ABSTRACT
In June 2013, I made my second visit to several villages in Treasure Town (a pseudonym), a town in South China with a long history of e-waste recycling. Juanjuan, a 19-year-old first-year medical student who grew up in the area, agreed to host me in her family home as she had done on my previous visit in 2012. We slept in a small room built on the corner of her brother’s plastic processing workshop. The machinery to melt plastic sat unused, however, surrounded by dozens of large bags of small plastic pieces ready to be sold. In previous years, when business was thriving, he could earn 100 thousand yuan in a month from plastic trading, but business had declined since the economic crisis, the prices were too low, and nobody had been trading in the past few months. Her brother, and many like him, had switched to computerized embroidery to make ends meet.
