Discarding electronics

14-12-2022

Sorting containers come in their own geologies. Their insides consist of media equipment with different densities, consistencies, volumes, and textures. In the top layers you find larger devices, like printers, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, and stereo sets. These are much intact. Once you get deeper into a container, equipment becomes smaller and smaller. From DVD players to Wi-Fi receivers to modems to laptops once you are two thirds through a container. Wires tend to interweave through multiple layers, from top to bottom, sometimes neatly rolled up, but more often entangled with other equipment. Once you start finding remote controls you will also encounter pieces of broken plastic, loose parts of deep-frying sets, lost toners, electric plugs, and other fragments. The deeper you get, the more broken the equipment is and, therefore, the slower sorting gets. Once you reach the last layer of the container, depending on your luck, you might find loose batteries, smartphones, gas burners, gourmet set pans and internet switches, all of these might be drenched in deep frying oil, might be squeezed together with broken safety glass, or as was the case today, all media remnants might be frozen together in layers of glass, frying oil, water, batteries, and cables. The deeper down you get, brand, function and objecthood disappear. Only a vague media soup is left in which you need to fish out batteries and airpods before scooping everything out with a large shovel.

23-3-24

Taylor Swift plays on the radio. She sings that she is always rooting for the anti-hero. Who is the anti-hero I wonder? Is it a version of herself, as she suggests in the video clip? Or does she want me to join her act of self-valorisation? Am I supposed to be the anti-hero? Persuaded by the melody and the rhythm of the beat I look at myself, toiling away in the dusty cold workshop. Swift is one of the most visible people in the world. The workshop I am in is one of the most hidden places in the world, located at the edge of a provincial Dutch city, behind closed gates and fences. She enters my world through the ether, mediated by the radio. Throughout the day we recycle hundreds of radios, many still capable of receiving and playing Swift’s voice. In fact, the radio I am listening to has been fished out of a recycling bin a couple of years ago. I am not an anti-hero. I can step out of this place at any moment, back to my artist-life. 
Repetition is not just in the work but also on the radio. Many of the songs are cheap remakes of cheap remakes from the 90’s. The songs involuntarily repeat in my head. Memories repeat when I hear tunes of my childhood. The following song by Swift and Ice Spice is called ‘Karma’ but because of the many background noises I mistake karma for colour. ‘Colour is a god. Colour is the breeze in my hair on the weekend. Colour is a relaxing thought. Aren’t you envious that for you it is not? Sweet like honey, colour is a cat.’ It makes me think about the colours that surround me. The grey, yellow, pink, blue and red of the wasted equipment is covered in dirt, smeared with oil, and dulled by the sun. The magenta, cyan and yellow tones of the ink cartridges are toxic and drip through the cables and on my gloves, leaving deep yellow stains. A pink cloud puffs out of a toner when it is thrown into the toner-bin. The fluorescent yellow suit protects me from the forklifting trucks and the yellow, blue, or brown colour codes of my gloves tell me what they are used for. Colours at the recycling centre are functional. Red means danger, blue light means that a forklifting truck is close by in reverse. Black means thin gloves that can be used for nimble tasks. Fluorescent yellow means worker. Certain colours mean old. Certain colours mean toxic. Swift’s words make colours poetic. I wonder what colour a relaxing thought could be, and how the colours I wear and see around me would sound like through her voice. 

6-4-2023

I am fascinated by the discarded but potentially working equipment I find in the waste, specifically media technology and objects with personal markings. They carry stories that speak to my imagination and make me think of the lives of their previous owners, captured in a faded sticker or tangled magnetic cassette tape. For my co-workers, equipment is not so exciting. They see it every day. It excites them more when they encounter objects that are out of the ordinary. Today I saw Frits and Valentijn hunched around a small statue of a monkey that someone fished out of a bin. It was made of hard resin and had a cable dangling out of its belly. They were trying to decide what species it was. Frits said ‘baboon’, but Valentijn looked sceptical. I joined the conversation and suggested ‘macaque’, to which Valentijn agreed. Frits took out his phone to google different monkey species. We didn’t find the correct answer but realised it was neither a baboon nor a macaque. Other ‘interesting’ things found today were a pink-green cap with the text ‘come to the forest party’, a can of air refreshener scented ‘spring breeze’ that Martin sprayed around his workplace, the artificial smell contrasted nicely with the e-waste environment, and a huge artificial taxidermy deer mount with a motorized mouth. 

When in passing Victor noticed the deer’s head, he suggested to mount it on the wall as a trophy. It made me think of the royal hunting grounds ‘het Loo’ on the other side of the city, although the taxidermy mounts at the palace are probably real. At the recycling centre we have many other trophies: colourful parrots, an erotic FHM magazine, Ajax merch, two large toy robots, toy trucks and a few children-sized Mercedes Benz cars. Towards the end of the day, I saw some of my co-workers hunched over, reading a small blue notebook produced by Plieger, a bathroom product company, with an image of a large truck on the cover. On the front free endpaper ‘internet sites’ is written in ballpoint, followed by a few printed pages with addresses of Plieger branches in the Netherlands. The rest of the notebook contains graph paper and is filled with handwritten web-addresses, mostly in the same handwriting with ballpoint pen. Many of the website addresses refer to websites with information about travelling or mobile homes. Some sites refer to insurances, money lending, pensions, jobs for older people and flight reservation. The rest of the book is empty. I realise that all of us are charmed by what we imagine to be an analogue version of google created by an old man using a ballpen and a notebook from a sanitary wholesale company. 

