Dept. of Geography

Dr. Josh Lepawsky, who leads the Reassembling Rubbish project, has just released interactive visualizations of global e-waste flows. The visualizations draw on data available from the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development. The dataset assembled by Dr. Lepawsky and a team of graduate students is part of a larger investigation into the trade and traffic of discarded electronics (often referred to as ‘e-waste’).

The visualizations require java and work best in Firefox or Safari and can be found at the following link:

http://scalar.usc.edu/works/reassembling-rubbish/visualizing-transboundary-shipments-of-e-waste?t=1405506877765

Interested readers can also access free peer-reviewed papers associated with the dataset. These papers situate the data underlying the interactive visualizations in analytic detail.

See:

• Lepawsky, Josh. 2014. “The Changing Geography of Global Trade in Electronic Discards: Time to Rethink the E-Waste Problem.” The Geographical Journal, April, n/a–n/a. doi:10.1111/geoj.12077: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geoj.12077/full
• Lepawsky, Josh, and Chris McNabb. 2010. “Mapping International Flows of Electronic Waste.” The Canadian Geographer 54 (2): 177–95: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2009.00279.x/full