Lecture 3 - Sept 23 (15-17) - Shakila Umair

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Time and place: Monday September 23, 15-17 in lecture hall B3.

Title: "Information recycling of electronic waste in Pakistan"

Guest: Shakila Umair, Guest researcher at CESC/FMS, KTH

Talk: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been connecting people for years. Today more and more people have access to these ICTs and they want the best. Producers are coming up with the new technologies every day and as each new gadget or technology reaches the market, something older becomes obsolete. Obsolete electronic equipment, "e-waste", is the fastest growing waste stream today. Of all e-waste produced, only 20% is recycled formally and the rest is dumped in developing countries where it is recycled informally. Pakistan is one of the countries at the receiving end of this waste stream and it is one of the world's largest importers of e-waste. E-waste in Pakistan is recycled by crude processes which includes manual dismantling, open burning and acid processing of motherboards for the extraction of precious metals. These processes have impacts not just on the environment and on the people involved in this business, but also on the communities living in the vicinity of these sites. This lecture highlights the processes and the impacts of informal e-waste recycling in Pakistan.

About: Shakila Umair is working as a guest researcher at the Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC)/FMS at KTH has has previously worked at Lund University Centre for Sustainable Studies (LUCSUS). She has been working with informal recycling of e-waste in Pakistan for about three years. She has a master's degree in environmental engineering and sustainable infrastructure with a major in environmental strategies from KTH. She has worked with the United Nations Development Programme and the World Wide Fund for Nature Conservation (WWF) in Pakistan.

Literature to read before the lecture:

1) Umair, S. and Anderberg, S. (2011). "Ewaste imports and informal recycling in Pakistan - A multidimensional governance challenge". Available in Bilda.

While the lecture will primarily concern e-waste, the literature (below) will also cover other "first order" or "primary" effects of ICT (i.e. the environmental impact of mining, manufacturing, use, disposal and recycling of ICT hardware).

2) Instead of reading the paper, you should watch this 10-minute long presentation of the paper "Scarce metals as raw materials for ICTs: Do we care enough?" by P. Wägner and R. Widmer (2013). The paper was presented at the first international conference on information and communication technologies for sustainability (ICT4S) which was held in Zürich earlier this year. For some reason, the sound disappears during the last minute of the video (sorry for that).

3) Raghavan, B. and Hasan, S. (2012). "Macroscopically sustainable networking: An Internet quine". International Computer Science Institute report, TR-12-010. Available on the Internet (pdf).

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