7 - The Toxic Elephant in the Room

Summary

Our focus in this chapter is the burn sites themselves. We describe the toxic substances released, the massive environmental and health problems these present, the importance of including remediation of these sites as an integral part of e-waste policies, and our piloting of such remediation. While such toxic sites figure centrally in the scientific literature on e-waste and iconic portrayals of e-waste hubs, figuring implicitly or explicitly as a key motivator for EPR policies that would redirect waste away from e-waste hubs, they figure very little in e-waste policies themselves. Thus, such policies risk giving e-waste hubs the worst of two worlds: relocating the sources of their livelihood away to central capital-heavy recycling facilities without removing the contamination that would continue to harm their landscapes and health for decades to come. We describe the details of our pilot cleanup of one such site, our development of a framework for scaling this up to remediate the most serious sites in the West Line, and how this scaleup fell afoul of disputes of principle regarding national sovereignty and more mundane tensions between central and local authorities within the Palestinian Authority.