deformations; they accumulate in peripheral spaces and define well-traveled circuits of disposal. These circuits and spaces of disposal are often hidden, but as Leonia and Cornucopia City imply, they are indispensable to everyday material practices.

This chapter focuses on electronic waste in the form of discarded devices—specifically focusing on the fossilized plastic materials and packaging that house and enable electronics—in order to describe the circuits and spaces of disposal through which abandoned electronics travel. Disposal is not just about garbage trafficked to waste sites, and it involves much more than simply throwing unwanted items in the rubbish bin. Disposal, as it turns out, involves the holding patterns, stockpiling, recycling, and salvaging of materials before they further dissolve or enter another stage of waste. Electronic waste moves not just out of centers of production but also through marginal storage spaces and into recycling depots and, via shipping containers, toward developing countries. In this sense, disposal requires complex infrastructures, practices, and relationships in order to shift devalued objects into spaces for potential revaluation. Such circulations more fully describe the material geographies and practices of disposal, since there is no simple periphery to which objects can be jettisoned. The imagining of the periphery, furthermore, constitutes a topic of investigation: where is there an “outside” to which wastes can travel?

As the previous chapters have indicated, electronics is a rapidly growing industry, with increasing rates of consumption and obsolescence, and for this reason, its waste stream has increased as well. While the exact delineation of what constitutes electronic waste varies, “consumer electronics” of all sorts are scrapped in numbers that are now reaching the billions.³ Although electronic waste is growing at a rapid rate, the circuits and practices of disposal are not clearly delineated, often because this is a relatively new form of waste. Even with the obvious growth in the number of electronics bought, sold, and discarded, it is actually quite difficult to determine how many of these devices enter the waste stream at any given time, because owners often store and stockpile them for several years beyond their useful life. To further add to the confusion, many countries that export or import electronic waste do not use a specific code to track its delivery, so the trail of disposed devices becomes further obscured in the process of shipping and receiving.⁴ The processes and spaces of disposal are not singular but open into expanded geographies. Similar to Leonia and Cornucopia City, the peripheral routes for the disposal and displacement of electronic waste accumulate and congeal into a “definitive,” if makeshift, form. This form emerges through disposal practices that are relatively obscured but that are essential in maintaining the apparent immateriality of electronics, even while they are enduring and toxic.

The production of microchips and the screen-based electronic exchanges discussed in the previous chapters, then, extend to wastes generated from electronic production and transmission to consumption and disposal. The focus on consumption here specifically considers how it is continuous with disposal and how consumption patterns can even inform the ability of materials to be “used up.” This chapter examines another aspect of digital technology and “use”—not necessarily to concentrate on patterns of interaction between “users” and technology, but to consider instead the more extensive material networks that enable relatively transient forms of “use.” But the relationship between consumption and disposal is often neglected. Some studies on consumption suggest that we trace the “social life of things” in order to understand the “trajectories” of commodities.⁵ Yet there is a certain difficulty in following “things” in a study on electronic waste. These electronic commodities rapidly expire, have numerous hidden inputs and fallout, and are stockpiled or enter dubious routes of disposal upon their expiration. On many levels, electronic disposal, then, offers a more complete account of electronic consumption, since these technologies have been designed and developed within material cultures of disposability.

Disposal—in the form of use and using up—is a complexly situated process of materialization. To study these material processes specific to electronics, it is useful to account for the multiple “hidden flows” that enable their formation and deformation. Waste is a significant part of the flows of materials that are present not as consumer goods, but as the fallout from production and disposal. Indeed, at any one time, the majority of global material flows are made up of some form of waste. As estimated by the World Resources Institute, these material flows are typically comprised of the by-products and resources that are necessary for the formation of commodities.⁶ But these estimates of material flows typically account for the waste generated from production processes and further assume that every item produced will eventually migrate toward consumption and then disposal. Consumption and disposal are protracted spaces and practices that do not necessarily involve a unit-by-unit correspondence. There are vague spaces and processes of expenditure that take place between consumption and disposal.⁷ Indeed, a “unit” of consumption does not automatically translate into a unit disposed; rather, consuming, using up, and disposing generate extended spaces of delay, deformation, and demattering. To map these spaces and movements, I take up anthropologist Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld's suggestion that we should go beyond the social life of things to consider the “social death” of things.⁸ This attention to social death can bring to light the extended processes, practices, and places that emerge with the disposal of objects.

In this chapter, I extend this natural history of electronics to encompass the transience and migration of electronics as they pass through and are suspended in circuits of disposal, which cross local and global environments, depend on formal and informal labor economies, and at times require material movements much slower and heavier than the dematerialized networks of electronic markets. To describe these circuits and spaces of disposal, it is also necessary to describe how electronics became so disposable in the first place. As they shift around the globe, disposed electronics sediment as residues from the processes that have contributed to the “throwaway society.” This chapter explores how electronics developed within a culture of disposability and how advances in automation, together with new material developments, actually intensified processes of disposability. In particular, the development of plastics played an important role as an ephemeral and disposable material, as well as a material that might be valued for its performance and functionality rather than its durability and solidity. Plastic was, in many respects, the ideal material for the packaging and performance of electronics. As a material composite, plastic further signals the continuity between consumption and disposal, for here is a material that is developed for the purpose of using in order to use up. Plastics and the material technologies of packaging are, then, another critical fossilized fragment and layer to exhume in this natural history of electronics. The ease of disposability, the material transformations of electronics, their consumption and disposal, along with the storing, shipping, and stripping of these technologies—these material practices and spaces together form this account of how electronics turn into waste.

