EXCAVATING ROBOTIC WASTE
Neo Tokyo & BeyondPeter Wynn Kirby
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Most people feel a certain ambivalence regarding robots. After years of reading tales about cyborgs andtechnology-run-amok in dystopian Japanese manga, as well as watching decades of Sci-Fi films—from
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Solyaris (1972), and Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1978) to Brazil (1985), eXistenZ (1999), Children of Men (2006), and Under the Skin (2013), I
am certainly no exception. What follows is an unconventional opus of organized musings, interpretation,
and analysis over robots, resources, space exploration, and what might befall the human species as theplanet changes and technology continues along its accelerating arc. Amid all this serious rumination overrobots, development, and the implications of environmental and industrial policy in Japan and China inparticular, I found myself glimpsing fragmentary lurid scenes from movies or overhearing snatches of
dialogue involving robots and the future. It was inevitable that some of those ventriloquist shards wouldfind their way into the present text.

INTRODUCTION: MATRIX EVOLUTIONS
In a sector—robotics—that suffers from an abundance of hype, persistent efforts to inculcate buzz, andsometimes desperate attempts to attract capital, it was striking that a project that seemed, at first glance, tobe about grabbing attention and creating shock value turned
out to be more substantial and thought-provoking. An
Matrix (1999), general excitement on board
international team working in a nascent field sometimes
the Nebuchadnezzar after Neo’s kung fu
described as “evolutionary robotics” in 2021 crafted an
upload: “MORPHEUS IS FIGHTING NEO!”
early empirical foundation toward building an autonomous
robot ecosystem. Such an evolutionary matrix could, intime, be sent to a distant planet, for instance. As a selfregulating, continuously adapting outpost, such a foothold perch could foster conditions to help sustain
the eventual arrival of human life on an utterly different world. Given thatmost planets offer extremely harsh and forbidding environments in which tosurvive, the robots would have to be robust and adaptable to be able towithstand the bitter, unforgiving extraterrestrial “elements” there—
particularly in outlands whose particular climatic conditions and physical/
chemical compositions remain little known to scientists. Furthermore, to beable to endure over time, the robotic matrix would need to be recyclable.
The last point is of particular significance here, and I return to this questionof material recovery and material conversion below.
The project, called Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE)—comprised of ateam based at several UK universities and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam—involves creating a menagerie of varied robots within a self-contained
test setting.

TARS robot from Interstellar(2014):“EVERYBODY GOOD?
PLENTY OF SLAVES FOR
MY ROBOT COLONY?”

Physical robots are 3D printed, drawing on an extensive toolkit;1
furthermore, each physical robot has a digital avatar that undergoes
extensive and rapid simulated evolution in the matrix’s mainframe, or “greymatter.” In this arena of what might be called “unnatural selection,” newgenerations of robots are then “conceived” and “born” of this combinationof physical and digital problem-solving, combining and building on those
traits that are most successful in the test field.2 Swiftly sequencing throughsuccessive generations while engaging with unfamiliar conditions on a newworld, the matrix might yield a robot that crawls on many limbs, or uses
wheels or tracks, adapting all the while to its surroundings. Perhaps it mightscoot or slither in articulated sections. Because the matrix operates

1 M. F. Hale et al., "Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution," 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on

Computational Intelligence (SSCI), 2020, pp. 2140-2147, doi: 10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308204.
2 “We’re teaching robots to evolve autonomously,” The Conversation, 21 February 2021 (https://theconversation.com/were-teaching-robots-to-evolve-autonomously-so-they-can-adapt-to-life-alone-on-distantplanets-153159/, accessed December 2022)

independently of human control, solutions to such exoplanetary challenges
would likely go beyond what human controllers could conceive ofthemselves. The matrix could be sent to distant outlands decades or
perhaps centuries in advance of human arrival, providing optimized
support available for whenever humans might embark upon their sojournthere.

So far, so far-fetched. Discourse on interplanetary travel, not to mention
involving robots, tends to take on an exceedingly speculative tone, andthis bot-populated space yarn is no exception. Nevertheless, elements ofthis seductive droid narrative bear some discussion. For instance, thetechnology for setting up the robot matrix might precede the technology
for successfully transporting human pioneers (or refugees) by many years,
meaning that the intervening time could be used productively to progress
the aim of settling anew in cruelly inhospitable exo-terrain. The robots
could begin building shelter that would safeguard the matrix while at the
ROBBY ROBOT CARRYINGUNCONSCIOUS BLONDE,
same time providing an emergent base for a laggardly human landing
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
party. In such a shelter, terrestrial plant life, perhaps even insects andanimal life, could be encouraged to flourish in order to provide oxygenand sustenance for eventual human consumption. In the meantime, therotting of dead matter, etc., would produce carbon dioxide in order to help support the new flora. Robotbuilders could be joined by robot caretakers and robot groundskeepers, who would allow this Eden to go
through its own evolutionary generations before humans arrived to enjoy the fruits of robot labor.

Such is the stuff of future dreams, not tomention fertile material for forwardthinking screenplays, dystopian manga/anime, and Sci-Fi novels, many withspecific reference to Japan. The idealized,
just-so, romanticized quality is familiar,
even de rigueur, in discussions of space
exploration and terra-forming of exoplanets. In order to engage in such
futuristic rhapsodizing, it becomes necessary, even desirable, to skip
numerous thorny stages where current technology falls short or where
the expense of such ventures could only be justified if the very survivalof the human species were much more clearly and presently hanging in
the balance.

CUE LEGENDARYCYBORG “BIRTH”
SCENE FROM GHOST IN
THE SHELL (1995).

FURRY ROBOT, RO-MAN,
FROM ROBOT MONSTER(1953).

Yet what is clear from an outside, contrarian’s
examination of the sector is that the creation of a more sustainable system for
SERVICE ROBOTS AMID
recycling space-faring robots could also be used to benefit life on Earth. Our
MANICURED GROUNDS
current infrastructure for producing, using, discarding, and sometimes
ON SPACE STATION,ELYSIUM (2013).
recycling and remanufacturing computers, appliances, and other devices
involves a great deal of destruction, pollution, inefficiency, and toxic residue.
A better system for (re)production of robots—a waste stream that is sure to
grow exponentially in the coming years—could offer eventual environmental and material benefits ofterrestrial scale. Yet there are also more profound implications; future-tech developments like these couldalso furnish a roadmap in order to help transform the very pathways along which electronic waste (or “ewaste”) currently languishes, more often than not, in a range of settings, particularly in the Global South.
Excavating robotic waste involves grappling with, andhopefully reducing, the amount of waste generated in theHandsome, creepy David 8 android from
Alien: Covenant (2017):
first place. It also prioritizes repair—a far more “eco” way of“NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE LONELY
coping with unwanted electronics, as I explain—over mass
PERFECTION OF MY DREAMS. I FOUND
disposal and mass recycling. This piece highlights facets of
PERFECTION HERE. I CREATED IT.”the recycling challenge by furnishing examples and lessons
drawn from my longstanding ethnographic research into ewaste scavenging hotspots in places like South China (e.g.,
Kirby 2019a); the Tohoku disaster zone after the record 2011 earthquake and tsunami (e.g., Kirby 2022,
Kirby 2019b); and broad efforts in Japan and Europe to craft an aspirationally circular system of material
conversion by way of “the shredder economy” (Kalimo, Lifset et al 2012) (e.g., Kirby 2018, Kirby 2011).
Such real-world examples, as extreme as they may often seem, not only give a sense of the environmental
challenge facing the planet but also provide empirical evidence of ways that material conversion might
eventually operate within configurations like the ARE matrix.
These pages offer a nonstandard merging of the ethnographic and the programmatic. The intermittently
forward-looking or speculative dimension of the present account is not only (arguably) evocative but
productive, given the emergent and multifaceted nature of robots, both real and imagined, and theirdeployment in contemporary Japan and other tech-fixated societies; this intermingling here of case studies
and ideology, of evidence and imagination, of analysis and anxiety, is part and parcel of droid discourse
across the robot-strewn terrain of our sci-fi-informed tech future.
First, it is useful to consider how popular culture and other representations of the robotic imagination
have informed how autonomous machines are interpreted in areas of the industrialized world.

