E-waste: An Ecocritical Discourse Analysis

The way environmental discourse is constructed in the media contributes to shape the attitudes that people have towards ecological issues, especially when it comes to pollution and climate change. The BBC plays a pivotal role in this process because of its global influence in the generation of consensus and common knowledge. E-waste, i.e. electronic waste, is one of the major environmental threats because of its toxic components and limited recycling possibilities. The paper aims at analysing the discursive strategies employed in fourteen articles about e-waste published on the BBC News website. Ecocritical Discourse Analysis is adopted in order to assess to which extent the BBC contributes to the maintenance of the status quo by framing the threat posed by e-waste as a resource for corporations to make new profits and create new job opportunities. By analysing linguistic features such as framing, metaphors, appraisal and facticity patterns, erasure, and salience, the paper demonstrates how e-waste is represented so as to make it functional to Western economic ideology rather than as a mainly environmental danger to the planet.