Staging e-waste: Media archaeology in an e-waste recycling centre

Luuk Schröder

As an artist it is not uncommon to find oneself in search of materials. Some time ago, I cast a series of old cathode ray tube televisions by applying concrete to their screens, like death masks. The cast surfaces were grey, textured, and concave instead of convex. I hoped to invite a different way of looking at these obsolete media objects, making them strange. However, releasing the concrete from the glass was a process of trial and error and I rapidly ended up needing more old televisions. My search brought me to an electronic recycling centre at the city limits of Amsterdam. Here I found a whole shipping container full of discarded televisions, but I also encountered people working in between heaps and stacks of discarded media equipment. They were busy sorting cables, disassembling computers, stacking containers, and prying batteries out of plastic casings. The visit gave me a first insight into the extent to which people are involved at the end of the production chain. I decided to investigate this further by working as a recycler myself and contacted the WEEE (Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment) recycling centre in Apeldoorn to ask if they had a place for me. Interestingly, there has been increased attention to documenting global circuits of production, for example the Allied Grounds project of the Berliner Gazette¹ or the Restart Project² that cover themes like environmental pollution and resource commodification, while the afterlife of products remains less documented. In the context of circular economy, a policy central to the Dutch recycling industry, defined by EUR-Lex as “a system where products are reused, repaired, remanufactured or recycled”,³ research conducted into the afterlife of electronic equipment is criticized for “lacking the social and human dimensions”.⁴ What can be gained from engaging with the perspective of people who work at the end-of-life cycle of media equipment?

We have a lot of knowledge about the scale and environmental harm of e-waste through annual papers like the WEEE UNITAR report,⁵ the extensive work done by researchers like Jennifer Gabrys⁶ and Sean Cubitt,⁷ or online mapping resources like the global e-waste map.⁸ My experience, however, did not just inform me about the world of electronic waste. As I touched, moved, carried, sorted, and disassembled many kilos of e-waste, I experienced the scale, human involvement, sounds, and textures through my body. Changing my perspective from outside to inside a recycling centre showed me that we are ecologically interconnected with the electronic waste we discard. Sharing such a materially informed experience has the potential to change the way we, consumers, people who normally don’t have access to a recycling centre, experience our discarded media equipment. As I will show, some of these alternative perspectives are already present in media archaeology, a field that emphasises non-discursive, non-linear, and hands-on media histories with attention to obsolete, forgotten, or failed media technologies. In this text I will attempt to ground some of these alternative perspectives in existing recycling practices. I will do so by answering the following research question:

What ecological insights can be gained by framing the location, layout, and the work being conducted at an e-waste recycling as a performance and contextualizing this in media-archaeological terms?

Method

This paper is based on a working period of two months early in 2023, at the WEEE recycling centre in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. In addition to specific knowledge of the daily workings, people, and layout of the recycling centre, two auto-ethnographic texts I wrote are central to my argument. My enquiry is open-ended: The process I initiated with the old televisions was meant for making sculptures but changed into situated research. In her recent book The Artistic Attitude, Anke Coumans identifies both open-endedness and situatedness as important aspects of an artistic research attitude. She writes: “Art can be situated in the daily course of life, not only as a product or an image but as an artistic space in which a different practice and a different attitude emerge than we are used to.”⁹ By working at the recycling centre as an artist/researcher, I hope to facilitate a situation in which I and the people around me look at recycling work in different, emergent ways. Coumans refers to anthropologist Tim Ingold’s concept open-endedness as a term “by which he expresses the importance of remaining open to new information emerging from the environment”.¹⁰ This is similar to the way I allow my own practice to be changed by what I encounter. At the start of the work period, I made myself known to my direct colleagues as an artist who does research. In addition to ethical considerations about transparency, making myself known like this was important because it allowed the possibility for discussion and feedback about my practice. During the day my co-workers would often make an effort to explain how certain processes work, suggest things for me to write about, or comment on my way of working. My act of working at the WEEE recycling centre is performative and has affinity with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ practice, who used her status as official artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation to make workers around her think of their practice differently. Similarly, I believe that being open about my position allows the open-endedness I referred to earlier to be reciprocal and will ultimately make my research more reflective.

