Once one is sensitized to the shadow world of waste, a drive through most areas of the West Bank will reveal ubiquitous dismantled scrap metal piles and the small ashy patches lining roadsides, with telltale remnants of the electrical and electronic components that were burned there. But these traces of small and usually ad hoc pockets of recycling do not prepare one for the landscape-scale imprint of the persistent, pervasive, and massive scale of e-waste and scrap material recycling in the West Line – a string of rural villages located in southwest Hebron along the Israeli border (see Figure 1.2). Here we find an e-waste hub: an organized, durable, and centralized industry that has processed most Israeli e-waste for almost two decades and become a pillar of the local economy.
While the notion of “e-waste hubs” is used casually in the media and academic discourse to refer to scores of similar clusters around the world, this remains a phrase, rather than an analytic category to indicate the special and remarkable social and economic processes in such places. Informal e-waste hubs are analogs of the celebrated “industrial clusters” of the formal economy. Somehow, away from, and sometimes despite, the intentions of governments and formal economic institutions, e-waste hubs have emerged as hosts to thriving integrated concentrations of businesses, managing far-reaching economic and logistic ties through which they process (albeit with methods that cause severe environmental harm) much, if not most, of the world’s e-waste. These hubs achieve higher rates of e-waste collection and recycling than some of the most advanced systems with formal recycling policies. According to the most recent assessment of global e-waste quantities and flows from The Global E-waste Monitor, in 2020 only 17.4 percent of the globally generated 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste was “documented to be collected and properly recycled.” Of the undocumented 82.6 percent, only 8 percent from higher-income countries goes to residual waste streams, with most of the remaining 74 percent assumed to move through informal channels and destinations, with large environmental and health harms (Forti et al., Reference Forti, Balde, Kuehr and Bel2020). Since e-waste is a fairly recent phenomenon, with rapidly shifting composition, sources, and regulatory landscapes, the rapidity of these hubs’ emergence and their flexibility in tracking these dynamic economic activities is impressive.
E-waste hubs embody a dark side of global capitalism. A combination of growing global consumption and rapid product obsolescence has made e-waste the fastest growing waste stream worldwide and presents complex disposal challenges due to its internal components combining both valuable metals and toxic substances (StEP, 2016a). E-waste management policies and formal recycling systems have failed to keep pace with increasing e-waste quantities sparking a key and pressing environmental problem, with considerable attention focused on the transboundary movement of discarded electronics from the Global North to e-waste hubs in the Global South. As we discuss in Chapter 3, the prevailing narrative of the e-waste problem frames consumers in the Global North as perpetrators generating excess e-waste that is dumped on marginalized populations in the Global South. Drawing parallels to the outsourcing of manufacturing to overseas destinations where low labor costs and lax regulations allow increased profits (USNEWS, 2014), nongovernmental organization (NGO) and media portrayals of e-waste hubs in Asia and Africa highlight the poor working conditions and excessive pollution in these sites, which are considered to be dumping grounds for the refuse of rich countries (60 Minutes, 2008; Frontline, 2009; Puckett et al., Reference Puckett, Byster, Westervelt, Gutierrez, Davis, Hussain and Dutta2002). This common storyline not only obscures the environmental consequences in the production of electronics and the environmental limits of recycling (Lepawsky, Reference Lepawsky2018), but also characterizes e-waste hub residents as helpless victims of transboundary environmental injustice. E-waste hubs do not figure as real places nor is the local population seen as political actors with agency; rather, e-waste hubs serve as warning icons to motivate the urgency of instituting formal systems – symbolic markers of distant places and people to be eliminated, saved, or reformed through assimilation within formal systems. This book centers e-waste hubs as a key component of the e-waste dilemma and, through our sustained community-based research in the West Line villages, describes and argues for a hub-centered lens to reframe conceptions of environmental justice within e-waste discourse and policies.
Operationally defining industrial hubs is notoriously difficult, and e-waste hubs are no different. Definitions are often blurry and contentious, but for our purposes, a broad characterization suffices: a confined geographic region where e-waste recycling and related economic activities are the primary industry supported by common markets, technologies, and labor. E-waste hubs operate as informal economies, which contrast with the newly emerging formal economies created through the government-sanctioned marketization of e-waste, primarily through Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies, where e-waste is “owned” and managed by Producer Recycling Organizations (PROs) that require e-waste collection and recycling businesses to be registered and monitored, adhere to e-waste processing standards, and pay taxes. Businesses within e-waste hubs typically adhere to none of these formal arrangements. However, there is a range of intermediary or blended situations, such as businesses that are registered and pay taxes but obtain inputs from undocumented sources on a cash basis or formal recycling companies that rely on informal partners to take and process certain fractions of the waste stream that are marginally profitable within the formal system. While formal e-waste economies are planned and supported by government policies, e-waste hubs have emerged in regions with specific socioeconomic, geopolitical, and cultural characteristics and support diverse economic activities despite government ambivalence or even opposition.
Within the West Bank, small clusters of e-waste processing have emerged in dispersed regions (e.g., Yatta, Qalqilya, Ezaria, Anata, the villages surrounding Nablus, and othersFootnote 1), yet only the West Line qualifies as a hub in this sense, on par with others internationally (e.g., Guiyu, China; Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; Moradabad and Seelampur, India) (Doron & Jeffery, Reference Doron and Jeffery2018; Greenpeace, 2009; Ploumis, Reference Ploumis2011. For a review of e-waste hubs, see Auclair et al., Reference Auclair, Ormes, Smith and Tourtillott2020. Beyond the impressive quantity of e-waste and used materials processed in the West Line villages and its economic importance both locally and nationally, as described in Chapter 2, this industry is so central to the local economy that villagers consistently estimate that upward of 80 percent of households benefit from it. The changing daily prices of copper, steel, and aluminum influence the trade in unrelated businesses, such as barbershops and restaurants, and even children can list metal prices and comment on their fluctuations.
We begin our book with an obvious question that will serve as a useful entry point into a more nuanced account of e-waste hubs, both in our case and in others: “why here?” National-level discrepancies between Israeli economies and environmental enforcement regimes prevail throughout the West Bank but do little to explain why this particular rural area emerged as Palestine’s “scrap capital.” We can ask similar questions at other scales. Globally, developing countries have low worker salaries and lax environmental protection, yet only a few regions in a subset of developing countries have emerged as key destinations for foreign and domestic e-waste. Of course, the emergence of hubs is partly path-dependent, a matter of chance. But beneath the noise, there is a surprising amount of regularity in the characteristics that foster the emergence and clustered growth pattern of these hubs, and these are the subject of this chapter. In what follows, we introduce the factors that facilitated the emergence of the West Line e-waste hub, and how local contexts come to tap into and flourish from this new source of livelihood. We suggest that beneath the particularities of the Israeli-Palestinian case lie broader similarities with other hubs globally.
