Looking Past the Miracle Box

This paper focuses on tools to approach the practices inherent to the formal and informal e-waste value-chains in Ghana. Our series of field trips and interviews with e-waste collectors and scrap workers, repairers and retailers at their respective workplaces, as well as with domestic electronics users captured a situation in flux, where local authorities had implemented their decision to demolish the Agbogbloshie scrapyard site in Accra in July 2021 and relocate the workplaces within the city. In this situation, our exploratory perspective on tools and practices serves as a lense to identify possibilities of socio-technical support for repairing and upcycling and related community building.