To bring out and share the performative dimension of my research I will rethink the recycling centre as a stage, a method similar to that used by historian Naoko Shimazu in her article Diplomacy As Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955.¹¹ Shimazu uses the term staging with the purpose of temporarily designating her subject, the Bandung conference organized in Indonesia in 1955, as a theatrical event. By setting the city of Bandung as a political stage for the conference, Shimazu rethinks the visiting politicians as performers and the citizens of Bandung as an audience that participated in the performance, all the while paying specific attention to the way people were dressed, moved through the city, and addressed each other. By temporarily framing the recycling centre as a stage, I intend to think through the different spatial elements that constitute recycling work as a specific social performance.

I will first consider the location and layout of the site itself. Then I will zoom in on the labour that is being conducted at the site and how this is organised. Finally, I will bring in examples from my own work experience, compare these with my earlier analysis and contextualise my findings in media-archaeological terms.

Staging: Location

Seen from above, the recycling centre has four clearly distinguishable sections. The outdoor area that is covered in corrugated metal is the largest. Here, shipping containers are lined up around the edges, and the scatter of tire tracks testify to the busy activity of lorries and forklifting trucks. Right below is the large workshop where most of the dismantling is done. Here, manual workers spend the day sorting electronic waste by hand. On the right of the workshop is a smaller building with office spaces, meeting rooms, a canteen, and a small lobby. This is the most public area of the centre. Further to the right two parking lots can be seen, the lower one for employees, the top one for visitors.

Laptops are left upside down to expose their batteries, cables are cut off from toasters, microwaves, or printers, as they pose a safety hazard, and everything is stacked, scratched, and squeezed.

The centre is divided into two intersecting scales: the office space is acclimatized and scaled for people, while the large outdoor area is scaled for the shipping container. Every container that comes into the centre, and every container that goes out of the centre is weighed and registered on the weighbridge that can be seen right above the office building. Additionally, the weighbridge functions as an entrance for manual workers, who need to go around the office building to reach the workshop. Due to safety and theft protection, this entrance is closed off with a fence during most of the day. The outside space, as can be seen by the tire tracks, is the domain of large lorries that come in the morning to deposit electronic waste. Urban researcher Keller Easterling, in her discussion of global infrastructure, refers to the way international standards like the dimensions of a shipping container inform the way cities are organised.¹² The location at the city limits of a recycling centre like the one I worked at, is partly determined by the fact it functions on a shipping-container scale. In contrast to the spectacle with which electronic equipment enters our society, think for example about the Apple store which is located in the city centre of Amsterdam, with its products prominently on display in the beautifully refurbished Hirsch & Cie building, electronic waste departs our society silently and in bulk. Both the fence at the entrance and the location at the city limits make it that the recycling centre is, compared to the Apple store, a backstage. Rebecca Schneider writes in her text Slough Media “what happens backstage, or obscaena (‘offstage’, to use the Latin that employs the Greek), is also theatre”, in the sense that the “stagehands are operational components of the theatre made, even if they don’t appear as such in the product, such as it is”.¹³ This is an apt way of saying that the recycling centre, by the act of removing electronic waste out of sight, participates in the way electronic equipment is seen and experienced.

At the end of the working day, materials leave the recycling centre in the same way they entered the space: in shipping containers. Lorries pick up the sorted materials for reuse, or to be delivered to specialised companies that do further recycling, dismantling, or processing. A segment of this system operates internationally, as we are unable to recycle or process the growing amount of electronic waste on a national level. In this sense a Dutch recycling centre is the first step in the global network of the circular economy. In an article about circular economy and e-waste flows to Nigeria, Deutz et al. note that:

[D]espite the circular action plans and just transition aspirations, shipment of European waste electric and electronic equipment (e-waste) [is ongoing,] … especially to places with little or no capacity to sustainably manage them.¹⁴

Even though Dutch recycling centres only deliver sorted materials to certified companies, the trans-boundary character of the waste industry makes it difficult to keep track of everything that happens further downstream.¹⁵ In this situation, the Dutch recycling centre discussed in this text can be seen as a first layer in a series of multiple backstagings that disconnects society from the world of waste. Ecologically this is relevant. According to media ecologist Sy Taffel, in his book Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code and Hardware: “[E]cology comprises the study of patterns of entanglement, connectivity, interaction and symbiosis between agents ranging in scale from individuals to ecosystems”.¹⁶ By virtue of its location, visibility, and accessibility we interact with the recycling centre as if it is a backstage. If ecology is about entanglement and connectivity, backstaging media waste and the people working with and around the waste disconnects us from it, and therefore obfuscates its ecological urgency.