As we will see, a detailed investigation of the circumstances and agency of e-waste hubs demands pushing back against a familiar and often implicit characterization of these places as dumping grounds reflecting national-scale dynamics within global political-economic forces and flows. This kind of initially intuitive characterization of Global North–to–Global South e-waste flows has, with varying degrees of explicitness, propelled and relied on the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) (Lepawsky & McNabb, Reference Lepawsky and McNabb2010; Pellow, Reference Pellow2007). The PHH posits that pollution-intensive economic activities will obtain a comparative advantage of reduced costs by relocating to jurisdictions with less stringent environmental regulations. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, markedly different labor costs and regulatory vigor are certainly a major part of the story. Yet, there is much that must be added to the PHH narrative.
While the PHH has been mobilized to understand relationships between trade and environmental behavior since the 1970s (Clapp, Reference Clapp2001; Kellenberg, Reference Kellenberg2010), it has only recently been applied to trade patterns in hazardous waste, including e-waste (Bernard, Reference Bernard2015; Lepawsky & McNabb, Reference Lepawsky and McNabb2010; Lucier & Gureau, Reference Lucier and Gareau2015; Pellow, Reference Pellow2007). As it gained traction as an overall framework to situate global e-waste trade patterns, this framing informed efforts to prohibit e-waste trade from developed to developing countries, most notably under the purview of the Ban Amendment to the Basel Convention, an international treaty restricting shipments of hazardous waste from developed nations to the developing world.Footnote 2
Despite its policy salience, there have been few empirical attempts to explicate and test the PHH with respect to e-waste flows. In fact, as more studies and empirical materials speaking to e-waste flows and pollution havens emerge, they suggest a greater degree of geographic variability than accounted for by the PHH, demanding a more nuanced portrait of global e-waste flows and their destination sites (Breivik et al., Reference Breivik, Armitage, Wania and Jones2014; Efthymiou et al., Reference Efthymiou, Mavragani and Tsagarakis2016; Lepawsky & McNabb, Reference Lepawsky and McNabb2010). For example, studies mapping global e-waste trade patterns have shown that e-waste movement does not only flow from developed to developing countries, but also includes e-waste trade within and between developing countries (Furniss, Reference Furniss2015; Lepawsky & McNabb, Reference Lepawsky and McNabb2010). The patterns, motivations, and agencies mobilizing flows to e-waste hubs extend beyond simple accounts of dumping and flight to jurisdictions with the lowest labor costs and least stringent environmental regulations (Kahhat & Williams, Reference Kahhat and Williams2010; Lepawsky & Billah, Reference Lepawsky and Billah2011; Reddy, Reference Reddy2015). Thus, the very definition of hubs as disposal sites for global e-waste demands a reconceptualization. These are sites where real value creation and entrepreneurial inventiveness occur as the range of processes extends beyond simple rudimentary extraction to more complex forms of reuse, repair, and material recovery (Grant & Oteng-Ababio, Reference Grant, Goldizen, Sly, Brune, Neira, van den Berg and Norman2013; Lepawsky & Billah, Reference Lepawsky and Billah2011; Lepawsky & Mather, Reference Lepawsky and Mather2011; Reddy, Reference Reddy2016; Schleup et al., Reference Schluep, Hagelüken, Meskers, Magalini, Wang, Müller and Sonnemann2009; Tong & Wang, Reference Tong and Wang2004). E-waste hubs emerge after years of an accretionary virtuous cycle of growth, which gradually accumulate expertise and tacit knowledge, networks and complex supply chains, specialization, niche diversification and synergies, and auxiliary support systems (which, conversely, represent sunk costs and spatial lock-in), and are all fed by increasing economies of scale, so that a hub becomes an actor and magnet for e-waste flows. This emergent and even entrepreneurial dynamic is quite different than the dumping ground/pollution haven imagery that guided early treatments of such hubs. Our work adds to this emerging consensus. We argue that the PHH is not so much wrong as far too simplistic – an inadequate universal description of global e-waste flows. The PHH obscures local and contextual factors that, if better understood, would provide more insight and better guidance for e-waste policy. As we describe the dynamics in the West Line e-waste hub below, we also critique and enrich the theoretical conversation around the PHH as the main framework for understanding how and why hubs emerge while laying the groundwork for a different approach to studying them and developing hub-based policies.
As context for our discussion of the predisposing features of the West Line e-waste hub, we begin with a broad overview of the Palestinian economy under Israeli occupation. Specifically, we discuss the circumstances that have undermined Palestinian economic development and inhibited environmental protection, as well as setting the stage for the West Line’s repeated sequence of articulation and disarticulation from the Israeli economy that are central to the hub’s functioning. We then tease apart the place-based attributes that facilitated this region’s engagement with scrap metal and used materials and then its emergence as an e-waste hub. These place-based features are not exceptional to the West Line e-waste hub case, and we illustrate the generalizability of these through brief portraits of how they play out in the two most publicized e-waste hubs globally, Guiyu and Agbogbloshie. Finally, we conclude by showing how this kind of account challenges prevailing narratives of e-waste hubs as pollution havens, or “digital dumpsites,” as well as the moral impulses and policy responses this framing favors.
1.1 The Palestinian Economy under Israeli Occupation
Insofar as one can generalize about “developing countries,” the West BankFootnote 3 fits within this category but is inflected by Palestine’s actively colonial situation, rather than postcolonial, and the occupation is characterized by a spatially contiguous yet strangely perforated and indeterminate border, giving rise to a kind of troubled fusion with unique advantages and woes. The mechanisms of Israel’s occupation – extraction of Palestinian resources and labor, and unilateral control of borders and movement – and their contribution to the continued decline of the Palestinian economy are well known (Gordon, Reference Gordon2008; Hever, Reference Hever2010), so our focus here is on dynamics most relevant for the emergence of the West Line e-waste hub. The structural groundwork for this emergence was laid over the course of three main periods between 1967 and 2004.
