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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/1...eoj.12077/
A richer approach to the geographies of e-waste would add questions of reuse, repair, refurbishment and material recovery to the issue of trade flows and their environmental effects. These questions, however, cannot be addressed well with existing trade data because such data contain no specific commodity codes related to reuse, repair, refurbishment or recovery (i.e. trade codes make no distinction between new and used electronic products; for a method that provides estimates of exports of used electronics from the US based on assumptions about the dollar value of exports, see Duan et?al . 2013 ). Hence, the critical importance of fieldwork to ground-truth patterns apparent in such trade data and to elucidate the rich practices of reuse, repair, refurbishment and recovery of electronic discards. Attending to practices of reuse, repair, refurbishment and recovery highlight different sorts of issues around justice and equity not limited to dumping and its ill effects – though of course, these do not disappear as matters of concern nor should they be ignored. Reframing of the e-waste problem along these lines would make it an issue about waste and discards, but also about value, resources, who has access to them, and under what conditions. Such a reframing would serve to productively enrich the conceptualisation and policy discussion of e-waste as an issue of environmental and economic politics and justice.
A richer approach to the geographies of e-waste would add questions of reuse, repair, refurbishment and material recovery to the issue of trade flows and their environmental effects. These questions, however, cannot be addressed well with existing trade data because such data contain no specific commodity codes related to reuse, repair, refurbishment or recovery (i.e. trade codes make no distinction between new and used electronic products; for a method that provides estimates of exports of used electronics from the US based on assumptions about the dollar value of exports, see Duan et?al . 2013 ). Hence, the critical importance of fieldwork to ground-truth patterns apparent in such trade data and to elucidate the rich practices of reuse, repair, refurbishment and recovery of electronic discards. Attending to practices of reuse, repair, refurbishment and recovery highlight different sorts of issues around justice and equity not limited to dumping and its ill effects – though of course, these do not disappear as matters of concern nor should they be ignored. Reframing of the e-waste problem along these lines would make it an issue about waste and discards, but also about value, resources, who has access to them, and under what conditions. Such a reframing would serve to productively enrich the conceptualisation and policy discussion of e-waste as an issue of environmental and economic politics and justice.