Performativity: Interaction with the recycling centre

When we have the need to discard electronics, we interact with the recycling industry through trash bins, waste collection points, and pick-up services. At these sites we simply hand over our waste, and it disappears in a container, truck, or box. We might have a conversation with the city council employee, but often this conversation is limited to a few words about the most basic kind of materiality. Does the object contain batteries? Any loose parts? What is its size? The purpose of this exchange is to decide where to pre-sort it. We do not talk about memories connected to the device or share stories about where or how we acquired it. What is our reason to discard the device? Do we think it is ugly? Why? Did it break down, and, if so, which part? Waste collection points work as ‘interfaces’, in the sense that they both connect and cut off at the same time.¹⁷ By channelling our e-waste, the waste collection point connects us to the recycling centre, but in the same gesture it decouples our personal histories from the equipment that is being discarded. Perhaps this can be seen as the reverse process of what anthropologist Sarah Pink defines as appropriation in her book Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice:

Through appropriation, or the process by which people assign meaning to things, people, places and activities, media technologies are incorporated and redefined in different terms, in accordance with the household’s own values and interests.¹⁸

At the waste collection point we ‘deappropriate’ our media equipment once again into an anonymous object. Only a damaged sticker of an early 2000s idol, some glitter marks or a password reminder written on a sticky note are left of the presence of its former user.

Screens, 14 December 2022.

In our daily lives we, consumers in a wealthy economy, handle the media equipment we own with care. We place our laptop softly on a table, to avoid shaking up its interiors or scratching its surface. We do not touch lenses or screens with our fingers as this would leave grease marks. We protect our smartphone in a beautifully decorated cover, sometimes with personal stickers, pins, or hangers. When we use our equipment, we use it in specific ways, often just touching it softly, swiping it, caressing it. Today I saw Jasper¹⁹ carry two flatscreens. He held them upside down. They dangled by their stands from his thick gloves, swaying back and forth as he walked through the space. It seemed as if he carried two dead chickens, ready to be thrown on the grill. Even though the screens did not show physical marks, they looked broken. In the recycling centre objects are touched, carried, and handled differently from the way we do in our daily lives. Laptops are left upside down to expose their batteries, cables are cut off²⁰ from toasters, microwaves, or printers, as they pose a safety hazard, and everything is stacked, scratched, and squeezed. The way we treat media equipment is as carcasses at a butcher’s. As dead media.

A lot of the equipment that enters the recycling centre might be outmoded, obsolete, ugly, discoloured, or dirty. Even though we treat it as if it is dead, it actually often still functions.²¹ This situation resembles what new media theorists Jussi Parikka and artist Garnet Herz signal when they write about Zombie media:

Things break apart everyday anyhow – especially high technology – and end up as inert objects, dead media, discarded technology. Yet, dead media creeps back as dangerous toxins into the soil, or alternatively as zombie media recycled into new assemblies.²²

Both media that ends up in the soil and media that is reappropriated into something else are zombie media in the sense that they seem to disappear but remain. In terms of my argument, it seems that our way of interacting with the recycling centre through deappropriation produces a situation in which we separate dead from living media. However, as we will see later in the text, the fact that a large part of wasted media equipment still functions, and is in fact zombie media, leads to its own kind of performativity inside the centre.

Staging: Layout, the workshop

The previous auto-ethnographic fragment took place in the workshop area. This is an interesting space because it intersects the two scales that are present at the recycling centre: container scale and human scale. The workshop is technically an indoor space, workers are protected from rain, sunlight, and wind, but because of the open garage doors the human body doesn’t acclimatize too well. Due to the presence of forklifting trucks and heavy machinery, everyone who enters the space is required to wear protective overalls, gloves, safety goggles, and a helmet.²³ The combination of safety precautions and the different climate demarcates the workshop from the office space. Interestingly, this difference is emphasized by several small architectural features. When leaving the workshop towards the office, shoe cleaning bristles are mounted on the floor besides the exit. On the other side of the door is a large box with plastic shoe bags that one is required to wear when going to the canteen. Workers have separate toilets as well as a separate canteen and a dressing room to change from their daily clothes into their work uniform. These measures are present for safety and hygiene, but on a performative level they signify a transition from intellectual labour that is conducted in the office to manual labour in the workshop. In this sense the recycling centre mirrors the distinction between manual and intellectual labour Sean Cubitt writes about in Ecologies of Fabrication: “The labor of producing semiconductors can be divided between high-value design (cognitive labor) and low-value manufacture and assembly (physical labor).”²⁴