1. In the decades following Israel’s Occupation in 1967, Palestinians were integrated into the Israeli workforce in agriculture, construction, and other blue-collar jobs, leading to increased blurring of the two economies and flows between them, through a mostly unplanned but steady process. During this time, Palestinian unemployment in the West Bank was below 5 percent (PCBS, 2003).
2. The outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 interrupted the gradual emergence of this ad hoc integration, while the Oslo Accords of 1993, followed closely by the Protocol on Economic Relations (the Paris Protocol), began to rework the West Bank’s spatial and governance structures. The degree to which the apparent turnaround of the Oslo “peace process” masked a continuation and even deepening of Palestinian dependency and arrested development became increasingly clear during the Oslo Accord’s stipulated five-year interim period, which ended in 1999 (Naqib, Reference Naqib2003; Roy, Reference Roy1998).
3. The years of the Oslo process’ stasis and dashed aspirations came to a head in 2000 with stalled negotiations and then the outbreak of violent resistance of the Second Intifada. This led to a significant increase in closures and a precipitous halving of the number of registered Palestinian laborers permitted to work in Israel. Over the following years, the aspiration for “separation from the Palestinians” increasingly voiced by Israeli politicians and the public solidified into measures with real bite, undermining the kind of mobility to which a generation of Palestinian workers had grown accustomed. A series of dramatic terror attacks gave a visible rationale for a regime of Israeli work permits, mobility restrictions, and border closures, which had been taking shape over the Oslo years, while a suspicious Israeli public pressured politicians to accelerate the previously fitful construction of the “separation barrier” between Israel and the West Bank. Work opportunities became increasingly tenuous, which were further undermined by a Palestinian economy that had been crippled by decades of capped opportunities alongside a deep dependence on the Israeli economy, goods, edicts, and labor markets. By 2004, unemployment had risen to be chronically over 20 percent (Khalidi & Taghdisi-Rad, Reference Khalidi and Taghdisi-Rad2009), and poverty reached crisis proportions with 67 percent of Palestinians below the poverty line and 48 percent in extreme poverty (Kawasmi & White, Reference Kawasmi and White2010).Footnote 4
Thus, throughout these periods, the Palestinian economy was fused with Israel’s economy under uneven terms and then reworked along equally dependent but more strongly separated lines with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. These dynamics set in place spatial, governance, economic, and social conditions facilitating the emergence of the West Line e-waste hub around 2004. Key among these were the following realities:
1.1.1 Economic Dependency and De-Development
During the decade after the occupation, the Israeli economy absorbed roughly one-third of the Occupied Territories labor force, and the Green Line was more or less porous in economic terms. While Palestinian men served as an “industrial reserve army” (Portugali, Reference Portugali1993), independent Palestinian economic development was stifled, and critical resources such as land, water, and stone/aggregate were controlled and appropriated by Israel. In the wake of the Oslo Accords, the Paris Protocol established the interim-period economic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority based on a “customs union” model, which unified some aspects of the two economies (currency, tax relations, etc.), with Israel retaining unilateral control of key leverage points, such as control of the borders (because of this, Palestinian businesses find it difficult to access international suppliers and markets directly). Palestinian real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) fell 36.1 percent between 1992 and 1996 because of falling aggregate income and rapid population growth. Palestine became an increasingly donor-dependent and service economy: with 38 percent of the Palestinian GDP generated from the service sector, 5 percent generated from agriculture, 15 percent from industry, and foreign aid, which stood at $1.8 billion in 2008, constituting 30 percent of the national GDP (MAS, 2010).
Palestine’s economy is substantially dependent on access to permits to enter Israel for employment. The permit regime has functioned as a mode of control over the Palestinian population since it has established and promoted norms of “correct” behavior, which has shaped the daily life and demeanor of Palestinians in line with Israeli interests (Gordon, Reference Gordon2008: 38). Palestinians requesting a permit are sometimes interviewed by an officer of Israel’s General Secret Services, also known by its Hebrew acronym as the Shabak or Shin Bet. Access to the requested permit can sometimes be made contingent upon the applicant’s willingness to collaborate, which can entail relaying information to Israeli authorities on persons or organizations of interest, extracting confessions from political prisoners, recruiting additional agents, and/or carrying out paramilitary activities (Cohen, Reference Cohen, Davis and Burke2010: 153). Collaborators serve two supplemental roles that are more significant than their formal roles, functioning as a means of control to encourage “correct” conduct. The prospect that anybody could be a collaborator becomes an effective tool to encourage people to act and even think in ways that reduce organized dissent against the occupying powers. They also fragment Palestinian society, undercutting the confidence and trust required to build alliances and solidarity, and ignite political resistance (Gordon, Reference Gordon2008: 48). Our interviews and many informal conversations with residents in the West Line villages revealed that many locals believe that Palestinians granted permission to work in Israel, particularly Alte Zachen collectors (from the Yiddish phrase, which literally translates to “old stuff”) and large scrapyard collectors (see Chapter 2), have been pressured by and made arrangements with the Israeli military to serve as an informant in exchange for permission to work in Israel.
1.1.2 Rise of an Informal Economy
The de-development of the Palestinian economy, the instability and high risk faced by formal enterprises, and endemic corruption have all created an economy in which much (and in some sectors, most) of the economy is informal. While the measurement of an informal sector is, almost by definition, difficult, it has been estimated that informal businesses in Palestine employ approximately 180,000 people, generate $300 million annually (Massar Associates, 2003), and contribute up to 50 percent of the national economy (Kawasmi & White, Reference Kawasmi and White2010). Informal businesses are often small, requiring little to no capital, provide moderate to low incomes and unstable employment, and frequently operate in unsafe working conditions. While the informal sector performs a valuable economic role in Palestine’s economy, it has also obvious drawbacks, such as the vulnerabilities and lack of protection of workers and their families, and the undermining of tax collection and regulation (Hilal et al., Reference Hilal, Kafri and Kuttab2008).
