Secondhand Extraction and/as Mediation
All photos by Tinghao Zhou
BY TINGHAO ZHOU
Imagine if our very survival instinct, the simple act of breathing, becomes a threat to our well-being. This dystopian vision of a future marred by perpetual pollution has been the harsh reality for numerous communities on the fringes of our environmentally exploited planet. These challenges are increasingly apparent on a global scale, as growing concerns about air quality—from the smog-filled skies of Canada and the United States during catastrophic forest fire seasons to the haze choked landscape of Australia—highlight the devastating impact of climate change and unchecked environmental degradation. In Guiyu, a seemingly inconspicuous industrial town on the rural outskirts of Shantou city in Guangdong Province, China, the atmosphere has become so polluted that the locals have invented a name for it: guiyuwei—the odor of Guiyu—renders even breathing dangerous. Guiyu, renowned as the world’s largest e-waste recycling center since the late 20th century, has become notorious due to the processing of electronic waste, including discarded consumer electronics such as smartphones, computers, routers, and TV sets, primarily exported from the United States. The once unregulated recycling processes in Guiyu have resulted in the excessive production of reusable metals and plastic materials. Yet, in the face of these daunting environmental risks, the inhabitants of Guiyu embraced a proactive form of respiration: smelling. Through their olfactory sense, they have found a lifeline, a means of orientation, and a way to survive in a world plagued by pollution and adversity. This slice of life in Guiyu epitomizes how the material afterlives of media technologies, when personal digital devices and electronic media reach the end of their designed life cycles and enter the cycle of disposal, have become intimately intertwined with human lives in the “shadow places” of the world. [1]
Over the past decade, the Chinese government has initiated environmental control projects and policies to address e-waste pollution. The goal is to formalize Guiyu’s informal e-waste practices into nationwide projects of the secondhand circular economy industry (ershou xunhuan jingji chanye) within the Green Belt and Road Initiative. Integrating the concept of “ershou (secondhand)” into the national discourse of ecological civilization transforms it into a material-symbolic concept with significant sociopolitical and economic implications. E-waste, often consisting of not only secondhand but also thirdhand or further used devices, typically declines significantly in user value within this cycle. Categorizing e-waste recycling as a core component of the secondhand economy highlights the moment of discarding an owned device as the transition point, wherein the framework of understanding and assigning value shifts from user to residual value, whether in terms of user or material worth.
Building upon the politico-economic concept of secondhand, I propose the notion of “secondhand extraction” to examine the various processes of extracting the residual value across different scales in e-waste recycling practices. These practices involve dismantling discarded electronic devices and extracting valuable minerals through physical and chemical processes, such as shaoban (circuit board burning) and suanxi (acid water washing). I consider this very practice of dismantling, breaking down, and extracting not only as the material process of transforming and reassembling obsolescent media, but more importantly, as provoking a particular mode of reading, theorizing, and critiquing the social and political relationship between media and environment, a multi-dimensional entanglement in the wake of global media economy. This framework explores secondhand extraction as various forms of environmental and epistemological mediation in e-waste recycling. It reveals how the global trade of discarded electronics and the recycling process have metabolically transformed the landscape, channeled the elemental exchange between laboring bodies (especially women) and the non-human milieu, reorganized local people’s sensoria, mobilized multispecies agencies, and reshaped environmental politics in local areas like Guiyu.
Secondhand extraction finds its roots in the Chinese word ershou, used in Chinese parlance for the secondhand economy industry, embodying semantic complexity and conceptual depth. The term ershou resonates with its English equivalent, “secondhand,” implying an item “acquired after being used by another,” as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Thus, secondhand extraction primarily denotes the material process of extracting materials and residual value from secondhand electronics. However, it goes beyond this literal interpretation. The concept also highlights the secondary, yet equally critical form of extraction prompted by the planned obsolescence of media. While primary extraction occurs from the outset of media life cycles, sourcing materials like heavy metals, rare earth elements, and oil byproducts from mines and oil fields to produce media devices and their infrastructures, the concept of secondhand extraction reveals the extractive nature of e-waste processing and reproduction of media. This aspect often remains hidden within the rhetoric of recycling and recyclability, commonly associated with the secondhand circular economy. It further reminds us that these recycling activities rely heavily on the exploitation of migrant labor and environmental resources like clean water, air, and biofuels. This framework allows us to perceive media recycling as an inefficient process, urging us to pay careful attention to the frictions, energy loss, bodily exhaustion, and sensory deprivation inherent in these practices.
