Abstrakt
E-waste (electrical and electronic) recycling is characterised by the desire not to lose precious resources but also by competing interests, profit-making, catchy slogans, questionable practices, and contested solidarities. These become obvious in the paradoxical relation between the two approaches of different actors involved in e-waste recycling.
The first approach is employed by the collective system, a company that manages the collection, transport and processing of e-waste on behalf of the producers. Although this company presents itself as a supporter of people with disabilities in this business sphere, the reports about the ceased sheltered workshops due to the limited flow of e-waste from this collective system prove the opposite.
The second approach is applied from below and concerns the cooperation between the e-waste processing company and the therapeutic services centre in the psychiatric hospital. This cooperation is based on the mutual effort to arrange the welfare of the company and the patients.
These two examples represent the opposite approaches to the responsibility ostentatiously performed in one case and formed inconspicuously from below in the second one. Building upon the ethnographic research on e-waste recycling in Czechia, I want to show how e-waste as a material object charged with various meanings encourages different enactments of solidarity negotiated in the ambiguous relations of power, economic interests, and bureaucratic obligations.