ABSTRACT
Waste and pollution have been increasingly significant issues for China in the past four decades. Electronic waste (e-waste) is one prominent example, as China has historically been the main recipient of the world’s e-waste, and is currently the largest global producer of domestic e-waste. Not surprisingly, China is also the country most seriously polluted by e-waste. In the last two decades, China has seen the emergence of nationally driven sustainability and environmental directives of ecological civilization and the circular economy, which aim for zero waste and zero pollution production. In light of these histories and current aims, this paper will explore the contemporary framings of waste and pollution within, and pushing beyond, the conceptual bounds of the circular economy and ecological civilization in China. Using the example of bioremediation, a nature-based, sustainable remediation method that has been utilized on e-waste in China, I will employ Jasanoff and Kim’s concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries (2009) and resistant imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015) as a means to compare given and emerging conceptions of (zero) waste and pollution, sustainable ecological-societal goals, and to address the ways in which technologies are framed to project certain environmental futures and relationalities to pollution. Opening up spaces for different ontologies of pollution can serve to address lived realities – not just national goals – and shift focus towards environmental resuscitation, resilience, and adaption as the primary means to achieve sustainability.