RELATING ROBOTS
Robots—both the actual, somewhat mundane,
contraptions themselves and also the lively
frieze of droid images that hovers in thecapricious imagination of varied publics—
comprise a funhouse-mirror reflection of humansocieties and social change. From space operas
to dystopian fables, all manner of fictional
narratives involving robots invoke a future
where human life becomes engulfed by
SPIDER DROIDS CRAWLING AROUND AS
machines. Robots thus serve as corollary triggers
SENSORS, MINORITY REPORT (2002).
for anxieties over technological development,
suspicions over surveillance and automation, andpersistent questions over the human mind and whether advanced artificial intelligence is possible orindeed desirable.
It is telling that the world of robots always seems to be on the verge of reality, never quite materializing.
This is characteristic of the robotic imaginary, which would collapse—perhaps not unlike a futuristic
outpost under machine attack in a standard sci-fi yarn—if people’s everyday lives were actually teemingwith rudimentary droids that could hardly accomplish basic tasks. The banal experience of the Roomba
vacuum cleaner over several days inspires mild boredom, not terror. Indeed, as I discuss below, the actual

level of robot development on Planet Earth is so woefully beneath the level of the robots with which
we’re familiar via popular culture that such breathtaking contrivances, and the weighty questions theyraise, will remain out of reach for quite some time longer.
Nevertheless, in film andtelevision—and less prominently
in literary work and comics/
manga—robots serve an importantfunction, allowing us to question
what is unique about humanexperience, offering a contrast
between embodied, “meat”limited mind and emotion on the
one hand and artificial capacityand enhanced execution on theother. The mechanized, nonhuman Other, as presented in adeluge of pop-cultural output, iscorrespondingly coy,
shapeshifting and ambiguous,
taking the form of 1) fullymechanical robots (or sometimes
pan-machinic AI); 2) different
degrees of cyborg (a fusing ofhuman
and tech components); andTHE B-9 ROBOT, NICKNAMED “BLINKY,”
3)
varietiesof “synths” created via
LOST IN SPACE (1965): “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!”
mimicry of biological andanatomical processes in order to“grow” synthetic beings along
pathways separate from humans. It is therefore fitting that the term “robot” derives from a 1920 play
entitled R.U.R, or Rossum’s Universal Robots, written by Czech playwright Karel Čapek, in which theeponymous subalterns are organic humanoids created in a lab solely for the purpose of work. Čapek’s
robots are biological entities that pass easily for humans, and are held without volition, freedom, orprospects, to say nothing of rights. (In a further wrinkle, robota means forced or compulsory labor andcomes down from the Czech word for “forced worker,” robotnik. The almost homophonous noun rabota
derives from an archaic term for servitude, itself derived from rabu, “slave” [OED, n.d.; Online
Etymological Dictionary, 2021].)
Anticipating a not-uncommon storyline,Čapek’s human characters speak of“The banal experience of the
R.U.R.’s robots as not having a soul, but
Roomba vacuum cleaner overnumerous subsequent works have posited aconsciousness, identity, or “ghost” that canseveral days inspires mild boredom,make robots uncannily human in theirconception of mind, claimed personhood,
not terror.”and consciousness (Lem 1977; Asimov
1950; Shirow 1991; see also Putnam 1964,
Schwab 2020; cf. Dark Matter, created by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, 2015). There are even fully
virtual AI entities that manifest with a robot-like avatar, like the quirky AI hotel manager with anextremely poor sense of guests’ personal boundaries (Altered Carbon, created by Laeta Kalogridis, 2018);

or a starship captain’s cool, dance-adept “first mate” who provides a high-functioning virtual link to thevessel’s systems (Another Life, created by Aaron Martin, 2019). Even though the electronics that generatesuch AI avatars could be conceived of as having similarities to robotic components, the present article isfocused on discrete robots’ material forms, e-components, and their recycling; for this reason, I leavethese virtual/holographic avatars aside here.
Futuristic storylines may choose to “other” robots by making them more overtly mechanical, or they may
make them dead ringers for homo sapiens. Each strategy furnishes abundant opportunity to rendermachines terrifying to human audiences. They may manifest as looming hulks bristling with weaponry,
like RoboCop’s nemesis the ED-209 (RoboCop 1987; dir. Paul Verhoeven) and other “enforcement
droids” that boom, plod, and clatter through various SF franchises—or they can be so small as to escapedetection, even burrowing into human orifices to lodge inside a person’s body (The Matrix, 2000, dir. The
Wachowskis). Correspondingly, there are filmic robots that can so effortlessly mimic human appearance
and tics of communication and expression that their very shapeshifting similitude itself becomes
unsettling. In films like Prometheus (2012, dir. Ridley Scott), the automat presents as more or lessunquestionably “human” until revealed to be comprised of wiring and goop later in the story; in the Alien
franchise, this android reveal has become a reliable element of the plot formula—see, too, The Windup
Girl (Bacigalupi, 2009), a novel whose beautiful Japan-made automat has to suffer tell-tale movement
impediments (and all manner of other humiliations) until she “jail-breaks” from the software. Back on
Earth in relatively sedate-seeming early twenty-first-century contemporary life, the exploits of “dogsoldier”-style robots have gone viral in recent years, including a range of headless, bright yellow-andblack models from Boston Dynamics that can balance when destabilized on ice and negotiate shifting
rubble, as well as a humanoid robot, Atlas, that can do a backflip and other tricks. These contraptions
frequently creep out human viewers
with how adroitly they can perform“There are numerous possible positionsdifficult tasks, but even these
are unsophisticatedon a continuum between remote human creations
compared with most of theautonomous fictional mechs that
control at one extreme and autonomy
people see as representative ofand even sentience at the other extreme many
robots in popular culture.

when speaking of such apparatuses.”In order to capture the full range ofcontrivances that both already exist
and will develop in the coming decades, I use the term “robot” (and “bot,” sometimes “automat” or“droid”) in this article to refer to autonomous or semi-autonomous synthetic entities that, broadly
speaking, engage with, perform tasks (at some stage) for, or coexist with humans. Naturally—as it were—
there are numerous possible positions on a continuum between remote human control at one extreme andautonomy and even sentience at the other extreme when speaking of such apparatuses. To advance a
discussion of robotic waste here, I use the term omnivorously to include drones, some electric vehicles,
and types of future appliances in a capacious category of “robots” when considering tech development,
discard, repair, and conversion. Nevertheless, I understand that a tighter classification could offer someadvantages. A strong case could clearly be made to fashion a much narrower definition of robot todistinguish between fully autonomous entities with relatively complex problem-solving and adaptation
capabilities and, conversely, drones/e-craft which are generally piloted by humans with tighter monitoring
and control. This, however, glosses over the question of tech waste, which is a core preoccupation of thisarticle.

