International law and global waste governance: the making and discarding of smartphones

Szafrański, Mikołaj Szymon (2024) International law and global waste governance: the making and discarding of smartphones. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This PhD thesis seeks to redescribe how international law engages with waste by fixing its focus on a disposable object of considerable significance in everyday life – a smartphone. Seeking to call into question conventional legal readings of smartphones as electronic waste, and electronic waste as governed by international regulations on management of waste disposal, the thesis engages with discard studies scholarship to unmask a wider set of externalities and legalities that are at play. Understanding waste not as a condition to be managed but as a problem to be resolved paves the way for inquiring whether international law sustains waste proliferation or waste elimination. In discursive terms, the thesis engages with three narratives about waste that can be found in legal scholarship: 1) waste as a ‘bad’ that law seeks to minimise and regulate, 2) waste as a ‘good’ that is commodified and conducive to development, and 3) waste as neither of the above - but as a resource that can be channelled back to production with the hope of achieving a ‘circular economy’. In material terms, the thesis looks situationally at the generation of various discards accompanying smartphone production and disposal, paying attention to different sites of wastefulness (among others: iron mining waste in Brumadinho, Brazil, manufacturing externalities in Shenzhen, China, and electronic discards in Agbogbloshie, Ghana) as mediated by these narratives. Accounting both for the knowledge practices that the law relies on to configure the waste footprint of smartphones (i.e. sociotechnical considerations), and the effects of such practices (i.e. considerations of distributive impact), the thesis yields an account of international legal authority as dependent on the generation of wastefulness, understood as a complement to capital accumulation.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Mikołaj Szymon Szafrański
Library of Congress subject classification:	K Law > K Law (General) T Technology > T Technology (General)
Supervisor:	Marks, Susan and Salomon, Margot E.
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4785

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