Appliance Theory

During the spring of 2005, in London, a “humanoid” sculpture of electronic proportions loomed seven meters above the river Thames. Composed of refrigerators and computer mice, mobile phones and microwave ovens, computer monitors and washing machines, the three-ton structure represented the amount of electronic waste a typical Briton would generate in his or her lifetime. Five hundred and fifty-three electronic devices in total contributed to the architecture of this sculpture. Yet the number of electronics is as striking as the diversity of devices that now constitute electrical and electronic waste.⁹ The pervasiveness of the microchip, as discussed in chapter 1, manifests in an equally pervasive array of electronics and appliances, including everything from irons to vending machines. Many of these devices are more or less “electronic,” because microchips and printed circuit boards that channel the flow of electrical currents and information power them. But these microchips are also encased in a skeletal body of plastic and copper, glass and lead.¹⁰ The extended material infrastructures required to house and enable microchips are evident in this motley assortment of plastic appliances. Microchips and plastic assemble into simultaneously pervasive and disposable devices. Leftover electronic devices are primarily composed of plastic and thus appear to be disposable.

The microchip, that miniature conductor and amplifier of electricity, is now neatly sealed in the contours of the everyday. Under the influence of the chip, appliances of all sorts have acquired new “functionalities” and speeds. The ways in which electronics have led to the transformation of objects, materials, and environments may be described as what the now-obscure packaging designer Vernon Fladager has called a “new machine economy.” In every such economy,” Fladager suggests, and with “every increase in machine speed,” new materials, designs, and packages emerge. In fact, “the perfect package material of today can go out the window tomorrow because a new machine economy may make an alternate material a better choice.”¹¹ The electronic package of microchips and plastic is bound up with processes of materialization that can be described through the quickening of matter, proliferation, and increased disposability. This is a machine economy that not only describes altered rates and scales of production but also establishes a temporal mechanism for the disposal of existing materials and designs. Electronics even appear to be programmed for their own elimination, as though an expected part of electronic processing has to do with eventual disposal and erasure.

Electronics, it seems, are prime operators in this transient machine economy. In many respects, electronics are situated within a larger culture of disposability that significantly expanded with the advent of automation after World War II. With automation, there was a general explosion of many consumer goods, which were typically produced to the point of market saturation. New practices of consumption and wasting arose in relation to automated production. In a similar way, practices of electronics consumption and disposal have emerged to facilitate these particular machine economies. Disposability may even constitute an “inventive” use of electronics and peripherals. DVDs have been developed that would expire upon 48 hours after their packages were opened,¹² and certain varieties of mobile phones have been designed to last for only a few days of use.¹³ The duration of electronics has dwindled from at least a decade to, in some cases, a matter of hours. Devices appear disposable because they are at once freely available, constantly updated, bound to cycles of fashion, and often increasingly miniature in size. These machine economies encompass more than microchips simply acting on matter. Instead, they evidence the changing material arrangements and practices that sediment within particular technological and material forms. Automation, altered consumption patterns, material developments in the form of plastics, packaging, and shipping technologies and economic geographies have all informed electronic processes of materialization and disposal.

The Throwaway Revolution

The term throwaway revolution is used by Packard to describe—if not denounce—the postwar rise in automation and disposability in the United States, when objects with short life spans or limited use increasingly appeared on the market. Technological advancements in automation led to lower production costs, which led, in turn, to a flood of cheap goods on the market, the rise of disposability, and the decline of repair. This was a moment when, as is typically the case now, it became much cheaper to dispose of and replace objects than to repair them. Commenting on the rise of the throwaway revolution within his time, Packard suggests that automation led to an explosion in the number and type of disposable goods available. “Paper plates, cups, bottles, containers have long been disposable,” he writes, and “these are now joined, according to a recent report, by ‘everything from bikinis to men's blazers, night-wear to student's gowns, curtains to bathmats.’”¹⁴ In Packard's popular critique, economic progress seems to require even more elaborate forms of waste making. If new and improved goods were to be made available and if the economy were to continue to grow, new strategies of consumption and disposal were necessary. Cornucopia City was simply the most ideal—if perverse—installment of this logic: wasting, in the end, stimulates growth.¹⁵

With automated mass production, a greater store of goods was made available, which enacted changes not just in patterns of consumption but also in patterns of disposal. These changes extended to the availability of a greater variety and volume of disposable goods; yet they also included, as waste theorist Gay Hawkins suggests, “the fundamental logic of the commodity form, seriality.”¹⁶ The repetitive production of goods meant they could be easily replaced, old things disposed for new, without any relative concern for where the disposed objects went. Far from constituting a continuation of existing patterns of disposability, the postwar orders of disposability that emerged marked a fundamental shift, not just in the form of commodities, but also in the dynamics whereby they were valued or devalued. Technological advancements that allowed for more rapid product manufacture contributed to the sense that objects were less enduring and more replaceable. Transience and substitution became motivating factors in consumption. This is another aspect of the way in which waste is a generative dynamic, a necessary movement of goods out of consumption-bound circuits and into other circuits of disposal and removal. Practices of consumption become inseparable from practices of disposal.¹⁷

Disposability is evident not just in the materiality and consumption of goods but also in the growth of the automated production process. As discussed in the previous chapter, with the rise of automation in the mid-twentieth century, changes occurred not just with the gadgets and products available but also to the processes of manufacture and to what it meant to be “automatic.”¹⁸ When goods became “electric,” they became fluid, moving just as easily from warehouses to markets, homes, and rubbish bins. Matter is programmed—as much for fluidity as for disposability. This stage of automation not only made available a greater abundance of goods but also contributed to the transformation of matter. The accelerated movement of goods was concomitant with a greater sense of dematerialization, plasticity, and disposability. Plastic objects in particular appear to be inscribed with their inevitable movement toward rubbish.¹⁹ These objects tip toward disposal and waste more readily not just because they are more abundant or made of more ephemeral materials but also because they are produced through technologies that enable speed and transience.

The postwar history of technology is a legacy of successively intensifying attempts to electrify objects. Things quicken under the influence of electricity. Once-inert objects transform and are animated by the quiver of electricity. These permutations of matter and electricity corresponded to goods that became more and more transient. The prefix e- now potentially can precede even more than markets. The electronic conjoins and augments material and transactions from electronic mail to electronic money and electronic waste. Phones and ovens, cameras and books, leaf blowers and teakettles all submit to the same hazy law of the electronic. Every appliance presents an electrical mutation of an object that once stood still. Matter is charged, but what does it generate? In this general economy of electrification, matter does not just levitate, emanate, conduct, and mobilize; it also circulates, leaks, dematters, disappears, and wastes. The boundaries of objects break down at the same time as they receive an intensifying jolt. Just as the early pioneers from Texas Instruments and Intel anticipated, electronics are now so pervasive that nearly everything is informed in some way by electronic processing. But this pervasiveness is now part of the dilemma, where electronics have proliferated to such a degree that their volume and transience constitutes a material-handling problem.²⁰ In this “revolution operating on matter” (to quote Serres, cited in chapter 2), electronic objects are produced and designed with increasingly shorter life spans. The effects of increased production and shortening life spans become most evident through the accumulation of electronic waste.

With the rise of automation and electronicization, materials become increasingly indistinguishable from their performance. Materials such as plastic are defined in relation to their functions, as designer Ezio Manzini suggests, from “mechanical function” to “surface quality” to “special electric properties” and even integrating “information input and output systems” into materials.²¹ Materials are assessed for their performativity; they are engineered for efficiency, functionality, and, on a certain level, elimination. Objects become smaller, and extraneous components are removed. Function and flow stand in for matter—qualities that are ultimately symptomatic of the electric and the electronic. Matter performs as a package, a surface, a plastic medium for the delivery of function. These operations are also processes of materialization. As discussed in the previous two chapters, electronic technologies enable the capacity for acceleration, proliferation, and destabilization. Yet these same dynamics contribute to the transformation of material and its exchange, as well as the generation of waste and remainder. Electronics and electronicization have as much to do with material developments as with innovations in technology and manufacturing.

Packaging Electronics

It may be the case that electronics owe as much of their development and evolution to the history of plastics as they do to the history of silicon and transistors. It may also be the case that the plastic and the electronic—and, by extension, the plastic and the virtual—have more in common than previously imagined. Plastic is the material that enabled the profusion of disposable packages; it is abundant and pervasive, malleable, and suitable for an infinite variety of uses. But plastics and silicon are also functional materials; they perform operations, so they do more than provide the “raw” material for technologies and objects. These materials in fact inform the possibility of emerging technologies. As “informed material[s],”²² they exist within processes of materialization and not simply as inert matter.

Informed materials, as discussed by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, operate as more than raw materials, but in fact contribute to the possibility for new technologies and functionalities to emerge. Electronics are comprised of informed materials: silicon enables the flow of electricity and the apparent dematerialization of matter; plastic is inscribed with the capacity for disposability and mass production that now characterizes electronics. Plastic, as a functional material, could be produced in relatively unlimited quantities; it was inexpensive, easily replaced; it could embody the instantly disposable and the imminently possible all at once. As various commentators in the Modern Packaging Journal opined, “The biggest thing that's ever happened in molded plastics so far as packaging is concerned is the acceptance of the idea that packages are made to be thrown away.”²³ Plastic packaging came to embody all the defining traits of disposability: cheap, abundant, and expendable after a single use. The transience of packaging ultimately contributed to increases in production volumes, where millions of packages eventually grew to billions of packages discarded annually.²⁴ The single-use purpose of packaging easily extended to all objects made of plastic. Suddenly, not just the casing but entire goods were subject to the logic of abundant, single use.