EXPLOITED “FEMALE” ROBOTS PLOTTING THEIR REVENGE. EX MACHINA (2014)

ROBOT ANXIETIESA glance at blockbuster film offerings reveals an enduring and popular fascination with synthetic
creatures, systems, and devices that become self-aware, become degraded and unstable, become
indistinguishable from humans, and/or become hacked, suborned, or appropriated by interested parties.
But these robot fables are just as likely to be vehicles for other social anxieties. A brief account here
touches on a few well-known examples of iconic franchises in order to help dispense with extensive
description.
For instance, the neo-noir masterpiece Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott) is, like many such futuristic
films, concerned with theastonishing ability of so-called
replicants to impersonate and“The film also reflects some ambivalence
ventriloquize humans,
comprising a sensitive, thoughover a muscular killing machine … with ablood-soaked, meditation on
foreign accent wearing American
personhood and identity. Muchof the story involves Decker
sunglasses and leathers, jacking iconic(Harrison Ford) struggling with
Harley-Davidson motorcycles from Godhis grim job hunting down andassassinating replicants while atfearing citizens, and shooting
the same time falling in lovewith a replicant and trying toconstitutionally protected firearms while
save her from an apparatus
laying waste to American communities.”
dedicated to her destruction.
But the film, made in the early
Eighties, is in many ways just as much about anxiety over a rising Japan during its period of high-speed
growth and competition with American industry. East Asian iconography litters the film and close scrutiny
reveals a disturbing amount of dwarves, apparently presented as an unspoken racist critique. Significantly,

the Philip K. Dick story on which the film is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick, 1968),
has no such East Asian context.
The Terminator (1984, dir. James Cameron), made just two years later, is very much about unchecked
technological development, the dreaded rise of machines and their gruesome, crimson campaign toexterminate the human race.
However, made during the height of the Cold War, the film also reflects some ambivalence over a
muscular killing machine (Arnold Schwarzenegger) with a foreign accent wearing American sunglasses
and leathers, jacking iconic Harley-Davidson motorcycles from God-fearing citizens, and shooting
constitutionally protected firearms while laying waste to American communities.
It’s difficult to pinpoint what The Matrix (1999, dir. The Wachowskis) precisely “means,” seeing as it is aself-consciously cerebral mash-up ruminating over choice, control, and Gnosticism across a sprawlingplot that depicts humans as enslaved in a world dominated by ruthless and terrifying machines.
Nevertheless, the film betrays considerable anxiety over virtual “reality” and the perils of a digital, Webenabled world.

THE INTRICATE ROBOTIC SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF WESTWORLD

It’s even more difficult to position the intricate robotic slaughterhouse of Westworld (2016-2020, createdby Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy), but the series serves as a gory contemplation of corporate greed andhumans’ capacity for savagery and violence in a space where rules and mores are suspended, as well asproviding extensive indication of human attraction to pleasure-bots. Here, as well, humankind isthreatened by a machine uprising as the robots become self-aware, hostile, and unwilling to play their
humiliating subservient role in an immense Wild West theme park. Nevertheless, much of the plot
critiques the monied and professional classes of humans who designed, run, and or visit Westworld andwho betray such ignoble traits, whereas the newly emancipated automats exude a kind of naïve purity due
to their relatively recent exposure to the “real” world—echoing Stanislaw Lem’s Mortal Engines (Lem
1977), in which implacable “palefaces” (humans) hunt down fugitive robots who, for their part, submit todeath with all the precious dignity of Christian martyrs.
This brief discussion indicates that while robots are a frequent vehicle for anxiety in some popular
culture, particularly science fiction, they are not the only source of anxiety. Indeed, films along the samelines as these include a great deal of other elements of legitimate concern, from bioprospecting (e.g.,
Avatar, 2009, dir. James Cameron) and Gattaca-style problems of gene-driven inequality (1997, dir.
Andrew Niccol) to the character of alien
ways of life beyond Earth and themysteries of inter-species attraction, not to“Implacable ‘palefaces’ (humans) huntmention human capacity for barbarism.
down fugitive robots who, for their part,Not to put too fine a point on it, robots
might best be described as intensifiers—
submit to death with all the precious
elements that amplify and heighten
dignity of Christian martyrs.”
ambivalence over human tendencies byoffering both a rival source of action andpower in the story and a means of stepping outside of the dominant human narrative that so insidiously
privileges humans’ xenocentric attitudes. Even though robots form a key part of the technology-run-amok
theme, they provide a means toward more profound critique; robots thus hold a mirror up to humanity,
aping our mannerisms and foibles, yes, but reflecting awkward, even brutal, glimpses of “human nature”
that—across a range of works—foreground a portrait of homo sapiens that much of humanity might findunsettling.
This ambivalence notwithstanding, in the year 2022—over a century after Čapek’s legacy launched athousand autonomous ships, fembots, search-and-destroy rovers, and service droids—human imaginationof robots remains extremely active. Yet in many ways the machine era has already arrived, with far lessexuberant dread. Outside of these dark fictional visions on screens or book pages, human familiarity withmachines and devices creeps onward, to the extent that many populations in developed and developing
contexts are surrounded by a steady aggregation of technological things—as well as an accumulation oftech-waste. Thesemachines’ continued easypresence and materiality in“Over a century after Čapek’s legacy
human lives in well-off andlaunched a thousand autonomous ships,
less wealthy nations createsa misleading sense of theirfembots, search-and-destroy rovers, andbenign “end-of-life”
service droids, human imagination of robots
pathways when discarded.
Very much to the contrary,remains extremely active.”
this midden-mound of tech,so ubiquitous as to seem
harmless, comprises a serious global problem that the impending robot revolution may do little to help. (Isketch out the global impact of e-waste below.)If, given the above, we consider our willing surrender to the devices we carry and the Internet of Things
that is slowly colonizing households and other spaces in which our lives are lived, it is ironic to conclude
that humanity is already complicit in the machine takeover that has roiled our collective futurist dreams
and wary Sci-Fi fantasia for many decades.
Cyberdine’s “Skynet”“Yet to the extent that devices sometimes
this is not. Yet to theextent that devices
communicate and move with apparent
sometimes communicate
and move with apparent
independence, autonomous or semi-autonomous
independence,
contraptions may very much resemble aautonomous or semiautonomous contraptions
makeshift robotic glimpse of the future.”
may very much resemble
a makeshift robotic
glimpse of the future. In addition to domestic security and enforcement operations, drones engage
internationally in surveillance, airstrikes, and brutal targeted assassinations inside and outside of
warzones. “Autonomous” electric cars have more or less driven themselves into and around somejurisdictions. Airborne drones deliver parcels to certain locations and wheeled robots carry grocery
shopping down some metropolitan sidewalks. There is vanishingly little cause to think that these trends
will peter out over time. Instead, they will likely extend into vast webs of robotic service of varied
autonomy—but along a “long tail” timeline. Westworld will remain an engaging, but decidedly distant,dystopian mirage, at least for the foreseeable future.
This slow progress notwithstanding, in the Covid era, relatively rudimentary robots and drones are widely
seen as covid tech conveniences whose time has come. On top of degeneration and obsolescence, theexperimental horizons of robotic development mean that autonomous and semi-autonomous devices will
be continuously tested at the messy frontier of technological innovation, along with accumulating techdetritus.
Next, in light of this futuristic topic,
I’d like to discuss challenges with
“Westworld will remain an engaging, but regard to the environment and withregard to material resource use in thedecidedly distant, dystopian mirage…”
coming years. If we are living in aworld where drones will
increasingly deliver our purchases,
monitor our location, and patrol our borders; if we are living in a world where robots will gradually (andsuddenly) take on mind-numbing or complex tasks once performed by humans; if we are living in a world
where core elements of our daily lives will increasingly become automated, whether due to a pandemic or
to other factors, then those in industrialized nations which have tended to export their tech-detritus to theperiphery, particularly to the Global South, need to start to think more seriously about what happens to all
those devices when they become broken, outdated, or too cumbersome or unloved to remain in theirpossession.
In short, we need to talk about robotic waste.

