Electronic Waste
This handheld device has been the number one contributor to electronic waste since the invention of the iPhone.
What is cell phone?
Commonly referred to as "the three Rs", these three words, each beginning with the letter R, describe how to leave a smaller waste footprint.
What is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?
What is Agbogbloshie?
Most waste from electronic devices is produced before the consumer does this.
What is purchases the device?
It is difficult to do this to electronic waste because it comes in many shapes and sizes, and is not tracked universally.
What is quantify?
Between 1996 and 2012, total global e-waste flows more than doubled, from over 488 million kilograms to more than this amount.
What is 1 billion kilograms?
This phrase refers to the reclamation of materials from electronics, specifically a way that the U.S. government could get minerals.
What is resource recovery?
This province was the hometown of the Noranda Company, where it operated the Horne smelter.
What is Quebec?
What is waste?
This convention, comprised of 186 countries, was entered into force in 1992 and is the key international treaty regulating the international shipping of hazardous waste.
What is the Basel Convention?
This acronym is used to refer to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database which tracks the waste and scrap of primary batteries and electrical accumulators across the world.
What is COMTRADE?
This percent of the secondhand equipment brought into Ghana is marketable, that is, not waste.
What is 85%?
The author refers to the wastes arising from the “minescapes,” “productionscapes,” and “clickscapes” of electronics collectively as "[this term] of electronics".
What is discardscapes?
This analytical tactic is used throughout the novel in an effort to understand perspectives on e-waste.
What is worlding?
The term "Electronic scrap" evolved into the term "electronic waste" which then became abbreviated as this term.
What is "e-waste"?
This law passed in the 1960s, had the goal of reducing waste and protecting human and environmental health by decreasing pollution and promoting better municipal waste disposal technology.
What is The Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965?
Trade for this purpose rather than for waste dumping is found to be the main economic driver of such exports.
What is reuse?
Lepawsky found that used electronics imported from abroad were crucial to this city's economy.
What is Dhaka, Bangladesh?
Contrary to popular belief, wealthy countries do not send most of their electronic waste to this type of country.
What is developing nation?
This type of monitor was crushed and processed for its copper and lead at both the Horne and Brunswick smelters.
What is CRT?
What is Maine?
The anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom, who has spent years mapping the intermingling of global licit and illicit trading notes that national economies in Africa show a surprising commonality with the economies of these three countries.
What is Italy, Russia, and Peru?
This question is the central focus of the novel and of our class this week.
What is what is the right thing to do with electronic waste?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no mandate to track nonhazardous waste generated in this industry.
What is manufacturing?