Spectacular examples of multi-million unit uses of expendable molded plastics in containers for razor blades, ice cream and other foods, in tomato trays and berry baskets, are demonstrating that a plastic package, while it may be a thing of beauty, need not and should not be a joy forever. Consumers are learning to throw these containers in the trash can as nonchalantly as they would a paper cup—and in that psychology lies the future of molded plastic packaging.²⁵

Plastic took the place of paper as the ultimate disposable material, and by doing so, it redefined the material sense of disposability. The rise of plastic packaging was, at one level, part of an effort to minimize the weight of goods previously packaged in glass. The use of plastic in order to minimize associated material, energy, and transport costs was related, then, to a certain drive toward dematerialization. The drive toward dematerialization became continuous with elimination, where goods and packages became more expendable as they required fewer material inputs.

Modernized packaging not only extends to the cellophane and molded polyethylene surrounding tomatoes and soap but also includes the skin around the increasingly transient technological “guts” of machines.²⁶ In this sense, packaging became a model for disposability that began to inform a whole range of goods, including electrical appliances. Electronics, as with the force of electricity that preceded it, depend on the design of these packages and fluid materialities. Designed packages in the form of electric appliances may enable a sense of efficiency, futurity, and disposability.²⁷ With electrical appliances and electronics, increasing consumption depended as much on the disposability offered by the package as on the promise the futuristic package presented in the form of technological fashion. Electronics perform in relation to imagined futures; they are packaged in a forward and instantaneous passing of time. Electronics of all sorts have been packaged in ephemeral plastic containers, disposable shells for the conveyance of information.

Plastic, as Roland Barthes writes, “is in essence the stuff of alchemy,”²⁸ because it enables “the transmutation of matter.”²⁹ So thorough is this transmutation that plastic appears to dematerialize completely in the production process, where it moves from “raw telluric matter” to the “finished object.”³⁰ In this dematerializing movement, which resonates with the electric inventories and immaterial networks discussed in the previous chapter, plastic acquires infinite possibilities for transformation. Any number of objects appear in plastic shells, molds, and packages. Plastic, similar to electronics, mobilizes matter toward apparent invisibility, lending a sense of dematerialization through miniaturization and through accelerating rates of circulation. Plastic is, then, in many ways continuous with the changes enacted by the microchip: these are materials and technologies that emerge as programmed matter, engineered to express malleability, invisibility, and disposability. It was the proliferation of plastics that gave concrete—if immaterial—form to this sense of dematerialization. Plastics are in fact also the material carriers of many seemingly immaterial information and communication media.³¹ Just when plastic became so pervasive that it even became the common carrier for electronic technologies, it receded from view. For this reason, plastic partly enabled the sense of virtuality, the sense that digital media somehow operate free from materiality.³² As discussed earlier, in many ways, immateriality has less to do with the actual removal of matter and more to do with the alteration and “destabilization” of materials.

Indeed, the microchip is a kind of plastic, a reverse packaging that renders malleable the electronics and appliances that it powers. But in fact, these devices take on another level of materiality through electronicization. Objects that were once inert, durable, and relatively benign are now plastic, toxic, disposable, and yet enduring. Electronics do not dematerialize as much as they rematerialize through such (plastic) programming of matter. Plastic, metals, and glass are the primary materials that make up electronics. As the icon of disposability, plastic is part of a group of material composites that often fade from view. These plastic composites constitute what Manzini calls “a world of nameless materials.” No longer are objects made of materials that are readily identifiable, such as wood or clay; instead, they are typically composed of a highly engineered and mysterious mix of substances. Computers are assessed less for their material integrity and more for their performance; materially, they may appear at most to be “plasticky” and disposable.³³ What we see with these opaque materials is the operation and image of the devices. Material becomes synonymous with its function and appearance and effaces its own substance. This shift was inevitably aided in large part by plastics. “Plastics have played a fundamental role,” Manzini notes, “in triggering the technical, economic, and cultural dynamics that led to the current new scenario of materials.”³⁴ Advances in plastics led not only to the “unrecognizability of materials” but also to the constant redesign of products with materials that promised better performance, with “less matter, less energy, more information.”³⁵ These are the new and nameless materials that dematerialize through the force of information. But when they resurface, they are increasingly difficult to salvage and recycle. Because of the wide variety of plastic composites used in electronics, it is often difficult to sort and recycle these materials for additional use.³⁶ They are also increasingly troublesome as pollutants and objects that linger indefinitely.

While the electronic industry has speed and turnover in mind, it typically employs materials that last for decades. Here are copper and plastic, mercury and lead, substances thicker and more enduring than any transcription of ones and zeros. Yet for all their endurance, these substances have been essential to the emergence of new orders of ephemerality. Plastic is nearly synonymous with disposability; yet it is also the enduring discardable. Packaging carries with it this deeply ambivalent relation to materiality. Inside the plastic shell that constitutes the predominant material for most electronics are also beryllium, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants.³⁷ Materials are caught in a tension between the quick and the slow. Ephemerality can only hold at one level; it instead reveals new spaces of permanence. Throw away plastic to discover it lasts for an ice age. The balance of time shifts. The instant plastic package creates new geologies. We now have mountains of congealed carbon polymers. Entirely new landscapes are built up around the fallout from the momentary and the disposable. So this is not just a story about the vaporization of “all that is solid”; rather, it suggests that new forms of solidity—new types of “hardware”—emerge with the program of disposability. Disposability is, then, about more than just overproduction; it also includes conditions of material transience and pliability. Electronic technology may have ephemerality as its guiding agenda, but it unwittingly produces new orders of permanence and new spaces and artifacts of indeterminable duration. The remainders that move through the circuits of disposal, in contrast to the accelerated networks of production and consumption, are drawn into these extended orders of duration and material solidity.

