Julia Perczel

JULIA PERCZEL, then a graduate student at University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, was awarded funding in May 2019 to aid research on ‘(In)formalizing the E-waste Economy: Environmental Legislation and E-Waste Work in Delhi,’ supervised by Dr. Penny Harvey. What values and value transformations that characterize and organize the business around e-waste? The research takes the recent E-waste (Management) Rules of 2016 as the lens through which to understand the socio-economic and material transformations that are affected by the legal framework that is aimed at making big business take environmental responsibility. The study traces the value of e-waste, environmentally sustainable recycling services, labor, and people by following the dealings of Sahih Kaam, a new, for-profit producer responsibility organization (PRO) in New Delhi, India. PROs are companies that can provide environmentally sustainable solutions to electronics producers to fulfil their legally determined targets of recycling a certain percentage of past-year sales responsibly. Following the struggles of the PRO in trying to make business and establish their credentials for caring for the environment reveals the contradictions entailed by the dual profit of making profit and being responsible, as well as the shortcomings of the regulatory ecosystem. At the same time, the people who make up and make possible the PRO activities’employees and scrap dealers’provide an interesting angle to the cross section of the Indian metropolis’ inhabitants, their values and hopes for livelihood and love.