Mangling and promiscuity: Materialities of waste conversion in East Asia

Waste material endures in a remarkable variety of forms shaped by (or sometimes in defiance of) influential discourses like sustainability, “circular economy,” and industrial ecology. Through ethnographic portrayals of sites of intensive ruination and material conversion in Japan and China, this article recuperates promiscuity’s original lexicographic connotations of casual, undiscriminating, desultory engagement in order to scrutinise the ceaseless intimate relationality between and among such varied and mutable artifacts within human and nonhuman environments. In particular, the article highlights the promiscuous toxicity of material degradation-a feature of “vibrant” materiality neglected by “new materialist” geographers and others-in ravaged sites such as post-tsunami Japan and a much-discussed South China electronic-waste scavenging community, called Guiyu. (Electronic waste is also known as “e-waste” or WEEE [Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment]. E-waste conversion is widely described as “urban mining.”) In communicating the intimate promiscuity of e-waste artifacts as they both drive and transform such sites of intensive ruination and scavenging, this ethnographic account of electronic waste conversion offers an important opportunity to consider the “enmeshed processes” of objects and the apparatuses that both destroy and (re)produce them.