Slashdot Mirror
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."
Remember, these monitors will only be worth 5c in most states, but if we take them to michigan we can double our money!
If I show that my firewall/router is a 386sx 8Mb running OpenBSD?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If these bills pass, does this mean that we will have to pay a recycling fee when we buy the computer, and then pay a recycling company to do it, or will the recycling itself actually be free now?
Guns are like umbrellas and condoms. Better to have one and not need it, than need it and not have one.
Why do politicians and authorities always come to solutions that never work out in the end.
Charging a recycling fee is only going to make people throw their computers (and worse monitors) into the trash (or worse the river) instead of properly disposing of them.
You have to make it easy for people or they won't do it. Because people are lazy.
our old computers?
I have a stack of them in the garage, just in case I need that 20 MB hard drive (they make great paperweights)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Not obsolete! I've turned them into fishtanks ala http://mendax.org/article.php?article_id=388 "Scrap"! Bah! Old CD drive = cupholder Old boards can be recycled into clipboards and business card holders. The possibilities for the "junk" are endless.
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...
PEP National Directory of Computer Recycling Programs
You can go there to see what options you have on recycling computer parts in your area.
They could get a safety deposit on every part sold, thus inciting peoples to dispose of their computers in a proper way. Just like they do for consigned containers here. You pay an ammount and you get it back when you bring your computer to a proper recycling facilitie. They could have this money prosper during your years of usage and thus fund recycling companies without charging an extra tax.
Colosse.
I live in Belgium and we got a tax on every electronic item sold, this is called the Recupel Tax, this tax is used for recycling. The rate is different on each category of items, for example a mobile phone is about 0.5 but a computer is around 10. I personaly think this is a good idea.
Right now, of course, those mail-ordering from out-of-state retailers are supposed to remit the sales tax by filing all the paperwork and sending a check to the state. But individuals rarely (if ever?) do this. Many businesses (who are supposed to be doing this on any expense) don't do this either, though they get caught at it fairly often by state income tax audits.
California actually is pretty good at finding out-of-state car buys and collecting tax on them, but the paperwork involved with registering a car makes sure these get put in the system. Are we gonna have to register our CRT's with the DMV?
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?
Unless, of course, this is to merely defray the cost of shipping them to China.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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,
i'm sure lots of people will complain about gov't regulation, but it's about time they did something. it's obvious that the private sector has utterly failed to come up with solutions for this problem.
i find it amusing that while many people will point to gov't waste, they just accept failures in private industry as part of the process. obviously on that playing field (gov't only works if it makes no mistakes, private industry is supposed to make mistakes) then of *course* private industry is better...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Obviously this doesn't work if the hardware is broken, but if it's just "old", donate it to local schools! There are still plenty of public schools with drastically underfunded computer budgets, and they could definitely use whatever they can get. Hey, if you were feeling extra generous, you could even pre-install linux for them!
In fact, it should be per part, not for a whole unit. I tend to buy and build my own. Yes, there are some organizations who want older systems but the new applications will not run on these and then the charities are hosed. As a consumer, I need to be responsible for what I do with my trash. There should be a fee added at the point of purchase and when the part is recycled, you get the fee (or part of) it back. Want to donate to an organization? Go head, if they can't use it then they can recycle and get the money.
I don't buy the arguement that the fee will stop people from buyine new stuff. It hasn't stopped people from getting new tires (recycle fee), an oil change (environmental fee), and drinking beer or soda ($0.05 or more back!!!).
I try to dispose of my electronics responsibly but there are too many people who just toss things in the trash. You HAVE to hit people where they will pay attention - in the pocket.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Over here we already have to pay an indirect removal fee for a computer. .CA bill), the producer/importer of computer equipment pays these fees, as he is charged for the number of systems sold.
Unlike other electronic equipment, where the price is a set fee which you are charged in the shop on top of your purchase (think in the area between 5 and 40 euro, a lot like the amount proposed in the
This also encourages the producer of the systems to try to keep the recycling costs low.
While it may hurt a little bit in the wallet it can not be denied that the systems do have an environmental impact when they are disposed of.
It does not really leave much room for geeks like me who still have their first computers 'somewhere around', but I have no objections to a system like we have it here.