Circuits of Disposal

Disposal and disposability distinctly inform processes of materialization and dematerialization. Disposal and disposability correspond to spaces of removal that stretch beyond singular disposable objects. These are the hidden flows of disposal, involving not just the wasted materials that are used in the manufacture of goods but also the murky spaces where abandoned electronics are dismantled, trafficked, and repurposed. These circuits of disposal reveal how and where these technologies dissolve. The plastic package that encases most electronics has a life beyond its immediate disposal. Indeed, the plastic packaging surrounding electronics enables disposability, a relative sense of immateriality, and mobility. “The distinction between disposability and mobility,” as cultural commentator Alvin Toffler notes, “is, from the point of view of the duration of relationships, a thin one.”³⁸ With increasing disposability, goods become so transient that they are rendered liquid and mobile.³⁹ “Mobile technologies” acquire an expanded meaning, for the most mobile of technologies are, no doubt, often the most disposable. The discards that are mobilized, packaged, and shipped across watery networks give rise to new places and new formations. But where are these circuits and places of disposal?

When we trace through the circuits of disposal, we move closer to what might be Leonia's nebulous boundary between garbage mounds and city. Dirt is supposedly “outside the system.”⁴⁰ But disposal is about not just attempted elimination but also arranging and ordering, putting aside or situating in relation to networks of exchange.⁴¹ While many studies on waste suggest that garbage is a relationship between “matter in place and matter displaced,”⁴² the very process of displacement can, in fact, give rise to places. These places emerge as the residue from attempting to relocate dirt toward an outside. There are many stages and places within disposal, which may extend to sites of storage, reuse, and recycling; transfer stations; and incinerators and landfills. The remainder of this chapter addresses those sites of disposal that are prior to and in transition to the salvage yard and dump, before electronics have reached terminal waste sites (the dump is addressed in a later chapter).

Disposal does not necessarily involve an absolute expelling of unwanted material but, rather, reveals attempts to recuperate or delay the demise of objects in order to postpone their decline of value.⁴³ Yet the margins where trash is shifted or held are not necessarily sharply delineated but overlap and intersect. Electronics are left on curbsides and in skips, packaged in closets, bundled up in warehouses. These peripheral sites are often actually central but invisible. Part of the process of disposal and displacement involves a willful overlooking of the electronic material debris that surrounds us. Debris lingers in places and often compels us to contend with its dissipated value. A disposed object has, in addition to mobility, a sort of “motility” or stickiness, as geographer Kevin Hetherington notes: objects appear to vanish “only to return again unexpectedly and perhaps in a different place or in a different form.”⁴⁴ When waste returns and resurfaces, it becomes clear that disposal is about more than matter out of place. Instead, disposal involves a set of practices for dealing with waste (even if this means overlooking it).⁴⁵ When we dispose of something, we create places and relations out of the residue of this displacement.

In an attempt to map out these extended spaces of electronic waste disposal, I took a friend's aged personal computer to the nearest recycling facility (at the time, in Montreal). Like many devices of its kind, this PC had sat in a closet gathering dust. Outdated, with a DOS operating system, the petrified machine was a bulky object that one felt should be put to good use but that was no longer functional. As mentioned previously, as much as 75 percent of obsolete electronics are currently stockpiled in the United States.⁴⁶ If all the devices that had been stowed away entered the waste stream suddenly, en masse, they would completely overload the system.⁴⁷ But there is a good reason why these devices do not unilaterally go in such a direction and why they continue to linger past the point of optimum performance. Not only are the circuits for electronic disposal undefined, but electronics are caught in a set of holding patterns that typifies disposal. The spaces of stockpiling and delay involve sites where “uncertain value” can be assessed.⁴⁸ The pause before a more terminal disposal in the dump or before packaging in shipping containers bound for the shores of China and India, is necessary in order to assess the lapsed value of the item. Disposal involves strategies of deferring the moment when objects become rubbish. Electronics initially undergo just such a holding pattern. No doubt, electronics stick around because of the relatively high price paid for them in proportion to the shortness of their useful life. What was at one time a device at the cutting edge of performativity has become an inert black (or beige) box, a device awaiting its final dispatch but remaining in the dim margins.

In my electronics disposal experiment, I located the nearest certified electronics recycler—situated, inevitably, well outside the city center, so that I had to drive the device to its proper waste-handling home. Following this path of disposal, I drove to the near edge of the airport, to a row of nameless light-industrial structures. Numbered loading docks edged up against a continuous plane of corrugated steel architecture, which was interrupted only by the company logo and front entrance. Carting the PC from the car trunk to the front lobby, I noticed that I was the only person in sight, and silent parking lots stretched into the distance. Inside the waiting room, it was clear that this act of singular recycling was unusual, even absurd. I met with the recycler and asked for verification of how the machine would be recycled and if the hard drive could be “wiped” of data (evidence of the success of this process was later sent to me in an e-mail with 13 lines of zeros, indicating no data found).⁴⁹ With the recycler's assurances, I handed over the ancient machine, which transferred to the shop floor for disassembly and recycling.⁵⁰

Businesses, institutions, and manufacturers are the primary recyclers of electronics. These groups are often prohibited from sending their electronics to landfills, so they are bound by law to find a recycling option for their machines.⁵¹ While it is not yet illegal in many places for consumers to place their electronics in the trash for eventual shipment to the landfill, more policies now require that electronics are not interred in landfills, as many of the components in these devices are hazardous and present the possibility for environmental damage upon their breakdown and decay.⁵² Increasing pressure has also been placed on governments to mandate an “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, that would require electronics manufacturers to take back the devices that they produce, for disposal and treatment.⁵³ EPR is often seen as a more ideal solution than a mandate that would only require the recycling of electronics, as the latter does not address the fact that the vast majority of electronics collected for recycling are eventually sent, in varying states, to developing countries, where they are processed and handled in relatively unsafe and environmentally unsound conditions.

When we follow electronics beyond their initial disposal, we find that even the apparently final forms of disposal are not nearly so complete and that value is never quite fully exhausted. If we unfold the stages of electronic disposal, we begin to see that there are multiple possible stages of removal, depending on the route that electronics follow. From Montreal to the Bronx and from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, I have visited electronic waste recyclers who have detailed the process of electronics disposal and recycling. Typically, electronics are first collected by recyclers in North America or Europe, who salvage high-grade machines for resale and extract valuable metal from devices for scrap or who alternately bundle defunct machines in shipping containers. In either case, at some stage down the line of processing, the electronics are usually sent to developing countries for scrap and salvaging of components, copper, gold, iron, plastic, nonferrous metals, cables, cathode-ray tubes, printed boards, and more. Raw materials markets thrive on and reincorporate these materials.

The disposal of electronics, then, follows a trajectory between developed and developing countries, where devices migrate from technology-rich regions to those places with an abundance of cheap labor and a high demand for raw materials. While countries such as China are currently regulating against the importation of electronic waste, shipments continue to make their way to Asia, Africa, and other developing countries for recycling and disposal.⁵⁴ Using GPS to track the fate of a television recycled in the United Kingdom, Greenpeace activists have mapped how this legitimately recycled electronic device was eventually retrieved in a secondhand market in Nigeria. But there were many stages to locating and recovering the television as it moved across the ocean, from recycler to port, and from port to market.⁵⁵ At the same time, many used computers and electronics are sent to developing countries as donations. These devices are meant to contribute to overcoming the “digital divide” by supplying electronics to people who might not otherwise have access to them. Yet the donation of obsolete electronics does not contend with the dilemma that these machines will eventually become waste and will linger in places that often lack the infrastructure for handling these wastes properly.⁵⁶

Indeed, this geographical relation between waste and raw materials is critical to the formation of the “third world.”⁵⁷ Even when electronics are collected by recyclers in the developed countries, the cost of recycling materials and the geography of markets for raw materials make developing countries a more “viable” place for disposed electronics to be sent in the end. But the cycle of production, consumption, disposal, and recycling is not a machine in perpetual motion, and as the recent collapse in the global market for recyclables suggests, the geographic relationship of manufacturing and waste is not fixed. When developed countries experience slower rates of growth and consumption, the developing countries that supply the products and remove the wastes similarly experience a slackening of activity. During recessions, piles of recyclables stack up in developed countries, as the usual routes for shipping and reusing these materials freeze up. Prices for raw materials can move with the same volatility as apparently abstract indices within electronic markets.⁵⁸ Recyclables may even begin to move in new circuits, shifting the relationship between manufacturing and raw materials from more disparate trajectories to nearer geographies; or materials are repurposed not for production but for incineration.⁵⁹

Not only is it often cheaper to send electronic waste across the ocean than to process it locally in places such as North America, but because so much manufacturing takes place in China, the enormous demand for raw materials means the movements of electronic commodity and electronic waste nearly collide with one another, as electronic waste often makes the loop back to the site of its manufacturing.⁶⁰ In an account that is reminiscent of Packard's Cornucopia City, journalist Heather Rogers describes how “some shipping companies that bring consumer goods into the United States have taken up rubbish handling. Instead of returning with empty vessels, they fill their cargo containers with U.S. wastes, which they then sell to recycling and disposal operations in their home countries.”⁶¹ Shipping containers become part of a veritable conveyor belt, where the movement of goods back and forth across the ocean operates as some well-oiled machinery. Commodity and rubbish anticipate each other. The ease with which these goods move, the lack of distinction between goods for market and goods for disposal, increasingly functions as an abstract system of exchange, as the shipping and receiving of goods now takes place through the automated movement of sea containers.⁶² The jumble, reek, and materiality of shipped goods are neatly sealed in containers that do not reveal the contents within. The same containers that ship electronic goods to market could just as likely contain electronic waste: the specificity of these materials has been eclipsed within a standardized container and mechanism of movement.

