Between toxics and gold: devaluing informal labor in the global urban mine

Julia Eleanor Corwin

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Environmental discourses on electronic waste have converged around two framings of e-waste as a significant global concern: as a polluting and hazardous waste product, and as an under-tapped source of value: an “urban mine.” This paper argues that the discursive shift between these two framings is not based in material differences between either the electronics themselves or related labor processes; instead, the major determining factor in e-waste’s categorization as hazard or resource is based on the category of labor working on it and where it is located. Drawing on research in India’s used electronics industry, this paper argues that when associated with informal labor in the Global South, e-waste is easily devalued and judged a hazardous waste through devaluing the labor that works on it. The conflation of pollution with informal labor in the Global South offers such a powerful narrative, particularly in governance and industry circles, that it has become a significant way to devalue e-waste in the Global South, opening up “new” frontiers of value that would otherwise be captured by local, predominantly informal, industry. Thus, environmental concerns about the hazards of e-waste can be used to secure corporate e-waste markets through devaluing informal labor.

Keywords: informal labor; devaluation; electronic waste; urban mining; refurbishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 N0 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2019-11-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-iue
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Capitalism Nature Socialism, 18, November, 2019. ISSN: 1045-5752

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102531/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:102531

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().