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California Considering Recycling Fees on PCs
Jeff writes: "It looks like two US senators are introducing bills that would impose recycling fees on new computer systems sold. These bills look to cover every high-tech product a consumer might buy, including computer and video monitors, desktop and notebook PCs, and handheld gadgets."
Environmental groups take a harsher view, saying that the high-tech industry hasn't done nearly enough and foists costs onto consumers that should be picked up by the manufacturers themselves. Consumers ultimately get the tab for manufacturers' costs...
Charging a recycling fee is only going to make people throw their computers (and worse monitors) into the trash
While that may be true for fees for getting rid of computers, the fee this article is talking about charging is when you buy the computer. If a few dollars more is going to make someone dump their new system into the trash on the way out of the store, I'm not sure it's the politicians that are misguided.
I read the article (surprise!) and I see the part where they want to add more sales tax, and I see the part where they are requiring manufacturers to set up a program to recycle the monitors as hazardous waste, but nowhere in there do I see where the money's going. Honestly, this smells like bullshit/another way to add "anonymous" dollars to the state budget with no oversight as to how the money's being spent.
If they simply told the manufacturers to set up a program or get nailed with a massive fine, you could bet your sweet ass the consumer would be paying for it in the end. In fact, what I see happening is a new tax put into place, the money from the tax funneled into pork projects, the manufacturers setting up the program without funding from the state, and the consumer getting stuck with the bill for the set-up programs, thus increasing sales tax. So....strike up two knocks of taxes, a new bureaucratic process, and a a couple politicians who can now claim to be pro-environment while doing nothing but padding the state budget.
I work as a computer technician for a small private college, and I know exactly what this article is talking about. As the title of this post says, we are drowning in a see of dead equipment that we can't get rid of, and we only have 1,000 students! I'm scared to see the problem at a large university.
Being that we are located in a small town, there is literally no place to take the 14" and 15" monitors, motherboards, cases, etc., that are quickly piling up. We are running out of storage space for all of the broken and useless junk that has no place to go. So far, it seems our only option is to pay to have HP to take it. How we are going to get all of this crap to them is a whole other problem, however.
I, for one, would happily pay an extra fee per computer bought if the state, or a company designated by the state, would take the old equipment for free when it dies. My fear however, is that we'll be charged this extra amount on the purchase price and then have to pay again for someone to take the machine. That would be even worse than it is now. If this is done right, it could be a great program.
If its done right...
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
When I have a computer I don't want anymore, I leave it on the sidewalk with a sign that says "FREE".
It's always gone within 24 hours. I can only assume that some techno-geek takes them and uses them for spare parts.
I did the same thing to my comic book collection.
Most of us work with this hardware every day, and are well aware it is toxic in many forms. Unlike televisions (which should also be included), people tend to have at least one computer or more per person. (I have three in my house, ten+ if you include machines I have upgraded from)
/dev/null. Everything gets passed to the consumer because, well... we consume.
Adding, $5, $10, or even $20 to a system is not going to kill us. However, I would want it to be used directly for the recycling of the machines and everyone (business and individual) alike must pay at point of purchase. The fact that a company buys 1000+ boxes, is no reason for a discount on recycling. By putting it at point of purchase, we can still donate boxes, etc. without having to worry about the charity paying the fee.
In addition, we should be able to put the stuff at the curb with the other recyclables. Who would spend $100 shipping back a PIII three years from now? It would end up hidden in the dumpster.
Finally, my favorite statement was:
"the high-tech industry hasn't done nearly enough and foists costs onto consumers that should be picked up by the manufacturers themselves" There are no zero return business costs anymore. NONE, ZERO, zilch,
Actually it's not just about recycling, did you notice they were talking about CRT monitors? Not LCD displays?
What this will do is encourage consumers to buy LCDs for their computers. I wonder if Apple is behind this idea to get more iMacs sold?
It would make sense to make LCD a standard feature as that would ensure someone comes up with a LCD that has print quality color output.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Umm.. how do you "properly dispose" of useless electronic equipment? We have horrendous amounts of this stuff. Big industry continues to bury the planet in things like inkjet cartridges and mini CD-Rs, not to mention things like old CRTs (lotsa lead) and hard disk drives.
You make a valid criticism, but do you have a better solution?
What does it take to break down an old PC into its constituent parts (iron, aluminum, plastic, copper, etc..) so that it can be re-used? Is it possible? Is it practical? What about smelting?
I guess my concern would be that there may not be a good target for the money, so they'd collect it, but never setup a nationwide recycling system.. so where would the money go? I shudder to think. I'd say "go for it" if they have a very solid plan to setup (the very costly) infrastructure to ACTUALLY recycle discarded consumer electronic devices.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
While I am in favor of the prinicpal of this, I fear the side-effects of the monetary flow to finance it. There is a class of people that is adept at finding flowing money, and inserting themselves into the stream. Today one example is health management costs - I've heard that 1/4 to 1/3 of our health costs are spent on 'management' as opposed to medicine.
With widespread mandated fee-based recycling for computing components, I fully expect to see the leeches emerge. But at least some good should come of it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Here in Belgium, whose citizens are among the most highly taxed in the world (43.3% social security, 55% income tax, 21% sales tax, 300% gasoline tax, ...), we already have such a 'tax' for over a year, called Recubel.
