“Control-Alt-Delete”: Rebooting Solutions for the E-Waste Problem

A number of efforts have been launched to solve the global electronic waste (e-waste) problem. The efficiency of e-waste recycling is subject to variable national legislation, technical capacity, consumer participation, and even detoxification. E-waste management activities result in procedural irregularities and risk disparities across national boundaries. We review these variables to reveal opportunities for research and policy to reduce the risks from accumulating e-waste and ineffective recycling. Full regulation and consumer participation should be controlled and reinforced to improve local e-waste system. Aiming at standardizing best practice, we alter and identify modular recycling process and infrastructure in eco-industrial parks that will be expectantly effective in countries and regions to handle the similar e-waste stream. Toxicity can be deleted through material substitution and detoxification during the life cycle of electronics. Based on the idea of "Control-Alt-Delete", four patterns of the way forward for global e-waste recycling are proposed to meet a variety of local situations

Electronic-Waste Circuitry and Value Creation in Accra, Ghana

Based on extensive field research, this chapter assesses electronic-waste processing in Ghana by examining the respective roles of formal and informal enterprises therein. Against this background, recent government efforts to manage e-waste and regularise related industries are reviewed. The authors conclude that government policies are not suitable for the development of this sector and for upgrading e-waste activities, because they largely neglect informals and their critical contribution to the sector. Given the low state of technology available in Ghana and the key role that informal labourers play in e-waste collection and processing, the authors call for a refocus on the informal activities so that informals can operate in better, greener, healthier and safer working conditions that would ultimately produce better outcomes in terms of sustainable development

Sociomaterial solar waste: afterlives and lives after of small solar

The problem of solar waste from off-grid technologies is attracting increasing attention. This chapter argues that solar waste represents multiple matters of concern; it is a problem of pollution, resource, and social ruin all together. It suggests that while an energy justice framework is well suited to identify issues of distributional, procedural, and recognition justice in relation to solar waste-what we refer to as "afterlives"-there is a need to engage with postcolonial theories of ethics in order to better grapple with different kinds of social ruins solar waste may represent-what we refer to as 'lives after'.</p

Technological innovation and structural change

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Towards post-growth creative economies: building sustainable cultural production in Argentina

The ecological crisis and the continued downturn in capitalist economies mean that there is now an urgent need for the creative and cultural industries to offer more genuinely alternative and sustainable models of organising and production. In this chapter, we highlight the existence and emergence of some incipient ‘ecological’, ‘alternative’ or ‘post-growth’ forms of cultural industries production that appear to offer different ways of thinking and doing the creative economy. First, we discuss the current state of cultural policy in relation to the ecological crisis, and argue for ‘post-growth’ as an avenue for rethinking and restructuring cultural economies. We then draw on empirical work undertaken by one of us (Serafini) in Argentina, to illustrate how in a post-crisis context, post-growth or post-extractivist and ecological imaginaries are already underpinning new forms of socially aggregating and sustainable cultural production. We conclude by arguing that the creative economy must be made more genuinely sustainable in all locations in order to help counter any further intensification of an already established set of economic and ecological problems and crises