In 2013, I visited a disassembly site for cars and electronics in Hunan, China. The tour was organized by the China Recycling and Resources Association (CRRA), an industry group that promotes the nation’s scrap sector, and it showcased a private electronics and automobile disassembly enterprise called Sichang.¹ Since 2006, Sichang has established itself as a leader in implementing China’s national policy of developing a circular economy. The company has invested in specialized facilities for the disassembly of electronics, automobiles, and industrial waste, and for processing non-ferrous and rare earth metals. In 2013, at the time of my visit, cities across China were welcoming a record number of cars onto their roads. Recycling industry leaders like Sichang, however, were looking decades ahead, creating facilities in anticipation of the obsolescence of the current generation of vehicles.

Our group, composed mainly of CRRA representatives and municipal bureaucrats, toured a newly constructed disassembly plant. We watched as workers in uniforms and helmets used excavators to crush auto bodies already stripped of their wheels and windows. The tour later took us to a disassembly line focused on household electronics, where workers stationed at a conveyor belt took apart CRT monitors, separating circuit boards from glass tubes, the disassembled and recovered components effectively procuring a store of valuable resources.

Infrastructures of Disassembly

Since China’s Reform and Opening in 1978, economic growth has relied on the continuous expansion of industrial capacity. State-sponsored factories and export development zones mobilized cheap labor for the production of textiles, electronics, and other consumer products to be shipped to the West. From the late 1990s to 2017, China also became a center for processing postconsumer waste. Shipping containers carrying exports to the West returned with postconsumer paper, plastics, and electronics.² A largely informal electronic waste disassembly network emerged, made up mostly of rural laborers who extracted copper and other precious metals by hand, with little regard for the environment or their own safety. China’s ecology, in effect, was twice polluted: once during the manufacture of electronics, and again during disassembly and reprocessing, which exposed both bodies and environments to lead and a host of other contaminants.

In the twenty-first century, China set out to realize a more sustainable development model. Alongside clean technologies such as solar and wind power and electric vehicles, waste management was to become a key site of state intervention. Chinese policymakers and planners promoted the idea of a circular economy—a technoscientific approach to waste management. Instead of displacing waste’s negative externalities to other locales,³ China endeavored to build a sustainable and modern system for managing waste that would rely on technological innovation to minimize or even eliminate the toxic effects of waste disassembly and reuse.

In 2017, China closed its borders to foreign waste imports, shut down informal recycling businesses, and re-established zones designated for waste recovery.⁴ The state invested in a new generation of technologies, including waste-to-energy incinerators and biogas facilities, as well as “circular economy industrial parks,” large centralized facilities for disassembly and conversion of matter into resource.⁵ Through better technology and social innovation, the circular economy envisions a closed loop where products and materials are recycled indefinitely.⁶

Facilities like the Sichang plant are critical nodes within the emerging infrastructures of disassembly—networks where discarded products are systematically disassembled so that their parts can be directed back into channels of production. While production under capitalism is predicated on the logistics of delivering goods cheaply and quickly to consumers,⁷ infrastructures of disassembly create systems of circulation in a network of reverse logistics. Composed of institutions, technologies, and labor, infrastructures of disassembly are an essential component of the circular economy and, by extension, of China’s transition to clean, sustainable development and green capitalism.

A State-Led Obsolescence

Obsolescence was once considered to be the unanticipated outcome of capitalist creative destruction.⁸ But since the middle of the twentieth century, the concept of planned obsolescence has been used to describe an approach that emerged in western industrial manufacturing, which aims to shorten the lives of industrial products. It continuously sustains markets for new iterations of products, stimulating consumers to replace products rapidly,⁹ and sending older versions to the dump. Planned obsolescence sustains a system of disposal.

In the twenty-first century, the circular economy presents an alternative approach to material circulation, one in which planned obsolescence is increasingly supplanted by a process of planning for obsolescence. Planning for obsolescence offers a vision of development capable of sustaining continuous growth at a time of increasingly constrained resources. It focuses not only on production and consumption but also on a totalizing approach to disposal and reproduction. In China, novel interventions in the treatment of electronic waste are critical to realizing this vision.

In the 1990s, only half of the households in China’s ten largest cities owned a refrigerator.¹⁰ Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has pursued policies to stimulate consumption, particularly of domestic appliances, electronics, and vehicles. While China has long produced goods for export to the global market, trade-in programs are meant to expand domestic consumption by incentivizing consumers to trade in old refrigerators, washing machines, and other household items for newer models. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the state mobilized such trade-in programs to encourage consumption in both large cities and in the countryside. By 2023, according to the Ministry of Commerce, more than three billion refrigerators, air conditioners, and washer units were in use across the country.¹¹

In April 2024, China announced a national trade-in program for cars and home appliances. This program was framed in ecological as well as economic terms, asserting that appliance trade-ins would promote energy efficiency. The program, notably, was accompanied by an expansion of the nation’s e-waste treatment capacity. The state aims to raise the volume of home appliances recycled by fifteen percent and the volume of cars recycled by fifty percent from 2023 to 2025.¹² China’s quest for sustainable growth thus centers on the creation of a network for resource recovery and reuse. Planning for obsolescence promises to resolve the tension between economic growth and sustainability by using the tools and techniques of a planned economy.