Cubitt’s distinction operates across multiple industries, like the microelectronics or the textile industry. Important to add is that in the context of media technology, low-valued physical labour involves media equipment that is often turned off, while high-valued labour involves media equipment that is mostly turned on. Jussi Parikka also notices this when he writes:

[W]e could as justifiably track down genealogies of media materials to labor processes, exploitation, and dangerous conditions that characterize also the current persistence of hard work alongside persistence of hardware.²⁵

Cubitt writes about vast inequalities between working conditions in different parts of the world. In this sense the situation at a Dutch recycling centre is different. Workers at the recycling centre I worked at earn a decent but relatively low income, and work in relatively good working conditions. One aspect of this divide between cognitive and physical labour does seem to pass over, and this is the way workers see themselves through the eyes of society. Even though my colleagues often expressed they enjoyed themselves, the overall image of their own work is that it is not valued very highly in society. On a performative level, both the backstage-ness of the recycling centre, and the division between cognitive and physical labour produce a situation in which recycling work is not seen as intellectual or creative labour, a binary that complements the earlier so-called division between dead and living media.

Performativity: Working at the recycling centre

E-waste arrives at the centre in bulk, is scaled down enough at the workshop to be handled by hand and is, after the sorting is done, scaled up again to bulk for transport. Bulk, hand, bulk. In bulk, e-waste is a mass that needs to be moved by machines, transported by trucks, shredded by large shredders, or dissolved in acid baths. After the shipping containers arrive, electronic waste is taken out in smaller containers and brought to the workshop by forklifting trucks. These smaller sorting containers are placed in metal frames that can be tilted towards a comfortable working angle. At this scale e-waste is sorted by hand. Every single object is, even for just a moment, touched. It is at this point in the recycling process that we can talk, again in Schneider’s terms, of “the in-handedness of media”.²⁶ We should be careful here for the long-running humanist bias that Schneider also signals in a footnote, following Heidegger’s concept present-at-hand/ready-at-hand, in which “hands” are used as a metonym for human subjectivity. In the context of my argument, I start from the point of the media equipment itself. Whether it comes in bulk and is moved by machines, or whether it comes as objects that can be touched by hand, one modality is not more or less ‘human’ than another, but they do afford different performances. In-handed-media has the potential to be switched on, to be activated. In doing so, something else might happen that could counter the previous binary between physical and cognitive labour.

Brainpower, 5 January 2023.

In the back of the workshop, on top of a small mezzanine is a radio that is switched on simultaneously with the lights in the morning. I assume that the radio is connected to the power circuit of the lights because I have never seen someone turn it on. The loud sounds of Q-music are ubiquitous in the space and help me during the moments that work feels somewhat monotonous. Most of the time we listen to electronic music. Today, a Dutch-spoken rap song played on the radio while I was working at one of the sorting stations. When I looked to my right, I saw that Hendrik had fished out a microphone from the container he was working on and started a lip-sync impression of the song. The newly found microphone was complemented by his helmet, which he always wears with the cap facing backwards, and his way of cupping the mic, with his hand clamped around the mic’s head. Jumping around through the sorting station and waving his arm, Hendrik looked like a rapper from the early 2000s. When I looked around, I saw that almost everyone laid down their work and was smiling, clapping, and cheering him on.

Even though the recycling centre cannot strictly be thought of as an archive, – it is rather more like a pass-through at which equipment lingers for a few days at most – Hendrik’s performance shows us that it shares some of the qualities that art and theatre scholar Nele Wynants identifies in her text “Invisible Hands in the history of the magic lantern: where theatre studies and media archaeology meet”. Wynants draws attention to Parikka’s phrase “the entanglement of past and present”²⁷ and introduces an archival approach “under which the absent past can be said to have ‘presence’ in the present”.²⁸ Key to this presence is interaction with a body. As Wynants points out, “in interaction with the hands that handle them in the present, the objects once again become a live encounter with the past.”²⁹ Hendrik’s performance is exemplary of this type of interaction. The presence of the specific rap song on the radio, the chance encounter of an old microphone in the sorting container, and Hendrik’s familiarity with the lyrics allowed a persona to emerge that we could all identify with: A rapper from the past with a look and feel that seemed to match those of the microphone.