URBAN MINING, TOXIC PAYLOAD
A fine, though bracing, way to look at elements of the robotic waste challenge is to sketch out howelectronic waste has been handled over the past few decades in key parts of the world which are known
for their robust approaches to e-waste conversion (a.k.a. scavenging).
South China’s Chaoshan, a region about five hours’ drive east of Guangzhou—is a zone notorious for
smuggling. Nestled in the dusty Guangdong heartland lies scofflaw, enterprising Guiyu, a community of
about 50,000 residents which, in its heyday,
attracted a shifting population of as many as
100,000 migrant workers; each year, Guiyu
processed up to 20 million tons of imported
e-waste in roughly 5,000 family-run
workshops (Chi et al., 2011; Huo et al.,2007).
Due to this staggering scale, Guiyu waslong viewed as the pollutant world capitalof demanufacturing tech devices—or inother words, the toxic, unsavory flipside of
the sleek, consumer electronics juggernautthat is all the rage in well-off parts of theworld. Not coincidentally, this sizeablenode of e-waste scavenging in Guiyu was
located near a major concentration of toy
TOXIC RESIDUES FROM ELECTRONIC WASTE
manufacturers; there, recovered microchips
SCAVENGING DUMPED BY THE RIVER IN GUIYU,
and other recycled components were sold to
SOUTH CHINA. (IMAGE: BASEL ACTION NETWORK)
be used in the making of dolls, playthings,
and other gewgaws both for China’s
domestic market and around the world, not to mention finding their way into a wide range of otherelectronic devices, like CCTV cameras. According to the range of Guiyu informants interviewed by our
ethnographic team,3 as well as others (see Minter 2013), repair of devices for reuse or resale was by far
the most profitable way to extract
value from e-waste. (I return to the“Guiyu became the “love-to-hate” poster child forsignificance of repair for crafting asustainable tech system below.)
campaigns against environmental blight in the
What couldn’t be repaired or
Global South as well as a symbol of the problems
scavenged for precious metals andother materials was often burned,of unsustainable outflows of waste from wealthy
buried, or thrown in the river that
ran through the community. Ash
countries to disadvantaged communities.”
3 My main collaborator on this transnational e-waste scavenging research has been Anna Lora-Wainwright, Schoolof Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. Our research and fieldwork were supported by a timely
John Fell OUP Research Fund grant (entitled ‘Urban Mining, Toxic Payload’) and then by a generous Leverhulme
Trust Project Grant. Prof. Li Liping at Shantou University Medical College kindly made our Guiyu fieldwork
possible by sharing her research contacts in the area. Professor Li also introduced us to several local students who
aided in research collection. During fieldwork in South China, we were joined by then-Oxford DPhil student Loretta
Lou. Dr Yvan Schulz subsequently joined our Oxford-based research team from 2017, also funded by the
Leverhulme Trust grant.

was also dumped into this tenebrouswaterway, which became a lifeless,putrescent channel of industrial bile thatliterally stained the riverbanks black at thewaterline.
Partly for these reasons, Guiyu became the“love-to-hate” poster child for campaigns
against environmental blight in the Global
South as well as a symbol of the problems of
unsustainable outflows of waste fromwealthy countries to disadvantaged
communities. While not unwarranted, thislatter characterization was neverthelesscomplicated by not-insignificant mitigating
SCAVENGERS WORKING IN FRONT OF A
factors—for
instance, many people in
TOWERING PILE OF E-WASTE COMPONENTS,
hotspotslikeGuiyu supported the trade and
GUIYU, SOUTH CHINA.
enthusiastically welcomed shipments ofelectronic waste, seeing them as a munificent
boon. Indeed, Chaoshan was awash with tales of bootstrapping Guiyu waste entrepreneurs who had madea fortune by gaining a lucrative foothold in the plastics recycling business. Others hit it big by extracting
precious metals like gold, platinum, palladium, and beryllium from circuit boards and other components
using crude acid washes (e.g., so-called aqua regia, an alchemy usually dominated by hydrochloric acidthat dates from the Middle Ages) and other deleterious methods. This is to say that, far from being seen
by most local Chinese as a miasmatic hellhole—the prevailing view in a range of wealthy, industrialized
democracies via lurid media portrayals—such tales of rags to riches in the waste trade made Guiyu into a
locus of opportunistic fascination. Vested local officials and bent police, as well as local gangs, brutally
limited the ability of outsiders to set up their own workshops in Guiyu, but local success transformed
families involved in scavenging into sought after sources of eligible brides and bachelors who offered thepromise of future earnings to in-marrying partners—at least for a time. From about the second decade of
the new millennium, a dogged central government campaign to clamp down on conspicuous pollutant
activities seen as damaging to China’s international image—clearly epitomized by Guiyu—and/or tocontrol successful businesses that lay almost exclusively in local Guiyu hands, led to a reversal of
fortunes for local workshops. By 2018, many entrepreneurs had soured on the scavenging trade due to a
combination of unwanted government interference in the historically freewheeling sector and a slump incommodity prices, as well as a lack of perceived availability of e-waste of desired quality. Once one of
the most reliable moneyspinners in the transnational
waste trade, albeit with often“Such tales of rags to riches in the waste
slim margins—much depended
on volume—Guiyu had lost its
trade made Guiyu into a locus ofmojo. The smart money foundopportunistic fascination.”other opportunities in Chinese
communities with a much lower
profile and less government andinternational surveillance than e-waste’s most notorious trouble spot had attracted over more than 20
years.

China’s ruling party has long seen the Middle Kingdom as a technological superpower in the making, andfor over a decade, the Chinese government has seethed at the perceived second-class role that China hadcome to occupy as, arguably, the pivotal nation in the murky, tainted global waste-scavenging trade.
Instead of wallowing at tech’s pollutant back end, China fancies itself as the sine qua non trading partner
on the supply side of high-end technology—though of course China itself produces a great deal ofdomestic e-waste, and therefore would continue to benefit from an ability to handle large quantities of
WEEE via sustainable conversion and recommoditization (e.g., Zhu and Chertow 2016). One reason
China became so central to the trade was both the willingness of entrepreneurs to engage in the trade andthe de facto broad latitude they enjoyed in disposing of the byproducts of their scavenging work in an
often laissez-faire regulatory sphere. The efficiencies were so lucrative that the whole industrialized world
had become more or less accustomed to using China as their extraterritorial scrapheap, a welcome
destination for their WEEE and a place where workshops would do the dirty work that they wouldn’t
countenance taking place in their own countries.
Given the sensitivities
surrounding these issues, it“Exasperated, Beijing began characterizing
was just a matter of time
before Beijing took action.
imports of e-waste and scrap as ‘foreign
Authorities banned several
categories of electronic
garbage’ (yang laji), vilified as a filthy anddevices and appliances as far
pernicious threat to the nation.”back as the year 2000. Yetwith patchy surveillance andweak enforcement, millions
of tons of WEEE continued entering into China with little impediment, fuelling an expansive informal
sector of scavenging and material recovery. Exasperated, Beijing began characterizing imports of e-waste
and scrap as “foreign garbage” (yang laji) (Schulz 2019), vilified as a filthy and pernicious threat to thenation (pace Lepawsky 2018; Davis et al 2018). The central government then implemented a series ofhigh-profile operations from 2013 (given triumphalist names such as “Green Fence” and “National
Sword”) in order to quash the illicit activities of this dynamic sector—particularly smuggling andpollutant processing. The campaign escalated in July 2017, with an even more restrictive ban on thetransnational trade in scavengeable waste. Notably including all plastics and paper, but also an extensive
set of categories of scrap materials, imports of such materials are now forbidden. The ban is even more
sweeping than it seems at first glance; since e-waste and other WEEE often contain plastic and a key partof the e-waste trade comprises the conversion of plastic, the ban excludes much imported e-waste, etc., aswell (Schulz and Lora-Wainwright 2019).
Moving forward, China has embarked on a strategy to implement formalization of WEEE conversion(Inverardi-Ferri 2017), shaped by an ideological vision of technological “civilization,” (Geall and Ely
2018; Tong et al 2015) but it is still too early to determine whether the shift away from the scavenging
mode of production has managed to achieve its stated aims of efficiency, safety, and sustainability. (Forexample, locating scavenging activities in a dedicated facility, as in contemporary Guiyu, does not, of its
own accord, magically eliminate pollutant emissions from conversion activities. Guiyu informants argued
quite the opposite—that emissions simply became better hidden.)In this regard, it is instructive to look at Japan, where an integrated system of largely automated material
recovery has existed for nearly two decades. Japan’s vast apparatus of material conversion offers a roughillustration of what authorities in Beijing envision for China in the coming years—though China’s formal
sector will likely be considerably larger, due to the nation’s far greater size and the longstanding focus onconversion there. (It is even conceivable that China’s system will eclipse Japan’s in sophistication ofmaterial conversion if the Middle Kingdom finds a way to integrate the expertise and dynamism of its
huge population of experienced scavengers, instead of marginalizing and vilifying them.) Following thelead of Japan’s successful appliance efficiency-oriented Top-Runner program, the archipelago’s e-waste
conversion apparatus is shaped by competition. Two rival Japanese tech consortia dedicated to WEEE
conversion, encompassing about two dozen high-tech plants between them, compete to have the highest
recycling percentage for certain
appliance classifications (such as
televisions, for which Panasonic“Repair is often the most “eco” way to deal
claims an 89% material recyclingrate).4 In this way, such highlywith electronics—it’s far more efficient to fix
automated facilities in Japana computer for resale than to break it downrecycle most of the nearly one
million tons of consumer
into pieces in order to extract tiny amounts
appliances generated annuallyof gold and palladium from its circuitry, for(Honda et al 2016, 84-89).

example, not to mention more lucrative.”

Repair is often the most “eco”
way to deal with electronics—it’s
far more efficient to fix a computer for resale than to break it down into pieces in order to extract tiny
amounts of gold and palladium from its circuitry, for example, not to mention more lucrative—but suchstrategies are unappealing to many established tech corporations. Indeed, it cannot be ignored thatexpertly repaired televisions and other appliances would take market share away from tech corporations’
own new product lines. For this reason, most of Japan’s recycling apparatus was relatively disinterested inencouraging repair and reuse (Honda et al 2016, 85-87; Kirby, 2018). Instead, the consortia pursued afamiliar cycle of mass-production, mass-consumption, mass-disposal, and mass-recycling that was anextension of Japan’s maximalist trajectory from the high-speed growth years of the postwar period.
Whatever the positives, the Japanese system can therefore be deemed a considerable missed opportunity.
Be that as it may, Japanese tech companies have embraced the industrial challenge of demanufacturing.
Through a combination of careful human prepping and skillfully mobilized mechanical brawn, thesecompanies dismantled, chopped, and classified the WEEE, transforming discarded products back into
relatively discrete aggregations of material (e.g., large industrial sacks filled with chunks of aluminum, or
steel, next to others into which particular types of plastic fragments had been decanted). The better thematerials are classified, the purer they will be and thus the higher their value on the market or to the
manufacturer; Panasonic representatives say it manages to use about 20% of its recovered materials in its
own global operations, a claim that seems plausible partly because such conversion helps Panasonic’s
own bottom line. Someday, perhaps this conversion work will be conducted with greater automation, butworkers remain integral to the current system. After initial manual human disassembly, most discarded
appliances and other electronics are crushed by a giant studded steel mangle. The resulting fragments arethen reduced to more uniform size and sorted at high speed on conveyor belts, utilizing clever and timesaving technologies to sort “like with like,” such as puffs of air, flotation, magnetism, electrical charge,
and infrared sorting. Partly for this reason, the business of high-tech “green” recycling is sometimes
referred to as “the shredder economy” (Kalimo, Lifset et al 2012). Yet the vast infrastructure of machines,
transport logistics, and human labour that breaks down e-waste goes far beyond mere crushing or“shredding.” This enterprise of undoing brings not just destruction but reconstitution, with plastics and4 “Recycling Processes,” Panasonic PETEC facility online PR, 2021 (https://panasonic.net/eco/petec/process/,

accessed December 2022).

metals shrapnelized, separated, melted, compressed, snipped, cooled, crushed, and pelletized in a mutable
purgatory of form. This then made them available for recommoditization.
As impressive as these formal-sector technological and engineering feats can be, it’s now clear via myresearch that this sleek, high-tech recycling stream was propped up and sustained by a shadow stream ofwaste exports abroad, mostly to China. Japan, since the late 1990s, has therefore presided over the
expansion of two “waste regimes” (Gille, 2007, 34-5) that worked interdependently—one public-facingand eco-responsible, the other dictated by expediency and profit, operating out of the public eye. Indeed,
the shadow trade in scavengeables like e-waste—smartphones, computers, televisions, appliances, oldstereo equipment, outdated
cameras, and other techcomponents— created ready“As Yamamoto-san delicately put it,
channels for licitly exporting
perhaps 10% of the hypothetical cargomaterials that the marqueesystem could not convert asmight have contained steel mixed withefficiently, as explained below.

copper—which was difficult for customs
inspectors to detect.”

The Japanese public-facing
system is a clever mix ofecological imperative and PR,
set up to elevate certain high-profile products as “national champions” in the French style.5 While themarquee system handled standard appliances and other predictable components, the shadow stream
enabled the difficult recycling work to be exported to other countries, notably China.
Yamamoto-san, a seasoned executive at a major Japanese recycling and smelting company, explained tome how the system worked. Of course, much of it came down to what he called the “separation cost” ofconversion, which was much higher in Japan. For example, a plasma-screen television bought within thepast decade would be sent to a dedicated, highly automated facility, like PETEC, and recycled to a highstandard (see Kirby 2018). By contrast, an old VCR-style videotape player, once very common in Japan,
would follow a very different path with much less scrutiny. A typical year before 2018 or pre-Covid
would see brokers visiting Japan from places like China, looking for scrap. Now-obsolete VCRs, forexample, contain metals that appeal to scavengers, but the small motors inside each VCR are an unwieldy
mix of copper and steel. This means that each motor has to be cut apart and the copper separated before
these can go to smelters. (With arms spread and an exaggerated facial expression of mock disgust,Yamamoto-san blurted out, “Steel smelters hate copper!” to a young female PR representative and me in asleek but sterile conference room near Akihabara.) The separation cost for such work is prohibitive inJapan. It’s hard to imagine any Japanese company choosing an above-board approach to this kind of
conversion work, which is difficult and involves much expensive manual labor with very little reward.
But this is precisely the kind of demanufacturing work that an e-waste Mecca like Guiyu specialized infor many years: high volume, slim margins, and relatively minuscule labor costs. Take a typical large,
pre-2018-crackdown shipment of iron-mixed-metal scrap from Japan to China, for example. As
Yamamoto-san delicately put it, perhaps 10% of the hypothetical cargo might have contained steel mixed
with copper—which was difficult for customs inspectors to detect. When it arrived in a scavenging
destination like Guiyu, however, the separation cost was much more manageable because labor there wasvery cheap; the VCR motors and transformers could be cut open and broken down manually.

5 Where France aggressively promotes Airbus mega-jets and Areva’s EPR third-generation nuclear reactors in high-stakes bilateral negotiations, Japan pushes an image of efficient competency with electronics that adds to the lustreof smart televisions, computers, air-conditioners, and so on.

Japan’s trade with China has long existed in an administrative murk that has suited Japanese interests. At
the crux of this trade is the, for Japan, highly favorable manner of defining what counts as waste andwhat, conversely, counts as a valuable commodity. Once something (a vending machine, an electronic
dictionary, a microwave oven) is designated as waste in the Japanese system, it falls under the dictates ofa strict series of mandated controls, including regulations stipulating the types of trucks that can handle
the material, a manifest system to account for its progress through different stages and intermediaries,
codes that designate the kind of facility where it can be stored and handled, and so on. By contrast,
according to Japan’s regulatory framework, if a waste product (such as discarded stereo equipment, oldstyle boxy televisions, superannuated appliances) is purchased, for nearly any amount of money, it isconsidered a commodity, not a waste. (In the Japanese system, according to Yamamoto-san: “If you pay
money for something, it has value. If you want … PCs from my company, the borderline is whether wepay money or we receive money.”) Such material can then be exported, even to a jurisdiction withgenerally low environmental standards and enforcement. This is markedly different than the approach
followed by the EU, for example; in Europe, anything containing mercury, a neurotoxin, must be handledwith care, no matter what its status as a commodity. So for a hypothetical Japanese company meeting witha hypothetical Chinese scrap broker, both parties get what they want. The Japanese company gets rid ofwaste that is difficult and expensive to process. The Chinese broker gets quality e-waste that can be
extremely lucrative to scavenge in a zone with much lower separation costs.
This Japanese approach is, in effect, a form of magical thinking. Instead of confronting the waste trade inreality-based, macro terms that would take account of the holistic effects that toxins have on people andthe environment, Japan chooses to play semantic games. There is an instructive analogue in internationallaw. According to a similar logic of human rights, an alleged criminal in one jurisdiction often cannot be
extradited to another country’s jurisdiction, for instance that of the USA, where s/he would likely face thedeath penalty. The Japanese policy of allowing the sale of waste as a commodity to overseas e-scrap
brokers is to pretend there is no capital punishment, no extradition, and indeed no criminal.
When I propose a different system for robotic waste, I engage in a degree of abstraction. Robotic waste is
essentially e-waste, despite how it might be commonly conceived. However, robotics as a sector remains
at a very early stage, withrelatively low production
volumes. There is an“Instead of confronting the waste trade inopportunity here to carve out
a different pathway forreality-based, macro terms that would takerobotics and robotic waste
account of the holistic effects that toxins
so that more sustainable
practices are programmed
have on people and the environment,
into the sector from anJapan chooses to play semantic games.”
initial stage. If robotics labs
can, early on, be encouraged
to rely more on repair thandisposal/replacement, then when the sector expands, down the road, robotics might continue along amuch more sustainable trajectory than has generally existed for standard WEEE.
Embedding this set of practices in robotics would be a big environmental win. However, going hand inhand with the messiness of e-waste is the enduring quandary presented by waste conversion. “Urban
mining” is never completely free of emissions and leakage, and with Guiyu-style scavenging this has been
far from the case, as I have explained. Is it better to engage in messy urban mining of e-waste, even if far

from pristine, or is it preferable to avoid scavenging and engage in traditional underground mining to
extract the same materials from ore? The former approach may offend environmentalists and others, but if
urban mining can be gradually made cleaner and provide a sizable percentage of material like copper—
which is lucrative and easily recycled—then digging up ore in “virgin” ground can perhaps be avoided, orat least postponed. A few timely examples include plans for Pebble Mine, whose proposed site on Alaskan
tundra would have threatened prized salmon spawning grounds (NYT, 9 September 2021); and the socalled Twin Metals project, whose proposal to mine in a national forest watershed could well have been
disastrous for Minnesota’s 1.1 million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, located justdownstream (Washington Post 26 January 2022; Minter 2013). Clearly, WEEE conversion needs to bemade far less noxious, particularly in industrializing nations in the Global South. It should also probably
be made much more efficient, drawing on industrial ecology principles, no matter where it occurs. But
whatever percentage of copper can come from conversion of existing waste (e.g., urban mining, also
known as “above-ground mining”) would help prevent Arcadian idylls like these, or even ordinary
communities, around the world from being depredated by extraction vehicles, toxic emissions, andparlous mine tailings. Introducing such principles into a relatively new sector like robotics could
potentially create substantial benefits and also showcase a practical dimension of sustainability in agrounded manner that would facilitate greater impact.