This is not the first time that Chinese economic planning has seized on waste. In the 1950s, during the Maoist period, China established one of the world’s first state-sponsored recycling systems. Material scarcity and foreign embargos led the state to encourage citizens to collect steel and other materials under a central material resources system.¹³ The All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives set up a network of local depots for scrap metal collection and processing to support national policies that prioritized industrial development.

In the twenty-first century, the “waste regime”¹⁴ that the Chinese state is perhaps most concerned with is that of e-waste. Electronic waste is valued for the metals and other useful materials that it contains. At the same time, the breakdown and disassembly of e-waste has the potential to release hazardous chemicals. Extracting rare metals from old computers and cell phones therefore calls for a turn toward high-tech sustainable development. Today, as China’s new electric vehicles are poised to dominate the domestic car market, Sichang’s planned vision seems to have arrived ahead of schedule.

Leaking Circulation

The circulation of e-waste has generally been understood through the lens of displaced toxicity. From the 1960s to the 1980s, microchip manufacturing sites in Silicon Valley left behind enormous quantities of harmful chemicals. Sites where electronics were produced and disposed of were contaminated with chlorinated and brominated substances, toxic metals, and plastic additives.¹⁵ Chemicals from the production of electronics were stored in large tanks that leaked underground, leaving many parts of the area so polluted that, for example, Santa Clara County is home to more Superfund sites than any other county in the United States.

In the 1990s, in the wake of more stringent environmental legislation, the US and Europe began sending their electronic waste overseas for disposal; China became a key destination. Western media coverage described environmental and health impacts in Guiyu, a village in southern China that became the center of a large informal electronics disassembly network. As China turned toward sustainable development and closed its borders to foreign waste imports in 2017, the circuits of electronic waste removal migrated yet again. Now, Ghana and Vietnam are popular destinations for international e-waste.¹⁶

The circulation of waste, however, has created more than just a geography of disposal. It has drawn many lives and diverse forms of labor into networks of circulation. A multiplicity of geopolitical and social relations have been formed, all in the name of a techno-utopian vision of smooth circulation. These changes underscore the types of political work necessary for sustaining new forms of circulation. The process of planning for a future of continued obsolescence in China illustrates that a circular economy carries the potential to obscure the consequences of limitless growth. And China’s capacity to capture and redirect waste as a resource is predicated on severing older political and economic ties.

China is planning for obsolescence by creating new infrastructures of material disassembly, meant to sustain growth in a period of ecological precariousness. These circulations will, however, inevitably produce new material networks, and new economic relationships—which may themselves have the potential to undermine the vision of continuous, green growth at the heart of the circular economy.

1. Sichang is a pseudonym. ↩︎
2. Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013). ↩︎
3. Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021). ↩︎
4. Yvan Schulz and Anna-Lora Wainwright, “In the Name of Circularity: Environmental Improvement and Business Slowdown in a Chinese Recycling Hub,” Worldwide Waste,
   no.1 (2019): 1–13. ↩︎
5. Amy Zhang, Circular Ecologies (Stanford University Press, 2024). ↩︎
6. Robert A. Frosch and Nicholas E. Gallopoulos, “Strategies for Manufacturing,” Scientific American 261, no. 3 (1989): 144–52. ↩︎
7. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). ↩︎
8. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (Harper Perennial, 2008). ↩︎
9. Giles Slade, Made to Break (Harvard University Press, 2006). ↩︎
10. Deborah Davis, The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (University of California Press, 2000). ↩︎
11. Adam Blair, “China Offers ‘Strong Financial Support’ to Help Boost Recycling of Household Appliances,” Retail TouchPoints, April 15, 2024, www.retailtouchpoints.com/features/news-briefs/china-offers-strong-financial-support-to-help-boost-recycling-of-household-appliances. ↩︎
12. Jiahui Huang, “China Releases Details of Trade-In Program for Consumer Products,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2024, www.wsj.com/economy/china-releases-details-of-trade-in-program-for-consumer-products-25a8c249. ↩︎
13. Joshua Goldstein, Remains of the Everyday (University of California Press, 2021). ↩︎
14. Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History (Indiana University Press, 2007). ↩︎
15. Peter Little, Toxic Town (New York University Press, 2014). ↩︎
16. Peter Little, Burning Matters (Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩︎