List of quotes attributed to Prof. Josh Lepawsky:

I (Josh Lepawsky) claim that what Valverde (2009) calls the ‘work of jurisdiction’ operates against instituting EPR systems. Examining the work of jurisdiction in the legislative governance of e-waste shows that the financial responsibility for e-waste management is delegated to consumers, rather than producers. As a consequence, it is very unlikely that the emerging legislative governance of e-waste in Canada and the US will succeed in instituting an EPR regime that results in clean(er) and green(er) manufacturing of electronics. 

Meta-Actor: Scientific Community

Source Document: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718512000668

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Lepawsky challenges UNEP’s premise in its May report that the key driver for illegal e-waste shipments “is the profit generated from payments for safe disposal of waste that in reality is either dumped or unsafely recycled”. For this to be the case, he says, there would have to be instances of Ghanaians receiving payment specifically for receiving and disposing of imported e-waste. Yet, to his knowledge, this has never happened.” 

Meta-Actor: Journalism

Source Document: http://www.scidev.net/global/digital-divide/multimedia/electronic-waste-dump-supplies-ghana.html

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"Lepawsky and several of his graduate students have already done field work in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangaladesh, and reached conclusions similar to those drawn by Katharina Kummer Peiry. "When we surveyed the people in this trade most of their imports were coming from elsewhere in Asia, principally China," Lepawsky said. "There are shipments that come from the United States to Bangladesh, but in terms of sheer number, they're in the middle to low end." Lepawsky and his students also found that most of the so-called e-waste shipped to Dhaka was being repaired, recycled or refurbished in some way, a business that presumably will disappear if a ban on exporting electronics is put in place."

Meta-Actor: Journalism

Source Document: https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/113654086/

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An initial analytical cut through BAN's claim tells us the following:

That BAN attributes the statistic of 50-80 percent to 'informed industry insiders' and 'very knowledgeable and informed industry sources', yet does not state who the sources are except in one instance (a phone interview with Mike Magliaro). Notice a very important shift that occurs within BAN's report then: a single attributed source is pluralized. The one becomes the several. This is a move that suggests there are many experts that make the same estimate about e-waste exports. The photograph of asset tags that appears on p. 14 contains three such tags: one from the City of Los Angeles, one from the State of California, and one from the L.A. Unified School District. Together with the caption, the report implies that these tags are a mere selection out of an undisclosed number of such tags collected and photographed by BAN. So the photograph and the caption, work in combination to expand or pluralize the evidence said to support the 50-80 percent estimate. Thus, as in the previous point, three instances are made more plural. At the same time the report gives no information about how the asset tags were collected that would let a reader know whether those that are pictured on p. 14 come from some sort of systematic sample or not. 

Meta-Actor: Other

Source Document: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/reassembling-rubbish/mapping-e-waste-as-a-controversy-from-statements-to-debates

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“According to Minter and USITC, somewhere between 83-93 percent of "of what was put into American recycling bins in 2011 was repaired, dismantled or recycled domestically" (Minter, 2013).  We are now confronted with a range more or less diametrically opposed to the range supported by BAN (50-80 percent exported). 

In contrast to the BAN report, the USITC document is at pains to demonstrate its methodological rigour. It has a chapter section (p. 1-7 --- 1-11) and at least four appendices (Appendices A, E, F, and H) devoted to describing its methods. These methods include a survey of businesses in the UEP business, the use of both public and confidential census data on exports of a variety of electronic products, a public hearing, visits to various types of facilities in the UEP sector (e.g., recycling plants, asset disposition firms, original equipment manufacturers), and a literature review that included BAN's (2002) report. All of these methodological approaches have their pros and cons and the report makes at least some of these explicit. It notes, for example, that several participants in the public hearing voiced concerns about a survey approach since they found it unlikely that respondents would accurately report export activity that might raise questions about its legality (see USITC, 2013: 1-8, footnote 28). Whatever the various shortcomings of these methods may be, the move made by the report is to make those shortcoming public and, in so doing, enhance the truth claims of the report.” 

Meta-Actor: Other

Source Document: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/reassembling-rubbish/mapping-e-waste-as-a-controversy-from-statements-to-debates