The fragments about Jasper and Hendrik are similar in the sense that they took place during work in the workshop area, and while one was perhaps slightly more remarkable than the other, they can both be marked as daily occurrences. Different is that Jasper was doing what we are supposed to do in the workshop: he was engaged in sorting work and treated the screens as inert matter. His way of handling the screens fits nicely within the binary distinction between low value physical labour, involving switched off media and high-value cognitive labour, involving switched on media. By attaching low value to the material afterlife of media equipment, we again obfuscate its ecological implications. Media ecologist Sy Taffel also notes this in his book Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code and Hardware when he writes:

[T]he commonplace notion of digital technology as relating to virtual spaces, virtual communities and virtual reality is a discursive practice that obfuscates the complex and often poorly understood materiality of microelectronics.³⁰

To answer the first part of my question: What ecological insights can be gained by framing the location, layout, and the work being conducted at an e-waste recycling as a performance? The performative script of the recycling centre produces a situation in which recycling work is backstaged, a backstaging that continues through the trans-boundary character of the waste industry. In combination with the actively produced binaries between cognitive/physical labour and dead/living media, this situation obfuscates the role the material media is made of plays in the current ecological crisis. As a result, we don’t tend to consider where our waste ends up, a way of thinking that Thalpa et al. see reflected in mainstream discourses on circular economy that “reflect the ideology that the economy can grow forever without harming the environment”. However, a closer look at the second auto-ethnographic example complicates this view on recycling work.

When wasted media is switched on, it occasionally ‘jumps’ out of its material husk and makes an appeal to our senses.

As opposed to Jasper, Hendrik was playing around. He engaged with an imaginary world that he conjured up together with the discarded microphone. This type of play happens regularly at the centre and often involves either turning media equipment on or pretending that it is turned on. Other media objects we have ‘played’ with are, amongst others, an air purifier, LED foam glowsticks, a radio, and Christmas lights. In every case the smell, sight, or sound was an important part of the curiosity, humour, or imagination that accompanied the brief moment of play.³¹ When wasted media is switched on, it occasionally ‘jumps’ out of its material husk and makes an appeal to our senses. I think that at these moments, no matter how small and insignificant they might seem, we do have the possibility to regard our wasted devices differently.

To answer the second part of my question: What ecological insights can be gained by contextualizing this performance in media-archaeological terms? The performative dimension of an act like that of Hendrik, demonstrates that a lot of wasted media equipment is not dead and that recycling work can be different from the manual hard work we might associate with it. Working with electronic waste makes one attentive to the different affordances of the objects surrounding you. In this sense, Hendrik’s performance breaks with the cognitive/physical labour and dead/living media binaries and instead grounds media-archaeological notions like zombie media and the entanglement of the past and present in a daily practice. If this kind of practice were to be foregrounded more, people who would not normally have access to the world of waste could gain a better awareness of the extent to which we are interconnected with that what we discard. In other words, Hendrik’s performance brings us closer to an ecological understanding of e-waste, in the sense that it highlights a pattern of entanglement, connectivity, and interaction between people and the waste surrounding them.

Conclusion

By temporarily framing a recycling centre in the Netherlands as a stage, I formulated a series of opposing terms that apply to inside- and outside perspectives of recycling work. Firstly, a Dutch electronic recycling centre is an initial backstage leading into a series of backstages from the global electronic waste industry. In the context of media, a division of labour is produced in society between low-valued manual work and high-valued cognitive work that corresponds to a separation between dead and living media equipment. These binary categories obfuscate the ecological interconnectedness that we share with the e-waste we produce. Looking closely through a media archaeological lens at two performative situations at the recycling centre, I grounded concepts like zombie media and the entanglement of past and present in its daily workings. By doing so, the situations I encountered complicate the binaries that are produced around e-waste recycling work in society. Understanding the situations at the recycling centre in this way revealed an ecological interconnectedness between people and the waste surrounding them. If this view could be shared, it has the potential to attune people who would not normally have access to the world of waste in a different way to the environmental consequences of discarded media equipment.

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Luuk Schröder

is an artist and researcher interested in the ecological repercussions of media technology and its supporting infrastructure in our world. He makes installations and performances with media equipment and is currently following an artistic PhD at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Recent projects include a live streaming installation at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in 2021 and an exhibition in 2023 at alt space LOOP, both in Seoul, South-Korea.

l.schroder@pl.hanze.nl

Footnotes