It applies to each new piece of electrical or electronic equipment sold. e.g. EUR 2 on a typical EUR 2000 laptop. Manufacturers are required by law to take back old equipment, and this tax somehow should compensate them for that.
Probably just a scheme to extort more money from us wage-slaves.
Their official 'website' is here.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Yep! This is exactly the reception I got when we tried to donate our 486 and P-100 systems a couple years ago.
You know what's the most frustrating thing about it though? All those "rooms full of 8088's and 386's with no hard drives" would make excellent student projects. Instead of viewing it as "useless junk" because it won't run current Microsoft operating systems, use them to teach the history of computers, hands-on! Let students learn PC troubleshooting and upgrading in an electronics class with them! Teach them that just because something is old doesn't mean it's automatically no good; set up some of these systems to boot from floppies and run DOS-based testing software, math tutoring packages, etc.
Or are we all so hopelessly caught up in the "2 minute attention-span of kids" that we've convinced ourselves they can no longer learn from any software package that only displays text w/no multimedia?
We have a tire tax supposedly to pay for the recycling of tires (although why do I keep seeing stories about automotive places dumping tires?)
One of these bills doesn't seem to do anything about the problem; it just wants to set up yet another tax. Does that mean, okay we've collected the tax, now you can throw your old computer in the dumpster?
I would much rather see something closer to the second bill: an active recycling program that encourages computer makers to get older computers to schools and others non-profits so as little as possible ends up on the dump. I would rather see a reward system set up rather than a punitive one, however. Any costs penalizing these companies will simply be passed on to us.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
You can't go on forever throwing things in landfill, your country will fill up. Just like you can't burn too much oil and expect the environment not to turn on you...
Hm. I have a couple points about this statement I would like to make:
1. I'm not against recycling. It's a good thing in my opnion, but I do not want some big-brother government entity charging me a tax on everything I buy so I can recycle it.
2. I think someone has said it before, but I'll go ahead and say it again. There's a thing called conservation of matter. Sure, stuff gets shifted around alot, but the "stuff" remains the same amount. Filling up a landfill? How about dumping garbage into that stip-mine, quarry, etc...? Yes. It would fill it up. But it was filled with something to begin with.
All we're doing is shifting matter aound this earth and/or recombining it and dropping it off elsewhere. True, sometimes we recombine the stuff here into things that are toxic to us and everything else that lives here. But it's all from the same stuff.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
Yes, I played with those very same computers when I was young, and got a lot out of it and all that. But at the time those computers were good, or at least decent, and weren't simply arcane. The arcane is not that useful... it doesn't feel adventurous or exciting to use something who's time has passed. Those computers are so far behind the time that it would be like giving a kid a broken calculator 15 years ago and expecting them to be excited about it.
And setting up old software is certainly not helpful. Educational software sucks -- it's only good for keeping kids busy while the teacher takes a break. The only valuable way for kids to use computers, IMHO, is doing real tasks with real software, where the computer is a tool not an end. Old DOS programs make lousy tools.
This is where atoms and molecules -- which existed beforehand -- are combined under circumstances where they change their molecular properties. After having done this, the molecules have different properties: these properties are often advantageous to some process. However, in a different context (e.g., as waste) these properties may in fact be harmful.
And, moreso, the concentrations of material may provide hazards because it overwhelms the environment's ability to tolerate normal levels -- the material being concentrated because someone went to great effort to extract the material from deep in the earth where it was previously harmless, dilluted, and/or in a chemically more neutral state.
I don't know what kind of science you were smoking, but this stuff should be junior high level material.
If only this fee would actually make it recycling PCs accesible. I just moved to CA, and I had a monitor that crapped out on me a month or so after the move. I went to a few local computer shops looking for deals on a new monitor, and while I was there I asked all the tech guys where I could recycle the old monitor.
No one had any clue.
I spent a several afternoons trying to find an environmentally-friendly way to get rid of the damn burnt out monitor, but without any luck. Eventually I was forced to just put it out on the curb for the garbage men to pick up.
So I was determined to recycle my old monitor, but still failed in the state of CA. You think people who don't care in the first place will do anything other than just chuck the thing in the trash? If there's a purchase-recycling fee, then they sure as hell need a very robust system to actually do the recycling. And the most important part of such a system would be advertising to let people know the service is available and how to use it. Because otherwise there will be people like me who have the best intentions, but don't know where to take the hardware.
4-star general in a one-man army.
It's more like a deposit on a bottle of soda or beer.
The deposit doesn't pay for the cost of recycling or reprocessing. It just makes somebody pick it up and return it to the recycling center rather than dumping it someplace. I used to commute by bike during a period when a bottle bill was passed in my state. It really made a difference in the amount of broken glass on the road.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Even if that was true I'd still rather be an alarmist than dogmatically block everything that's contrary to my beliefs in endless economic growth (which is an insane concept, of course).
Alarmist: "Watch out, something's might not be right here! Think about what you are doing! Proceed with caution!"
You: "Don't worry, be happy. There's nothing wrong. Keep on consuming and making more money for me!"
In my opinion the industrialised world could very well reduce the standards of living. I do not mean scaling down something like health care, but limiting private car ownership, non-essential industry etc. Just to be on the safe side.
The owls are not what they seem