It is common practice for companies in the electronics sector to publish annual environmental reports. These reports can be very enlightening. After all, they represent a story about a given company in a situation in […]
Category: Discard Studies
Software Centricity
Discard studies offers an important concept for tech criticism: defamiliarization. The concept comes from the worlds of art and theatre and basically refers to some sort of device that helps make the familiar or taken […]
Pollution release and transfer data
I have a paper published called, “Mapping chemical discardscapes of electronics production” (it’s free to download). It’s about pinpointing what researchers can learn about the electronics sector and the chemicals that are released during the […]
E-waste, Pollution, and a Sense of Scale
Usually when e-waste is discussed, the story defaults to a post-consumer view of the problem: e-waste is what happens when people (consumers) throwaway their devices. Of course, post-consumer discarding happens but this is actually the […]
“E-waste journalism that starts and ends in blighted foreign landscapes of dumps and scrap yards emphasizes the recycling trap…”. A short piece for MIT Press Reader.
Workshop | SAVVY Contemporary
None of us, not a single plant, critter, or human alike, remain untouched by the toxic. Knowingly or obliviously, through direct encounter or through a diluted intake downstream, its pervasiveness is so ubiquitous that to […]
Think you know e-waste?
Almost everything you know about e-waste is wrong Josh Lepawsky, Memorial University of Newfoundland Many of us think we know what electronic waste is because we wonder what to do with devices we no longer […]
Changing Waste
Any system that deals with the four aspects of modern waste – tonnage, toxicity, heterogeneity, and externalization – on a large scale will change waste infrastructure and what counts as trash. — Max Liboiron
Electronic Planet Research Lab 