1.1.3 Spatial Fragmentation and Border Blurring
Israel and the West Bank share a unique border between the two territories, entailing a massive (but incomplete) separation wall, thousands of formal workers crossing the border daily (as well as considerable informal crossings), and a complex shifting geography of military occupation (see Figures 1.1 and 1.6). Under the current Oslo Agreement, stringent spatial controls have divided the West Bank into geopolitical Areas A, B, and C. Within this system, Area A is under full Palestinian civil and military control, Area B is under full Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian military control, and Area C is under full Israeli civil and military control. According to the Oslo Agreement, these demarcations define clear governance divisions; however, in practice, the borders between Areas A, B, and C are opaque at best. The border is selectively porous, and mobility differential. Thus, Israelis in settlements can move relatively easily through a system of bypass roads that emerged in the West Bank, and pass through borders in either direction with ease. At the same time, Palestinians face physical barricades and checkpoints as well as the “separation wall,” and passage to Israel is highly regulated with severe penalties for infringement. The Palestinian Authority is not allowed to regulate incoming goods, while Israeli regulation in both directions is confounded by settlements in Palestine that are considered “Israeli” destinations so that e-waste loads might be coming from or to these. The selectivity of mobility and passage has encouraged corruption, smuggling, and an economy of checkpoints (Tawil-Souri, Reference Tawil-Souri2009).
Figure 1.1 Photograph taken in the West Line village of Beit Awwa in 2016, showing the placement of concrete slabs to replace the chain-linked fence separation barrier. Before this, the concrete separation wall from the north of Beit Awwa was met by an easily penetrable chain-linked fence extending to the South.
1.2 The Rise of the West Line E-Waste Industry
Against this background, over a short period from around 2003 to 2006, the West Line villages evolved from hosting a scattering of e-waste scrapyards, as many Palestinian villages do, to becoming a centralized preeminent e-waste hub (see Figure 1.2). The hub’s emergence can usefully be demarcated as 2004, coinciding with the heightened physical separation of the West Line villages from their neighbors and the skyrocketing metal prices of the commodity boom of the 2000s. This milestone is marked distinctly in the appearance of extensive e-waste burning – an indication of increased e-waste recycling activity – in our satellite imagery time-series records (see Figure 1.3).Footnote 5 This process, which was intended and propelled by those actively working in the industry, certainly was not state-planned; in fact, it remained seemingly invisible, garnering little attention from national Palestinian and Israeli governments for decades. How and why did this hub emerge, and why here and at this moment? Clearly, the broad-stroke parameters of income and regulatory differentials that prevailed throughout the West Bank for many decades are necessary but not sufficient explanatory factors. Here, we describe five additional attributes that primed the West Line villages to emerge as Palestine’s main e-waste hub: (1) livelihood disruption; (2) proximity to Israel; (3) predisposing industry; (4) amenable social structure; and (5) weak environmental protection. These five attributes emerged as the most common responses during interviews with over twenty-five scrapyard owners and many more residents in the West Line villages, as we regularly posed the “why here?” question during our time in the villages. These attributes build on initial understandings of global and national e-waste flows that rely on the PHH and offer a more nuanced picture of the forces that shape cross-border e-waste flows and help recast e-waste destinations as not simply “digital dumps” but specialized industrial clusters.
Figure 1.2 Map illustrating the clustered location of e-waste-dependent businesses in the West Line villages.
Figure 1.3 Time series of satellite images from 1999 to 2009 showing the progression of a primary site for e-waste burning on the outskirts of the West Line villages, which coincides with the progression of the West Line e-waste industry.
1.2.1 Livelihood Disruption
E-waste recycling is a demanding and sometimes precarious form of livelihood, but a compelling income source where few other employment opportunities are available. When work in Israel was interrupted in 2001, many Palestinians faced desperate deprivation, but the West Line inhabitants were primed to seize upon a waste economy as an unlikely but lucrative alternative. The reduction in work permits following the Second Intifada had a strong negative impact on employment in the West Bank: Unemployment rates of 7.5 percent rose rapidly, reaching 28.2 percent in 2002 (Miaari et al., Reference Miaari, Zussman and Zussman2014). Increased unemployment mostly affected uneducated workers employed in Israel who received significantly higher wages than those available in the West Bank (Miaari & Saier, Reference Miaari and Sauer2011). Because of the West Line’s proximity and short commute to Israel, on the one hand, and distance from Palestinian urban centers on the other, they were particularly dependent on employment in Israel and had minimal investments and growth in local businesses.
This rise in unemployment acted as a catalyst for residents to search for any form of alternative employment, either long-term or temporary, which did not depend on permission to enter Israel. At the same time, international metal prices commonly found in e-waste rose to unprecedented levels from 2000–2008, spurred primarily by Chinese demand. For example, aluminum prices rose from $1,400/tonne in 2002 to $3,200/tonne in 2008, and copper spiked from $1,800/tonne in 2000 to $9,000/tonne in 2008. The existing relationships and historical roots in processing used furniture, coupled with an awareness of the growing value of raw metals that compose e-waste, fostered the surge of newly unemployed residents to shift from an economy dependent on Israeli employment to an economy dependent on Israeli e-waste.
Thus, a loss of usual livelihood source coincided with the emergence of a newly valuable resource, which could be easily and almost freely harvested. The low entry barriers to the waste economy make it especially appealing. And, as opposed to employment in Israel, which required all participants to enter Israel physically, here was an opportunity through which a few people crossing the border could leverage much wider circles of employment. Thus, a small number of Palestinians, who speak Hebrew and hold permits to enter Israel (and the financial capacity to hire an Arab-Israeli driver), can transport materials into the West Bank as a source of employment for thousands in the West Line who repair or dismantle these items or profit from the creation of supplemental businesses and the overall influx of wealth into the villages. The informal nature of the scrap industry, devoid of taxation and regulation, offers a considerable advantage relative to other forms of employment. Nor does the industry require advanced education, so it offers an easy transition for those who worked blue-collar jobs in Israel.
Thus, amid the general contraction of opportunities and incomes, the West Line found an inventive alternative. In fact, these new circumstances afforded some entrepreneurs a way to move from low-salaried and uncertain physical labor to relative prosperity. The combination of first-world revenues in Israel with third-world living costs in rural Palestine and the relatively low entry costs in the recycling industry enabled the more enterprising to accumulate sufficient capital to invest in their own business and incrementally increase the scale of operations. However, the majority, especially those who did not enjoy mobility across the border, worked in smaller dismantling and refurbishment businesses, or even household-level ones that can take place at home or on the street, with minimal overheads. Using basic hand tools (e.g., axe, hammer, screwdriver/power drill), an initial load of purchased e-waste can be dismantled and separated into metal components and sold to local traders. As the business builds up, profits can be reinvested to purchase higher quality and quantities of e-waste and more advanced dismantling machinery. Though work conditions are physically demanding and can hold many immediate and long-term health risks, employees of dismantling scrapyards can earn locally competitive salaries. Thus, thousands of uneducated Palestinians who lost their ability to work in Israel after the Second Intifada created a viable alternative in the context of deprivation.
1.2.2 Proximity to E-Waste Source
Global movements of e-waste typically require freight shipping over long distances to arrive at port cities in developing countries, which explains why most e-waste hubs that rely on international e-waste shipments, from both the Global North and Global South, are located near international ports (Greenpeace, 2009). However, the proximity and extensive road networks available to e-waste importers and exporters in the Israel–West Bank case make e-waste collection via trucks feasible, as most of the Israeli population lives within an hour drive from the West Bank border. The West Line villages are situated immediately adjacent to the Israeli border. Their location not only habituated an entire generation of local men to easy movement across the border over the decades of free flow, but still allows easy access for collection trucks to enter Israel in the morning, collect e-waste during the day, and return to the West Line villages in the evening. Within a one- to two-hour drive, collection drivers can readily service major Israeli cities – such as Tel Aviv, Ashdod, Jerusalem, or Beer Sheva – where dense populations hold higher quantities of e-waste. Though entry permits to Israel are typically given on a daily basis (disallowing overnight stays), collection drivers from the West Line can still make daily collection circuits and return to unload by evening.
Villages located even an hour’s drive east or south of the West Line villages would unlikely be able to sustain this economy. The added cost of gas alone, which in the West Bank is among the most expensive in the world, would eat into the thin profit margins of e-waste collectors. Logistically, collection drivers from the West Line typically begin their day before six am and often do not return until seven pm. If collectors had to drive an extra hour to and from Israel every day, a challenging thirteen-hour workday would become an unbearable fifteen-hour slog. Thus, the range of locations that could host an e-waste hub in the West Bank is restricted to regions located within a short drive to the Israeli border crossing.
1.2.3 Predisposing Industry
E-waste hubs require a predisposing infrastructure of people, relationships, and knowledge that enables waste entrepreneurs to become aware of the value and profit from discarded materials. Before e-waste recycling dominated the West Line economy, these villages had a long history, dating back to the pre-state period, collecting and refurbishing used furniture and other household goods collected in Israel. This industry was supported by a profession of collection drivers that clustered in the West Line but were also prevalent throughout the West Bank and Israel, known as Alte Zachen (described in Chapter 2). Collected goods were transported to a vibrant auction in Beit Awwa, where refurbishers and families inspected newly collected goods and haggled over prices. Purchased goods were repaired and resold to Palestinians across the West Bank, putting Beit Awwa on the map as the place to buy inexpensive secondhand furniture and household items.
The Beit Awwa auction has served as a key node and the lifeblood of this industry, with sixty to seventy trucks arriving daily, carrying one to three tonnes of mixed loads of e-waste and used materials per truck (see Figure 1.4). This convenient centralized meeting place – the largest of its kind throughout the West Bank – has benefited both buyers and sellers. Alte Zachen collectors can negotiate high selling prices from a competitive auction, while e-waste buyers can find niche items (LCD TVs, printers, treadmills, washing machines, etc.) fostering specialization, which increases the potential value extracted from secondhand electronics. Were it not for this nightly auction, the dispersal of Israeli e-waste in the West Bank would be costlier and less efficient. Moreover, e-waste collection would be less profitable, driving collectors to another profession, reducing flows of Israeli e-waste.
Figure 1.4 An Alte Zachen truck pulling into the Beit Awwa Market. Already, prospective buyers are eagerly inspecting the quality of items to assess their value. The lively auction is just beginning to draw a crowd.
Over time, electronic and electrical goods in all shapes and sizes became a greater, and more valuable, segment of the used products available to Alte Zachen drivers. Much of the increased availability of e-waste can be attributed to rapid advances in technology that have increased the presence of electrical and electronic goods in households, the rapidity of turnover, and the absence of any formal collection mechanisms in Israel, (E-waste was only belatedly recognized as an important policy issue around 2012.) As e-waste grew, much of the infrastructure and many of the business models were already in place for an easy transition from refurbishing furniture and household products to refurbishing and dismantling electronics.
Another, less traditional, form of predisposing infrastructure is apparent in the abundance of ad hoc landfills and disposal burn sites. The inexpensive disposal of non-valuable e-waste components is an economically advantageous externality to reduce e-waste processing costs. Because Israel sharply restricts Palestinian development in the area, rural land on the outskirts of these villages has remained largely vacant. Because the West Line villages are situated against the separation barrier to their west, the extensive Area C areas in the gap between them and the separation barrier have become even more of a liminal area that attracts dumping and burning. With minimal opportunities for Palestinians to reside on or productively monetize their land, many have used it to dispose of their e-waste remainders or profit from renting out their land as an informal landfill and/or burn site for other scrapyards. Land in Area C with absentee owners has become communal spaces for extraction and disposal burns and has even fostered collective maintenance norms (see Figure 1.5). For example, excessive burning in a burn site will eventually create a thick layer of loose toxic ash that blows in the wind and kicks up with foot traffic. When ash has piled too high, regular users of the burn site will pool finances to hire a backhoe or an excavator to scrap the top layer of ash to the edges of the burn site, maintaining a firm surface. Even the long iron rods used to spread burning cables to speed up the burning process are typically left at burn sites as a courtesy for the next burner.
Figure 1.5 This commonly used burn site located near a less fortified portion of the separation wall, comprised of a chain-linked fence, is regularly maintained by a collective of e-waste burners who push the loose ash accumulated from excessive burning to the side of the burn site, clearing the passage of trucks to continue burning e-waste materials here.
1.2.4 Amenable Social Structure
A less tangible quality, yet nonetheless influential, is a social structure with great cohesion. In the case of the West Line, family-based clans offer a high trust setting needed to operate an informal business and semilegal economy in which the protection of industry information, such as e-waste buying and selling sources, is imperative. Simultaneously, the clan-based occupational choice to work in e-waste helps contain and neutralize the stigma of working in a “rubbish” economy and neutralizes opposition and protest against its harms.
While financial investments present a low entry barrier into the e-waste industry, there are high barriers of contacts, skills, and tacit knowledge, which are gradually acquired through industry immersion, and often closely guarded. Only through experience can one learn the intricacies of the industry: where to find the most valuable e-waste for the lowest price, who to sell various dismantled components to, how to estimate the value of mixed scrap piles, how to negotiate the changing value of e-waste items, or how to economically dismantle various e-waste goods. One cannot get a degree in scrap recycling but must learn it directly, which explains what some villagers have described as the “contagious” nature of the e-waste profession. The opportunities of the e-waste trade can only be experienced through personal connections.
These dynamics are exemplified in the rise of the circuit board subeconomy in the West Line. Knowledge of the value and markets of circuit boards came initially from two nearby Israeli settlements, Adora and Telem. Before the emergence of the West Line e-waste economy, there was little perceived value in circuit boards in the few scrapyards that dismantled e-waste in the 1990s and early 2000s. For the most part, the focus was on extracting copper, aluminum, steel, and iron, and circuit boards were typically stripped of these metals and then discarded. In 2004, an Israeli settler shared with a scrap dealer from Beit Awwa the true value of circuit boards, which contain gold, silver, palladium, and other precious metals. Because this knowledge was well guarded, this scrap dealer benefited from high profit margins between the high-selling-price circuit boards he received from the Israeli buyer and the low price at which he purchased from dismantlers, whom, until this point, had been discarding these and welcomed this extra revenue stream. Collected circuit boards were brought back to a warehouse and organized based on specifications required by foreign refineries. The categorized circuit boards would then be sold to one of two Israeli settlers who functioned as middlemen by facilitating their transportation from the West Bank into Israel to avoid taxes and difficulties with customs. The circuit boards would then be sold to European refineries for metal extraction. After maintaining a monopoly in this new subeconomy for over three years, two additional relatives of this Palestinian pioneer became familiar enough with the purchase and selling prices and made independent connections with the Israeli settlers to open their own competitive operations. This new competition more than doubled the purchase price of circuit boards, to the benefit of dismantling facilities and the consternation of the original circuit board dealer.
The tendency of e-waste to be a family business also allows the profession to become established despite prevailing stigmas against this unglamorous form of livelihood, which is usually inherently dirty and physical, leaving its practitioners with perpetually stained black hands from handling scrap metal – a telltale sign that is not easy to hide. Mothers will steer their daughters away from marrying into families with reputations for working in the scrap industry. But since marriage is also very much along family lines, once a family has entered this trade, the costs of this stigma are neutralized. We can also observe how participation in the scrap sector, and even particular specializations within this, is dominated by specific families. About half of the dozen prominent extended families in the West Line villages work in the sector. Beit Awwa’s population of approximately 8,000 residents, for example, has consisted of two extended families for over 100 years: the Masalma family living in the east and the Sweity family in the west. The Masalma family dominates the refurbishment sector, while the Sweity family makes up most of the Alte Zachen profession and hosts many small dismantling facilities. In the neighboring village of Idhna, the Batran, Abu-Zalata, and particularly the Abu-Jheshi families are well-known for operating the larger dismantling scrapyards and local metal traders (see Figure 1.2).
Alternatively, certain families within the West Line villages abstain from the e-waste industry altogether. The Al’Joub family, numbering over a thousand, live in the heart of the West Line villages in Al Kum adjacent to the main strip of scrap yards. They are adamantly against this industry’s dirty nature and the pollution it causes, preferring to work in construction and agricultural professions, even though they earn a more modest income.
This family-based social structure that modulates participation in the industry between and within family groups has also defused opposition to it for decades, even as its harms became more salient. While confrontations still erupt over air pollution from e-waste burning, particularly when burning occurs close to residential areas and poisons infants and small children, the village’s overall economic dependence on e-waste has constrained community pushback. The balance between harm and livelihood is unevenly felt in different clans, with some predominantly experiencing the harm side of the equation, and others more ambivalent, since, even if the immediate family does not work in the trade, many in their extended family do. These dynamics surface in the rare and ineffective attempts to punish e-waste burners. Typically, when e-waste burners are arrested by either the local municipality, police, or Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority (EQA), the burner receives a minor fine, sometimes as low as ₪200 ($58), and signs a pledge promising they will not burn again. Traditional tribal hierarchies and modes of conflict resolution are very much alive, so that respected heads of the families filing complaints and those creating the problems will meet. The latter will make a plea for the economic hardships of the e-waste burner, their impoverished living conditions, and the absence of viable alternative livelihoods – not to mention the internal family hostility that would ensue for years were severe penalties applied. These discussions typically result in the complaint being withdrawn and the charges dropped. These kinds of conversations extend to the municipalities, and far beyond, to the police, and the regional EQA officials. Thus, family cohesion has both facilitated entry and blunted opposition to the e-waste industry.
1.2.5 Weak Environmental Protection
Beyond the general differential between environmental enforcement and regulation in Israel and the West Bank, the West Line villages “enjoyed” an additional and more local governance vacuum. Under the Oslo Accords, the residential areas of the West Line villages were designated as Area B, permitting Palestinian civil control, whereas land surrounding residential areas was designated as Area C, where the Israeli military hold jurisdiction and place restrictions on Palestinian policing (see Figure 1.6). These conditions have left environmental protection in disarray due to this responsibility being ineffectively shared between understaffed and jurisdictionally constrained Palestinian police and Israeli military that place a low priority on environmental protection.
Figure 1.6 Map illustrating the geopolitical administrative divisions in the West Line villages. The West Bank is divided into three geopolitical regions: Area A (not shown on the map) designates land under full Palestinian civil and security control, Area B designates land under full Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian security control, and Area C designates land under full Israeli control for security, planning, and construction.
The interplay of the e-waste industry and the West Line villages’ geopolitical divisions surfaces in the strategic location of scrapyards and burn sites. Most scrapyards are in Area B since scrapyards built in the development-restricted Area C are typically demolished by the Israeli military. At the same time, most open burning historically occurred in Area C, which is a governance vacuum as Palestinian police cannot access this geopolitical region without advance Israeli permission (which can take up to forty-eight hours to obtain) while Israeli military forces are rarely present in these areas, and when they are, they tend to have other concerns. Within Area C, the larger and more continuous burn sites gravitate to properties with absentee or municipal ownership, or very close to the separation wall where interference from Palestinian authorities is even more constrained. Thus, the Oslo divisions of space were conducive to the West Line e-waste hub: availability of land in Area C that could be severely contaminated with little government interference immediately adjacent to Area B in which scrapyards could operate with little regulatory interference.
The PHH emphasizes national-scale discrepancies in environmental regulation and enforcement as the driving force for international e-waste practices. Yet, while regulation is laxer in places where e-waste hubs are found, this is hardly an explanatory factor at the national scale, as it applies to many places in which e-waste hubs do not emerge. The West Line e-waste hub shows that a regulatory vacuum is likely to be operative not simply at a national scale, but at a much smaller, regional scale. Reduced ownership and governance offering a weak link in which contaminating processes can operate unchallenged prevail in areas measured in hectares or square kilometers.
1.3 Recurring Themes in Analogous E-Waste Hubs
Our reflection on the unique place-based attributes that facilitated the emergence of the West Line e-waste hub prompted us to consider whether similar place-based attributes (and possibly others) might be helpful to understand the patchy emergence of e-waste hubs across the Global South.Footnote 6 While the particulars of the emerging situation of the West Line are unique, key aspects of the motivations for and absence of barriers to harmful recycling practices are common to the transboundary movement of e-waste to hubs throughout the Global South.Footnote 7 In the Israel–Palestine case, the discrepancies in labor costs, environmental regulations, and enforcement in peripheral areas are intensified by their geographic proximity and the porousness of the border, and it is also one of the few, perhaps only, places where there is almost exclusive one-way transfer between e-waste importers and exporters (i.e., almost all Palestinian inputs come from Israel, and most Israeli outputs flow to the Palestinian areas). The PHH offers a macro-level theoretical skeleton to understand e-waste flows, but alone is an insufficient predictor. We suspected that the “why here?” question could show the dynamics beneath the thin accounts provided by NGO reports and media exposés, which focused on the poor working conditions and excessive pollution on the receiving end, and overconsumption and irresponsible e-waste management in the Global North on the other (60 Minutes, 2008; Frontline, 2009; Puckett et al., Reference Puckett, Byster, Westervelt, Gutierrez, Davis, Hussain and Dutta2002; USNEWS, 2014). Indeed, beyond the sweeping explanations of these places as victimized global “digital dumpsites” for the refuse of rich countries, a more complex story is apparent, with striking similarities to the West Line case. To date, there has been limited in-depth research exploring the origins and emergence of e-waste hubs in other sites, and we suggest future research addressing this question might reveal similar patterns as we found in the West Line villages. However, there are hints in the literature of common origin stories relating to some of the five factors we identified. Our review (Davis et al., Reference Friedlander, Weisbrod and Garb2019) of two well-known sites, the notorious Guiyu hub in China and the Agbogbloshie hub in Ghana, shows several compelling commonalities that have been discussed by other researchers in the economic, governance, and social conditions in which these e-waste hubs emerged.
Guiyu, which was the focus of the early and widely publicized exposé Exporting Harm by the Basel Action Network (BAN) (Puckett et al., Reference Puckett, Byster, Westervelt, Gutierrez, Davis, Hussain and Dutta2002), has become the poster child for discourses of irresponsible e-waste exportation from the Global North. Many accounts point to discrepancies in environmental protection and worker salaries as the reason e-waste is directed here, but a closer look at the history of the regional economy shows that, as with the West Line villages, Guiyu had processed discarded materials since the 1950s, which became an entrenched and primary sector centered on e-waste after a disruption of primary livelihoods, in this case agriculture (Li et al., Reference Li, Du, Bao, Higano and Li2011). Due to Guiyu’s location in a low-lying flood-prone area, poor agricultural production displaced farmers, especially in the northern provinces of Hunan and Anhui, who migrated to Guiyu (Puckett et al., Reference Puckett, Byster, Westervelt, Gutierrez, Davis, Hussain and Dutta2002). Destitute and socially marginalized, they overcame reticence to work in the stigmatized scrap industry, where they provided the physical labor. As in the West Line, the availability of liminal unregulated areas (in this case the disarray of land administration in areas falling between the jurisdiction of two neighboring cities, Puning and Jieyang) offered a location where these contaminating activities could be established with less resistance (Li et al., Reference Li, Du, Bao, Higano and Li2011).
Agbogbloshie is another widely known e-waste hub. Here, too, ambiguous land ownership has played a critical role in facilitating the emergence of an e-waste hub, which emerged in the environmental governance vacuum of an area on which migrant settlers had squatted for decades, creating ownership ambiguity and impeding proposed development plans of the government of Ghana (Afenah, Reference Afenah2012; Grant, Reference Grant2006). Here, the livelihood loss that served as a trigger for the emergence of an e-waste sector was more remote: the loss of income from rural agriculture in northern Ghana following declines in agricultural productivity and labor in northern Ghana due to 1980s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that reduced agricultural subsidies and government support for health, water, and education for many rural populations. While the SAPs exacerbated poverty in rural Ghana in general, the northern regions bore the brunt as agriculture shifted from food crops to export crops like cocoa and timber that were mostly grown in the south (Anyinam, Reference Anyinam1994; Konadu Agyemang, Reference Konadu-Agyemang2000; Yeboah, Reference Yeboah2000). With declining agricultural productivity, many rural dwellers from the north migrated to urban areas. Agbogbloshie offered, and continues to offer, cheap rent and easy entry into scrapyard work for many migrants seeking better opportunities through informal waged labor, especially from the northern part of the country, which accounts for over 70 percent of these workers (Amankwaah, Reference Amankwaa2013; Prakash, Reference Prakash, Manhart, Agyekum, Amoyaw-Osei, Schluep, Müller and Fasko2010). Here, too, migrant workers and marginalized populations were less deterred by the stigmatization of working with rubbish.
1.4 The Book
This chapter has tracked the emergence of e-waste hubs historically, as places taking shape within and because of specific local circumstances. The upshot of the kind of more detailed accounts we have offered here is not only a more nuanced political geography of e-waste hubs, but a reframing of their agency and functioning and, therefore, of the necessary policy stances and measures for reform. Hubs cannot be seen simply as victimized and passive receptors for the dumping of wastes mobilized by national-scale inequalities, as conceived by the PHH. They appear as the result of active entrepreneurs who have labored to forge and stabilize systems of collection, transport, processing, and profit extraction that transform waste into a rare source of income in a harsh economic landscape.