The majority of electronic waste, then, moves from developed to developing country by ship, which constitutes yet another space of delayed disposal. Electronics that have benefited from advances in plastics, packaging, and automation are then shuttled across the ocean by virtue of this other advance in “packaging.” Shipping containers advanced as a maritime technology at the same time that automation and packaging emerged. Shipping containers enabled a new and automated ease of movement, which had a particular influence on the global transfer of cargo. The automated, containerized, and efficient movement of goods by ship resembles those other material, economic, spatial, and temporal changes that were taking place, from plastics to electronics. A technical innovation and newly fluid network of containerized shipping emerged to facilitate the distribution of goods and wastes.⁶³ These containers move in a liquid and global organization that shifts in relation to cheap labor. Newly discovered peripheries can then become sites for the mobilization and shipment of waste.

Yet within these watery circuits of transport and communication are spaces of material delay. Even at its most routinized, shipping constitutes an extended temporality that undergirds the instantaneous time of electronics. The age of information is more approximate to what artist Alan Sekula calls the “third industrial revolution,” which crucially depends not just on electronic technologies but also on these technologies and networks of shipping. While the instant and virtual transport that occurs in digital space often holds sway over our sense of mobility—global, material, or otherwise—in fact, the “forgotten space” of the sea actually enables the movement of most materials, including electronics. So binding are these material flows that they serve as a significant counterpoint to the dematerialized flows of “cyberspace.” Sekula writes,

Large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute: the hydrodynamics of large-capacity hulls and the power output of diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the first quarter of this century. It still takes about eight days to cross the Atlantic and about twelve to cross the Pacific. A society of accelerated flows is also in certain key aspects a society of deliberately slow movement.⁶⁴

Electronics and electronic waste trail through these spun-out liquid networks. The suddenness of disposal is drawn out again into orders of material time that are neither plastic nor virtual but, rather, extend into the indeterminable durations of delivery, disassembly, and decay. Just as we position ourselves in the “information revolution,” we find that in many ways we are still entrenched in the measured material networks of the Industrial Revolution. In the paused space of shipping, all that had apparently dematerialized rematerializes. Electronics pass through, collect, and sediment in the delay between material registers and in the delay between continents.

Container ships loaded with electronic waste are primarily sent from North America to China, although other circuits of electronic disposal may be traced from Europe to Africa and from Singapore to India. In its report Exporting Harm, the Basel Action Network estimates that as much as 50 to 80 percent of electronic waste that is collected in recycling centers in the United States is eventually shipped to locations in developing countries. Guangdong, Lagos, and Delhi receive and distribute used electronics, which move from harbors inland to scrap yards, recycling sites, and resale markets. While electronic waste may have been displaced from one location, it resurfaces in these sites as material for potential reuse and recycling. The question of which “system” is displacing its wastes and how these wastes are configured looms large with the issue of electronic waste. While electronics may have reached the end of their useful life after 18 months in developed countries, becoming “inessential,” these same devices are incorporated into other systems where value and use is recuperated and where waste becomes scrap and commodity. These disposed materials are further delayed from complete rubbishing, as they are processed and repurposed in locations often distant from their use and consumption.⁶⁵

What makes electronic waste of particular concern is not just its volume and the fact that it now constitutes the fastest-growing waste stream in developed countries but also that its components are potentially hazardous upon disassembly and decay.⁶⁶ The practice of recycling may reinforce a sense that electronics are prepared and processed in a responsible way. But in developing countries, the recycling of electronics occurs through often crude and unsafe methods, including “open burning, acid baths and toxic dumping,” which pollute the environment and endanger the workers and local population.⁶⁷ Residents in developed countries are relieved of responsibility for these materials, and residents in developing countries process materials and waste that often they did not generate. Perhaps for this reason, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has spoken of how workers that sort through wastes and recycle materials seem, in the global economy, to also be “disposable people,”⁶⁸ expendable and made to deal with wastes from the wealthiest parts of the world. The murky but inevitable relationship between disposability and accountability materializes in concrete form with electronic waste. Circuits for the disposal of electronic waste do not enable its complete elimination; instead, they mobilize these materials toward other sites, forms of labor, and salvage practices.

Dirt, Displacement, Demattering

Recycling may potentially have the effect of increasing or encouraging disposability.⁶⁹ Materials may be just as rapidly thrown away, but the sorting, delay, and reintegration of these materials suggests that any problems arising from disposability can be addressed through this reuse. The distinction between recycled matter and rubbish is important in understanding the dynamic of electronic waste and rubbish in general. Recycling is another space of delay within disposal. It draws out materials for sorting, the recuperation of value, and reintegration by transforming rubbish into new commodities. Recycled material can even reenter spaces of exchange and renewed production. In many ways, this transformation takes place through the almost complete devaluation of goods and return to raw material, so that recycled materials move in and out of the economy; they are transformed from commodity to waste and raw material and from raw material into commodity again.⁷⁰ But this process involves not just the abstract transformation of materials and values but also the formation of places where material rejection and devaluation takes place. Wire villages, canals flush with broken monitor glass, and alleys full of chemical barrels, which are the typical sites for recycling electronic waste in developing countries, are the actual sites in which these transformations occur. Far from the dematerialized specter of cyberspace, these practices of disposal continually provide evidence of just how material—if dispersed—electronic technologies are.