Furthermore, the term ershou (secondhand) offers potential for media theoretical thinking. Its second dictionary meaning denotes information or ideas “received from or through an intermediary.” By identifying an “intermediary” between information creators and recipients, the concept of “secondhand” underscores the fundamental dynamics of media communication. I use the term secondhand extraction not solely to capture the material process of extracting value from secondhand electronics and digital media, but also to construct a theoretical framework for comprehending extractive processes—e-waste recycling, exploitation of human labor, botanical mineralization, and abstraction of environmental data—as mediating forces, with far-reaching effects on our society and planet, linking media theory with technological and environmental processes while reflecting various facets of the local political ecology. To illustrate, let’s envision the global media economy as a giant organism with its metabolic mechanism. Underdeveloped recycling sites in the global south effectively become the endpoints forced to deal with “undigested” e-waste. When the remnants of digital media are dismantled, burned, and reduced into simpler metallic and chemical forms, they saturate and disrupt the local ecology, directly impacting the individual metabolisms of local residents. In this sense, the metabolism of the global media economy is a trans-scalar operation, influencing and being influenced by multi-layered extractive capitalism.
I take a step further by reframing the concept of mediation, not merely as a descriptor for the procedures of media functions and effects, but as a vital potentiality that could disrupt the predetermined associations of media artifacts and their specific media functions. For example, a system of communication technology is often explicated as the operational manifestation of the mediation processes including transmission, processing, and storage. Mediation thus blurs the clear division between media producers and users. This perspective interrogates the neutrality of media and further politicizes them as emergent cultural and environmental actors in an era marked by social turmoil and planetary connection. Through the lens of the circulation, recycling, and extraction of e-waste, I contend that discarded media are more than “stabilizations of the media flow.” They represent an epistemological disruption that can potentially point to alternative capacities of mediation inherent to a medium, often obscured by its prototype. These capacities are often revealed in non-prototypical media practices, such as cleaning a motherboard or repairing a phone screen, and expose the complex political network of bodies, resources, policies, and social forces that are intrinsically woven into the life journey of media.
However, there is a paradox here: the kind of mediation I’m referring to only takes place following the breakdown of primary mediation—the transmission of messages and information. Thus, secondhand extraction morphs into a form of secondary mediation. A media theory focusing on e-waste perhaps should orient itself towards this form of secondhand mediation, a system of thoughts that problematizes the idea of recycling and takes into account secondary practices and processes of knowledge production that are equally significant both conceptually and politically. The secondhand extraction, then, embodies a self-reflexive awareness of its political and methodological commitment. It encourages us to incorporate methods such as field observation, interviews with residents, sensory perception of the environment, technological investigation of biological forms, archival research, and media arts production, as forms of secondhand knowledge consumption and production. It consciously distances academic research from the fixation on claiming firsthand originality and knowledge by working towards a community-based, locally-situated, and non-anthropocentric co-production of knowledge. In this spirit, a local, bottom-up perspective is essential for studying places like Guiyu–a place that exemplifies the shared environmental and political challenges present at media endpoints worldwide and a principal experimental area for China’s secondhand circular economy. Such an approach allows us to trace not only the unequal distribution of material resources and waste across global sites but also the local community’s responses to the socio-material aftermath of these operations.
Endnotes
The “shadow places” of the world are places that are “remote from self, that we don’t have to know about but whose degradation we as commodity consumers are indirectly responsible for,” places that “take our pollution and dangerous waste.” See Val Plumwood, “Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling,” Australian Humanities Review, no. 44 (March 2008): 147.
The Circular Economy Promotion Law of the People’s Republic of China came into force on January 1, 2009. It was one of the earliest legal documents that specifically centered on promoting secondhand circular economy projects at the national level. In both the 13th and the 14th Five-Year Plans of People’s Republic of China, developing this secondhand circular economy has been described as one of the central infrastructural projects that could help to achieve the goal of building ecological civilization in the next 30 years. July of 2021 witnessed the implementation of the 14th Five-Year Circular Economy Development Plan by the National Development and Reform Commission, further deepening the development of secondhand circular economy projects.
Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, 1986, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012): 21.
Tinghao Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the recipient of the 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. His research focuses on the intersections of media theory, environmental humanities and justice, science and technology studies, critical infrastructure studies, and digital culture in China and beyond. His dissertation explores the trans-scalar, metabolic impact of the global media economy on the local ecologies and politics of China through the living archives of migrant labor bodies and sensoria, mineral-absorbing plants, and the rural landscapes. Tinghao’s work has been supported by the Chancellor’s Fellowship from UCSB, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), among others. He has worked for Journal of Media+Environment as the coordinating editor, and he now serves as the book review editor for the journal.
