Abstract
Recycling of electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) in the Czech Republic occurs, among others, in companies where most employees are people with disabilities. The effort to integrate people at risk into the labour market is explained by the fact that manual electrical and electronic equipment processing would otherwise be impossible. The cost of recycling would outweigh the profits from the collection of appliances and the sale of raw materials. Unlike automated processing by shredders and sorting on lines, mechanical dismantling is more expensive financially. However, the resulting materials are of better quality. In the case of employing people with disabilities, companies receive funding from the state to support protected job positions. The financial support is intended to compensate for the reduced work performance of these employees. People with disabilities thus appear in a place where the dysfunctional remains of the daily operation of most households and companies are disposed of.
Based on ethnographic research at an e-waste processing company, I focus on the relationship between a human's corporeality and waste's materiality. I am interested in what regimes of values these two subjects go through and to what extent their trajectories are intertwined. As part of my presentation, I would like to look at waste from the perspective of critical disability studies and focus on how waste treatment is intertwined with the role of a human in society.