The remainder of this book is divided into two sections: the first explores the functioning, portrayals, and futures of e-waste hubs and the second a potential pathway for their reform, and their role in reforming e-waste policies more broadly. The remaining chapters in the first section (Chapters 2–5) describe the economic and environmental consequences of the informal e-waste economy in which e-waste hubs such as the West Line are central. Yet the portrayals of these sites that have dominated perceptions and policies regarding e-waste treatment have been Global North–centric. That is, they imagine a landscape without a robust and longstanding informal sector, neglect the importance of livelihoods, and aspire for e-waste management that is centralized and generates “new” green economies with state-of-the-art recycling technology. The result is an exclusive focus on remedying future environmental harm with profitable waste management business models while eclipsing the environmental harm of past e-waste along with the vitality and active economic roles of informal recyclers. We describe our community engagement method in the West Line villages, in which a hub-centric stance helped elicit and elaborate a different set of proposed responses to the situation, reflecting the balancing of hazards and opportunities of e-waste hubs from those most affected – the residents of the sites in which most of the world’s e-waste is processed.
While Chapter 1 describes the emergence of the West Line e-waste hub, Chapter 2 further sets the scene of this book through an in-depth description of how it functions and the economic and health impacts of the scrap sector. Our description of the e-waste economy proceeds sequentially from collection in Israel, the smuggling of scrap across the border to the West Bank, the recycling process and markets in the West Line villages, and the resale of extracted materials back to Israel. Because the scope and seriousness of this cross-border economy remained fairly invisible to NGOs, media outlets, and Israeli and Palestinian national government authorities for well over a decade, and since there is a lack of detailed descriptions of the entire economic landscape of e-waste hubs more generally, we describe this context in some detail, contextualizing it within the uneven power dynamics of the West Bank.
Chapter 3 elaborates on the context and consequences of the dominant portrayals of e-waste hubs as “digital dumpsites” for the Global North. We argue that this framing has led to narrow portrayals and crude policies that attempt to remove e-waste from these sites through a combination of e-waste trade bans and EPR-based e-waste management regulation that establish new formal e-waste recycling systems. In the Israel–Palestine context, the West Line e-waste hub became visible to environmental NGOs through selective engagement with a minority of West Line residents who are hostile to the e-waste economy and able to reach out to influential audiences. These environmental NGOs situated this case of e-waste contamination within a broader “digital dumping” narrative, which was then publicized and shared with Israeli and Palestinian government authorities. While Israeli and Palestinian authorities held diametrically opposing views of where the blame lay, they initially, somewhat ironically, urged quite similar policy responses to cut off all e-waste flows from Israel to this e-waste hub – a blunt approach that, if effective, would displace livelihoods without remedying the enduring toxic legacy in the West Line villages.
Chapter 4 wrestles with the complexity and challenges of accessing and engaging a more representative range of actors who might forge a consensual trajectory to reform harmful practices and retain livelihoods. We explore the diversity of stakeholders and perspectives within e-waste hubs, as well as the ironies of our own role as outsiders working to allow such community visions to emerge through an unconventional community engagement method that ensures consideration of this diversity. We unpack our considerations and the limitations of this community engagement approach, which entailed an initial phase of mapping the relevant stakeholders and community cleavages, and then deploying a novel Delphi-like method with eight “community representatives” through a spoke and hub form of communication between them and the facilitator that enabled us to forward a broadly endorsed development trajectory within a heterogeneous and conflicted community.
Chapter 5 broadens our process within the West Line villages to point to a hub-centered approach to the global e-waste problematic, that is, one in which the agency and interests of the places where e-waste is primarily processed figure large. We describe why a hub-centered approach offers a strategically, politically, and ethically advantageous leverage point for the desired changes. Drawing on the West Line villages’ desired development trajectory outlined in the previous chapter, we argue for the necessity of a policy package to reform e-waste hubs that consist of three pillars: eliminating environmentally harmful recycling practices, remediating past contamination, and opening pathways to reform and regulate existing e-waste hubs. These pillars led into the second section of the book and structure the following three chapters.
In the second section (Chapters 6–9), Pathways and Predicaments, our attention shifts to our activities in advancing the hub-centered proposals for reform that emerged from our work in the West Line villages, and what we learn from them about e-waste sector reform more generally along with the Israeli-Palestinian geopolitical setting. The hardships and friction we encountered in pursuing locally defined solutions uncover the paralyzing political dynamics between Israel and Palestine and within the Palestinian Authority to remedy cross-border environmental issues and offer a direction and process to reform e-waste hubs throughout the Global South.
Chapter 6 unravels the complex dynamics of e-waste burning, as a method both to extract metals wrapped in plastic and to dispose of non-valuable discards. This burning has become the visible, indeed, iconic public face of e-waste hubs across the Global South, and we describe the grave human–environment consequences of this practice in other e-waste hubs, along with our own findings in the West Line villages. We then explore the conditions that enable e-waste burning to persist undeterred, which, in turn, informed our strategy to eradicate it. During a three-month pilot project, we combined the carrot of subsidized cable grinding to offer an alternative to burning with the stick of enhanced enforcement through a grassroots community environmental policing system to overcome previous policing barriers. While the outcomes of our pilot project demonstrated a feasible and financially sustainable strategy to significantly reduce e-waste burning, the successful uptake in the Palestinian context has been constrained by unresolved national disputes over statehood and between central and local authorities within the Palestinian Authority.
In Chapter 7, we turn our attention to the neglected toxic legacies of e-waste hubs and bring them into conversation with prevalent e-waste management policies. As a point of departure, we review the human–environment burden of e-waste burn sites, highlighting the risks posed by the toxics generated at and dispersed from these sites. We argue that remediation must play a central role in a hub-based approach to e-waste management and discuss the donor-funded remediation plan we developed in the West Line villages. This chapter concludes by dissecting the political challenges and divergent agendas we encountered with Israeli and Palestinian authorities that derailed a carefully crafted plan to remediate e-waste burn sites in the West Line villages.
Chapter 8 details the strategies and advocacy efforts we forwarded to integrate the West Line e-waste hub with the recently formalized Israeli e-waste sector in a way that would allow both to benefit from a trajectory toward sustainability and upgrading of the West Line hub. We describe our engagement with key decision-makers on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, the unexpected allies and adversaries of these efforts and their stances, and the significant legal, political, and logistic barriers that inhibit an equitable integration of these two systems. These tensions and dynamics in the Israel–Palestine case echo those that occur throughout debates surrounding management approaches to e-waste hubs in the Global South and Global North–Global South e-waste trade broadly, in places where colonial relations are less visible and immediate than they are in the Israeli-Palestinian context.
In the final chapter, we take stock of the current state of play and outlook of the West Line villages. We use this as a platform from which to consider the broader forces that inhibit the prospects of upgrading e-waste hubs in the Israel–Palestine context and beyond, and as a call to action for relevant stakeholders to support and facilitate hub-based reforms.
