Global destruction networks and hybrid e-waste economies: Practices and embeddedness in Guiyu, China

Abstract

Recent geographical scholarship on the illicit e-waste geographies and e-waste processing hubs in the Global South has shed light on the global mobilities, production/destruction networks, and political economy/ecology of e-waste. However, their views about the reactivation of value in waste and the dialectics between waste and value rest predominantly on networks of material linkages shaped by broader political-economic structures at macro scales, but are relatively reticent about how mobilities and networks are coordinated by specific places, and how economic practices conducted by a broad diversity of local actors, often informal, constitute economic relations, transactions and dependencies, mediated by place-sticky social and cultural fabrics and vernacular institutions. Based on a study of Guiyu town in Guangdong Province, China, an (in)famous hub of global e-waste recycling, this study unpacks its cluster evolution through a perspective that works with the concept of embeddedness but by way of an emphasis on practice. By tracing a multiplicity of territorial, sociocultural, and political dynamics that articulate between the local and the global, this study enriches existing scholarships on e-waste geographies, global production/destruction networks, and the economic geographies of the illicit.