11-3-2024

Almost all the equipment the I find connects itself to the human body. Old fashioned telephones, thermometers and headphones attach themselves to ears. Tanning machines and heat lamps search for bare skin. Binoculars, VHS cameras, telescopes and VR goggles cover one or both eyes. Temperature controlled foot-massage baths and scales need feet. AED’s and blood pressure meters connect to the vascular system. Joysticks, remote controls, and drills fit in hands and respond to fingers. Thermometers are inserted in an anus and sextoys look for genitals. 
Most of the time the equipment functions as a kind of tool. Enabling us to see in different ways, experience pleasure in our bodies, heal ourselves from sickness or provide physical comfort. I imagine how we surround ourselves with devices. How they extend, alter, or augment our bodies.

This makes me think about my own arms and legs. I wear a helmet, safety goggles, gloves, eye-protection and a brightly coloured overall. The same objects that augment other people, become dangerous in their afterlife, when they are thrashed. I must protect myself from the equipment I sort.

I find a package of false nails in between the waste. The package contains twelve plastic nails that differ in size. The thick nails are for thumbs, the smaller ones for index, middle- and ring finger, the smallest ones are for the little finger. I wonder how the nails ended up between the waste. Like much of the equipment, the nails augment the body, but not in a functional way. Are the nails used as a tool? For scratching, clawing, fiddling, caressing, picking, digging, and pinching? I wear the nails. Although my hands are big, with some pressure they fit nicely onto my fingers. I hold my hands up against the light and see how my fingers leave different shadows. Pointy. My hands lose some of the coarseness that was acquired through labour and become almost graceful. But working through the waste, I soon realise the nails are a burden. They get stuck behind cables and easily come off. 

14-3-2025

In the corner of my eye, I see Albert holding a bright yellow object. He is cleaning it with a cloth, carefully rubbing it. When I approach, I notice it is a small toy tiger, made of plastic, with a battery compartment so it can make growling noises and move its paws. When I ask why he is interested in a toy tiger, Albert tells me that Maarten occasionally allows him to bring toys he finds for his grandchildren. We both look at the small tiger and realise that below the dirt, the tiger is damaged. ‘Hmm, perhaps not this one’ Albert says. I ask him whether he tells his grandchildren about the origin of the toys. That he finds them in between the waste. When Albert answers evasively, ‘Grandpa brought this from work’, I realise I asked an awkward question and attempt to correct myself by suggesting that it could be educational for a child to learn that a perfectly working toy can be found in the trash. Albert replies that one of his grandsons has a little toy car that he loves so much, he sleeps with it every night. The car is broken. It has no doors, windows, or steering wheel. Still, the boy loves it. I smile and return to my work. Albert is right. Children know what is valuable, and how to hold on to it. Perhaps it is only later in life that we learn to discard 

6-3-2025

While working at one of the sorting bins, Johan and I talk about the way e-waste recycling is financed. He tells me about producer responsibility and StichtingOpen, and about extra funding from local municipalities that enable work opportunities for people who have a distance to the labour market. Johan tells me that ‘people who are a little blunt or autistic, and find it harder to keep a normal job, are able to work here because of subsidies.’ I notice that he has some discomfort speaking about this. Specifically the word subsidies seems to carry a negative connotation, likely because it applies to his own situation. As an artist, I also finance my profession through various kinds of subsidies. But in my field, receiving a subsidy is a positive thing. People write proudly on their Instagram ‘Made possible by the generous support of the Mondrian Foundation’. How is it that income is valued so differently?

Johan changes the subject to his daughter. She is eleven years old and just took her high school entrance examination. Johan proudly tells me she did well, and that she got admitted to the highest level of education. She is very smart. Johan explains that when they watch television series together, she notices details in plot lines that he misses. I can imagine that after she finishes high school and university she will, in contrast to her father, choose where and under what conditions to work. She will likely get a job that doesn’t need to be subsidised. Johan is proud of this. 

I wonder why work in an organisation that receives subsidy is seen as less valuable than work in which people seem to be independent. In the canteen, during the break, I see men drive lorries in and out of the premises. When they pass by, corporate names written on the sides of their trucks fill up the window of the canteen. We read:

                                                                     VAN BEEK LOGISTIEK 

Some of the men have decorated their lorries with feminine names printed on licence plates. Nina, Angelique, Linde. Maarten tells me how the drivers work for various transport companies. I wonder how the men inside the canteen, whose jobs are subsidised, look at these lorry drivers. Do they compare themselves? The drivers probably have a better income, and the lorry is a traditional masculine symbol. Are the drivers considered to be manlier because they seem to be independent?