CRAFTING ROBOTIC WASTE ECOSYSTEMS
From the above description of real-world recycling processes, a.k.a. scavenging, in East Asia, we can put
forward some premises. 1) To start with, lasting sustainability doesn’t simply happen on its own. Withouta robust regime of laws, regulations with teeth, inspections, and penalties, sustainable e-waste conversion
is unlikely to flourish in a place where cheaper, easier, and more pollutant methods can be relied upon, notto mention routine smuggling of imports from abroad. 2) Next, context matters. Good-faith efforts toinculcate eco practices in varied socio-political settings must include taking account of history, culture,
and actual conversion practices on the
ground, not whatever buzzwords andcirculating attitudes happen to be in“Context matters. Good-faith efforts tofashion. Japan has spent decades
inculcate eco practices in varied socioinundating public discourse with ecorhetoric over sustainability andpolitical settings must include taking
resource use, both domestically andaccount of history, culture, and actualinternationally. In this way, Japan has
been able to self-curate its desired
conversion practices on the ground, notimage as a leading nation promoting
whatever buzzwords and circulating
best-practice environmental policy
and forward-thinking sustainability, aattitudes happen to be in fashion.”reflection of its aspirations on theinternational stage. (This is also a
logical response to spending much of the postwar period as a global environmental villain [Huddle &Reich 1987; Broadbent 1998; Avenell 2017].) Yet even Japan has been engaged in the aforementioned
shadow trade in difficult, dirty, and/or (maybe) dangerous (or sankei, a.k.a. “3K”; kitsui, kitanai, kiken) escrap being sold to other countries more or less under the table for convenient export. 3) Circularity is aseductive conceit often invoked by stakeholders, but it is rarely ever a description of a true sustainablesystem. Industrial ecology and so-called zero-emissions remain more common as aspirations of ecoefficiency rather than descriptions of successful environmental engineering at scale. 4) Refurbishment ofelectronics represents a productive way forward, however daunting and elusive beyond limited workshopstyle operations. Indeed, repair is often far more efficient than shredding—as explained above, fixing asmartphone is far preferable to disassembling and crushing the handset to extract tiny amounts of precious

metals therein, with all the eventual pollutant externalities such operations bring. But as yet, there are notso many examples of meaningful eco-recovery and repair of electrical and electronic components.
One telling case of repair that touches on these four premises is Apple’s Daisy robot (debuted in 2018),
designed to disassemble and recycle iPhones. In a convenient irony, Daisy, which resembles more of atransparently sealed factory-kiosk
than a discrete robot, was partiallyconstructed with parts from Liam,“Yet even within the Apple iPhone
the first iPhone recycling robot
universe, these operations remain far(which debuted in 2016) (Verge2018). This and other iPhoneout of proportion to the scale of the
scavenging helps facilitate the salechallenge: at full capacity, each Daisyof refurbished iPhones, for a lower
price—usually about 15% cheaper—
can recycle about 1.2 million iPhones awith components that come fromyear, while 233.9 million iPhones wereother iPhones (sometimes referred toas Certified Refurbished). But muchshipped in 2021.”
of what is recovered from the two
Daisies—one operating in
California, the other in Amsterdam—can, in turn, be converted and reconstituted to manufacture newcomponents. For instance, cobalt recovered from the recycling can be rechanneled into new battery
manufacture; tungsten is another in-demand element, used for durable casings, that is collected andreincorporated into further products. Yet even within the Apple iPhone universe, these operations remain
far out of proportion to the scale of the challenge: at full capacity, each Daisy can recycle about 1.2
million iPhones a year, while 233.9 million iPhones were shipped in 2021 (Statista 2022). This
improbable ratio doesn’t count the billion-plus iPhones already in current active use, either; furthermore,
many households and institutions have other old, abandoned phones lying around. Even with DIY e-repair
evangelists like iFixit offering manuals and tools to consumers willing to take matters into their own
hands, the prospects for a sustainable, repair-driven revolution in electronics so far remain dim.
The Autonomous Robotic Ecosystems (ARE) project, described at the opening of this article, is one
initiative that sketches out a pathway that could pioneer a different, more positive approach. To be clear,
the actual recycling of robots is not an emphasis of the existing ARE studies, to say the least. The UKand Netherlands-based scientists responsible for the ARE projects prefer to dwell on the more novel
theoretical and technical side of the robotic matrix, the problem-solving and design “evolution” of the
ARE apparatus, while the actual recycling involved is little more than an afterthought—recycling at its
most rudimentary level. (Some ARE scientists did not respond to numerous queries in autumn and winter2021 to expand on these research questions or explain their methodology further.) Yet over time, whether
or not by this team of scientists, the technological side of the recycling challenge will necessarily move
forward. Advances in the production of electronics, the continued modularization of components (likemicrochips and capacitors), and tailored engineering of mechanical devices—such as further stages ofsophisticated 3D-printing—will likely create sustainable efficiencies in how robots can be produced, withan eye toward eventual dismantlement, recycling, and reproduction.
Yet it is the potential applications for such a robotic matrix that are also enticing. The challenge of humaninterplanetary exploration—possibly as a response to the prospect of civilizational collapse, perhaps justas a billionaire’s pet project—may help focus and capitalize efforts to craft pioneering technologies inorder to make the “evolutionary” recycling of robotic waste a workable objective. This, along with thegrowing environmental interest in making efficient use of discards—or finding cheaper “certified-refurbished” types of cutting-edge smartphone to buy, as the case may be—may well help reorient someof the more out-of-whack elements of our species’ remaining time on Planet Earth.

CONCLUSIONSThe boundaries of what is considered “e-waste” have for some time lain unhelpfully narrow. For instance,
the satellite debris, wrecked or partially damaged spacecraft, and abandoned rocket components thatcurrently orbit Earth are called many things—space trash, space junk, orbital debris, “offworld rubbish”(Lepawsky 2016)—but are materiallyindistinguishable, for the most part,“By sharp contrast, excavating robotic
from e-waste. Given its increasing
waste stands as a similar, though much density and concomitant hazard tooperating satellites and space mission
more achievable and reality-based,
launches, perhaps entrepreneurs will
someday succeed in collecting andeco-technical goal. In a relatively new
converting this rich form of electronic
sector, sustainable principles that yield waste, just as space-oriented multibillionaires hope in the future to replace
efficiencies, including repair, can be
pollutant terrestrial mining withintroduced to the design anddemolition and ore-extraction ofcomets, asteroids, and other heavenly
manufacture of robots.”bodies.
By sharp contrast, excavating robotic waste stands as a similar, though much more achievable and realitybased, eco-technical goal. In a relatively new sector, sustainable principles that yield efficiencies,
including repair, can be introduced to the design and manufacture of robots. And with the assumed robust
development curve of robotics in the coming years, the impact of such sustainable principles could proveconsiderable. Significantly, many scientists and engineers who populate robotics labs are lifelong
tinkerers. Based on my ongoing research on robotics, people who are designing and testing robots have, atdifferent stages of their careers, depended more on repair when there was a problem with the robots they
used—until, for example, their more advanced career stage made them too busy, and time-consuming
repairs were too impractical. It’s impossible to say whether such conditions will make a difference, but
hands-on experience with repair appears to represent fertile territory for inculcating eco principles—suchas making robots, from the beginning, more easily dismantle-able, with components that are pre-designed
to be recycled efficiently. Moving forward, the potential for nurturing a sustainable approach andemphasis on refurbishment of robots is
non-trivial, as is the prospect for
growth and expanded impact.

“Thus, the creation of a more sustainablesystem for recycling the future’s spacefaring robots that are destined one day
to explore distant outlands can also be
used to benefit life on Earth in the here
and now.”

