Scrapping ‘Irregulars’: China’s Recycling Policies, Development Ethos and Peasants Turned Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Nowadays, ‘e-waste’, or discarded electrical and electronic equipment (DEEE), is synonymous with environmental degradation and global injustice. In China, the central government has come up with a series of regulations and policies in recent years to deal with the challenge posed by both foreign and domestic DEEE. It justified this programme by invoking the necessity to protect China’s environment. This article shows how Beijing’s efforts to ‘formalise’ DEEE collection and recycling concentrate activities in the hands of a limited number of large companies, and cause the exclusion of a myriad of actors and entities, in particular self-made entrepreneurs with roots in the Chinese countryside.