When we recycle, we repeat the process of delaying the inevitable return to rubbish. Electronic waste may be discarded in one location but then surfaces in another to be processed as goods with marginal scrap value. Yet when that scrap is processed into new electronic components, for instance, it reenters a value system that will mobilize again toward rubbish. Dirt, in other words, is the dynamic.⁷¹ Dirt is, in fact, a constant condition to which objects such as electronics return and against which their value is negotiated.⁷² A thing may be reconstituted—as the preceding discussion on plastic reminds—in an infinite number of ways. It may pass into states of disposal and then enter several stages of delay, recuperation, and reentry. When electronics pass through disposal, they undergo such transformations. The displacement of this electronic “dirt” further gives rise to places, social relations, and environmental effects.

It is useful, at the end of this chapter, to return to the earlier discussion on the relevance of approaching consumption through disposal, of understanding the role that consumption plays in using up and dissolving goods and how these practices are guided by the dynamic of dirt. Addressing the interdependent relationship between production and consumption, Marx articulates that “a product becomes a real product only by being consumed” and that “only by decomposing the product does consumption give the product the finishing touch.” In this sense, “consumption creates the need for new production.”⁷³ Marx's schema creates a loop between production and consumption and focuses on production as the condition to which economies return, where consumption provides the necessary dissolution of products in order to spur new production—hence his phrase “Consumptive production. Productive consumption.”⁷⁴ While Marx crucially draws attention to the dissolution that characterizes consumption, his analysis does not draw out the spaces and processes of dissolution and does not consider that dissolution may, in fact, be a condition guiding economic exchange. Waste, in this respect, is typically unaccounted for within discussions of production and consumption. Yet waste is a dynamic that influences all phases of economic exchange, providing the basis for the rise and fall of value and the formation of new commodities. Indeed, Marx says as much when he argues, “Consumption accomplishes the act of production only in completing the product as product by dissolving it.”⁷⁵ While Marx goes on, in the same passage, to the renewed need for production, a slight interpretive realignment indicates that what is guiding these economic exchanges most of all is the inevitable dissolution of products. Here, products are complete only when wasted. This is a dissolution that occurs not only in consumption but also, by extension, in disposal and the recuperative spaces of recycling.

When we focus on these spaces and processes of dissolution, we can reconsider consumption not only as a process of acquisition but, equally, as a matter of how and where we rid ourselves of objects that are typically manufactured for disposal. Consumption is continuous with using up, and disposal is a critical part of the use of electronics, even if these devices are not in direct control of users. “The issue of de-constitution, of throwing away,” archaeologist Gavin Lucas urges, “clearly needs to be related to theories of consumption,” because, he suggests, “shedding off possessions can be as complex a process as acquiring them.”⁷⁶ Consumption emerges not just as a process of dissolution that spurs new production but as a drawn-out process of “dispossession” and “demattering” that critically calls attention to how we get rid of things, how they circulate, where those things go, what residues they leave behind, and what political economies and ecologies they bind together. Disposal provides a way to focus on consumption without eliding this act of using up and without seeing disposal as the simple discarding of matter. Instead, disposal brings into relief those practices, spaces, temporalities, and performances that emerge through the removal and demattering of goods in general and of electronics specifically. Colloredo-Mansfeld argues that “what it actually means to consume an object remains curiously unexamined” and that, in fact, this aspect of consumption as using up is not only a necessary area of study but also reveals how consumption can articulate social relations that “act as generative moments” through expenditure.⁷⁷ Consumption and dissolution do not return exclusively to production in this analysis but open up into other spaces that are shaped through the practices and materialities of disposal.

The circuits of disposal discussed in this chapter reveal the locations—often not so officially designated—where the “de-constitution of material culture” takes place.⁷⁸ As these practices demonstrate, such demattering is too multilayered and multilocated to occur in any single designated place. If we return to Leonia and Cornucopia City, we arrive this time with a much different sense of the circuits of disposal in these places. Cornucopia City trucks its goods from the production line to the dump: it does not account for the necessary role of consumption in using up goods and extending disposal into multiple places. Leonia simply shifts its continually discarded goods outward, to an unnamed margin, which could just as well be some electronic waste dump in Guangdong. We not only need places of demattering; we already have them. They just tend not to register as places of regard. But these places of disposal continue to exceed their boundaries, forcing us to reconcile ourselves to the effects of our wastes—electronic and otherwise. Yet there are also spaces of more official demattering that we can turn to in order to consider how we deal with the loss of material culture. The museum or archive is perhaps primary among these designated spaces for witnessing or arresting the erosion and erasure of material culture. These are sites that manage the duration and space of material release but also preserve a concrete record of the program of transience within electronics. In the next chapter, I consider how the museum and archive offer up spaces of demattering and disposal, as well as material memories of failed technologies.