Thus, the creation of a moresustainable system for recycling thefuture’s space-faring robots that aredestined one day to explore distantoutlands can also be used to benefit lifeon Earth in the here and now. The
implications for making progress onnear-term goals related to air and water
quality, energy transition, and climate
crisis are promising. Yet maybe the biggest question-mark hovering over such a proposed change ishumans’ prodigious affective capacity, one of humanity’s most reliable markers of species difference. A

scientist named Joo-Ho, who runs a lab in Kyoto, chose to hold onto a robot, CE3, that he had used in five
years of experiments rather than discard or recycle the apparatus (as Apple’s Liam robot had beencannibalized to construct Daisy). The more the lab workers had engaged with the robot, the more they had
considered it a “friend” for whom they felt “sympathy.” As Joo-Ho explained, “The robot worked very
hard for us—it’s a very complex emotion”; he went through a sort of a grieving process in dealing withthe retirement of his reliable research subject CE3. After keeping the bulky superannuated robot for eight
years on a shelf in very tight storage space in his small lab, Joo-Ho said he was arranging for a colleague
to take on CE3—specifically, a former student who had more lab space and a similar willingness to holdonto the robot rather than toss it on
the proverbial scrapheap.

“Yet this aforementioned robotics lab’s

Excavating robotic waste may
involve both urban mining and aexperience suggests that we may have awillingness to dig a bit deeper into
further considerable affective hurdle towhat makes us human. As a species,
we may well develop thesurmount if, over time, we come totechnological and logistical capacity
develop feelings for the very robots that,to (re)produce robots sustainably at
scale and to avoid deleterious
for decades, we have feared asexternalities. Efficiencies and green
terminators, automat trackers, killer
advances in robotics could,
moreover, influence the larger
fembots, enforcement droids, andresource economy of the global
ruthless Sentinels.”
electronics trade, vastly multiplying
their impact. Yet thisaforementioned robotics lab’s
experience suggests that we may have a further considerable affective hurdle to surmount if, over time,
we come to develop feelings for the very robots that, for decades, we have feared as terminators, automat
trackers, killer fembots, enforcement droids, and ruthless Sentinels. Should this curious eventuality cometo pass, it will likely usher in a period of productive coexistence, even partnership, as machines offer their
non-senescent spans and expendable utility to humankind’s mortal toolkit. If so, the hand extended to help
save the planet and indeed the species may well be coated in silicon.

REFERENCES
Asimov, Isaac. 1950. I, Robot. New York: Gnome Press.
Avenell, Simon (2017). Transnational Japan in the global environmental movement. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press.
Bacigalupi, Paolo 2009. The Windup Girl. San Francisco: Night Shade Books.
Broadbent, Jeffrey. 1998. Environmental politics in Japan: Networks of power and protest. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Chi, X., M. Streicher-Porte, M. Wang, and M. Reuter. 2011. Informal electronic waste recycling: A sector
review with special focus on China. Waste Management 31(4):731–742.
Davis, J-M, Akese, G and Garb, Y. 2018. Beyond the Pollution Haven Hypothesis: Where and Why Do Ewaste Hubs Emerge and What Does This Mean for Policies and Interventions? Geoforum 98: 36-45.
Dick, Philip K., 1968. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday.
Geall, S. and Ely, A. 2018. Narratives and Pathways towards an Ecological Civilization in Contemporary
China. The China Quarterly, 236: 1175–96.
Hale, M. F., et al., Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution. 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on
Computational Intelligence (SSCI), 2020, pp. 2140-2147, doi: 10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308204.
Honda, S., D. S. Ketriwal, and R. Kuehr. 2016. Regional e-waste monitor: East and Southeast Asia.
Bonn: United Nations University.
Huddle, N., and M. Reich. 1987. Island of dreams: Environmental crisis in Japan. Cambridge, MA:
Schenkman Books.
Huo, X., et al. 2007. Elevated blood lead levels of children in Guiyu, an electronic waste recycling town
in China. Environmental Health Perspectives 115(7):1113–1117.
Carlo Inverardi-Ferri. 2017. Variegated geographies of electronic waste: policy mobility, heterogeneity
and neoliberalism, Area Development and Policy, 2(3):314-331.
Gille, Z. 2007. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist
and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Kalimo, H., R. Lifset, et al. 2012. Greening the economy through design incentives: Allocating extended
producer responsibility. European Energy and Environmental Law Review 21(6):274-305.
Kirby, Peter Wynn. 2022. Radiant Scars: Fallout, Trauma, Ghosts, and (Re)worlding in Fukushima.
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography. (h#ps://doi.org/
10.1080/04353684.2022.2101136; accessed December 2022).
Kirby, Peter Wynn. 2019a. Materialities meet the mangle: Electronic waste scavenging in Japan and
China. Geoforum 102: 48-56.
Kirby, Peter Wynn. 2019b. Slow Burn: Dirt, Radiation, and Power in Fukushima. The Asia-Pacific
Journal volume 17, issue 19, number 3. (https://apjjf.org/2019/19/Kirby.html; accessed December
2022)
Kirby, Peter Wynn. 2018. Mangling and Promiscuity: Materialities of Waste Conversion in East Asia.
Contemporary Japanese Studies 18(2). (https://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol18/iss2/
kirby.html#_edn7; accessed December 2022)
Kirby, Peter Wynn. Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2011.
Lem, Stanislaw 1977. Mortal Engines. (Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.) New York:
Seabury Press.
Lepawsky, Josh. 2016. The Wake of the Anthropocene. Techniques & Culture, Suppléments au n°65-66(http://journals.openedition.org/tc/7792).
Lepawsky, J. 2018. Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Minter, A. 2013. Junkyard Planet. New York: Bloomsbury.
NYT 2021. Alaska’s Controversial Pebble Mine Fails to Win Critical Permit, Likely Killing it. The New
York Times 25 November 2020, by Henry Fountain.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/climate/pebble-mine-permit-denied.html [accessed
December 2022])
OED, n.d. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford: OUP.
Online Etymology Dictionary 2021. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/robot [accessed December2022])
Putnam, Hilary. 1964. Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life? Journal of Philosophy
61:668-9
Schulz, Yvan 2019. Scrapping “Irregulars”: China’s Recycling Policies, Development Ethos and PeasantsTurned Entrepreneurs. Journal für Entwicklungspolitik 35(2):33-59.
Schulz, Y. and Lora-Wainwright, A., 2019. In the Name of Circularity: Environmental Improvement andBusiness Slowdown in a Chinese Recycling Hub. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary
Studies, 2(1): 9.
Schwab, Gabriele 2020. Radioactive Ghosts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Shirow Masamune 1991. 攻殻機動隊 THE GHOST IN THE SHELL, (kōkaku kidōtai za gōsuto in za
sheru). Tokyo: Kodansha.
Statista 2022. Apple worldwide shipments of smartphones from 2010 to 2021 (in million units), by
quarter. Statista (https://www.statista.com/statistics/299153/apple-smartphone-shipments-worldwide/[accessed December 2022])
Tong, X, et al. 2015. Re-making Spaces of Conversion: Deconstructing Discourses of E-waste Recycling
in China. Area, 47(1): 31–9.
Verge 2018. Daisy is Apple’s New iPhone-recycling Robot. The Verge Apr 19, 2018 (https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17258180/apple-daisy-iphone-recycling-robot [accessed December2022])WP 2022. Biden Administration Cancels Two Mining Leases Near Minnesota Wilderness, in Reversal of
Trump-Era Decision. The Washington Post 26 January 2022, by Dino
Grandoni (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/26/biden-boundarywaters-canoe-mine/ [accessed December 2022]).
Zhu, J., and M. Chertow. 2016. Greening industrial production through waste recovery: “Comprehensive
utilization of resources” in China. Environmental Science & Technology 50(5):2175-2182.