I feel the last part is in this spirit, encourage design for recycling, put the burden on the designer and manufacturer, because once it's in the end user's hands, he has little reason to recycle it, unless there was a core deposit, like on auto parts, to encourage return.
Of course this could be trickier for those of us who by seperate components and build our systems.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Taxes are never levied for the benefit of the taxed."
There are a hundred ways you could skim off the top of a program like this; this isn't even something that necessarily needs to happen. Computers can be reused almost indefinitely. Why don't we have a tax on televisions, Saturn automobiles, and everything else with reusable plastic (which means too expensive for recycling to pay for itself) stuff as well?
The sort of reminds me of the old tax that Feudal Lords used to put on their fiefs when the came for dinner - the "tooth wear and tear" tax, which taxed based upon the fact that the dinner caused the teeth to wear down to some degree.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
With way too many consumer goods, but especially electronics, current production methods make it cheaper to build new ones instead of repairing or upgrading old ones. Is there any really good reason why Monitors or circut boards, and other electronics cannot be designed with the intent of being able to cheaply repair it? Why not prepare an assembly line to dissassemble a finished but damaged object, and have its components either recycled or reused. And design each object with a 'diagnostic' port which can be used to figure out which part of the object is broken.
If it could be done cost effectively and profitably, the other benefits would be an added incentive.
END COMMUNICATION
That's the way glass is recycled at least here in Finland
When you buy a bottle or can of beer you end up pay about 18 eurocents more than the product itself would cost. Then, when the hard night of beer drinking is over, you take all the empty bottles and cans to the shop, feed them into a machine that counts them and prints out a receipt which you can cash on your way out.
Effectivly you are paying a deposit on the container.
Also not just glass bottles, the same method can be used for plastic bottles.
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.
I think we're at a point where this is not only a good idea, but that it can be done in a way that does not have an adverse economic effects. Ten years ago computers were being added at exponentially increasing rates. Charging a recycling fee would have slowed the adoption of computers. Now we are closer to a steady state; new computer tend to replace older ones. Charging a recycling fee that would be mostly or entirely refunded when the equipment is returned would, once phased in, have little or no net effect on computer budgets.
Of course, there is the cost of actually doing the recycling to be considered. However, it is important to note that the cost of disposal is not zero, it's just not absorbed in a market in which people get to voluntarily play (e.g. some poor shmoe is forced live with contamination because his neighbor is running an underground disposal operation).
So if, to be fair, we should charge users of computers the cost of recycling. How we doe this doesn't matter much : charging the manufacturers is no different from charging the consumer or vice versa. Would it be very expensive? I don't think so, provided we charged everybody. The greatest costs of proper recycling are investments in the technology to do it properly. If done on a wide scale, the unit cost of recycling will fall dramatically.
Also, the environmental coss of recycling will fall dramatically as the scale increases. Scale has a funny effect on environmental impact. Pop quiz: if you have a choice of three garments, cotton, wool and polyester fleece, which is the most environmentally friendly? The answer is polyester, even though it is made from petrochemicals. It can be produced from ground up bottles, is easy to dye with nontoxic dyes; at some point in the future given enough polyester usage in garments, it will be possible to recycle old garments into virgin quality fabric. Cotton, on the other hand, has a tremendous environmental impact due to irrigation and related problems like soil salination. The destruction of the Aral sea, possibly the most spectactual environmental disaster of the twentieth century, was due to cotton production. Wool has the direct impact on the environment due to sheep flocks, the toxic sheep dip used to keep the animals pest free, and has an indirect cost in that it is hard to dye in colors preferred by consumers without using and releasing toxic materials.
Scale affects the best choice to make environmentally. On a small scale (say producing thousands of garments), producing polyester would be by far the worst choice, and cotton and wool the best. On the large scale needed to clothe humanity (producing billions of garments), polyester is the best choice, wool is a bad choice and cotton a terrible choice.
The same principle of scale dependent impact will affect computer recycling. The mom and pop operations in China are environmentally horrible -- a proper land fill would be a better choice. However, when we are talking about a system that would be capable of recycling all electronics, then you would have a system which is much more environmentally benign than disposal, even if you don't count the reduced impact by making less extraction necessary.
So, I'm very positive about this in principle, although it would be better if (1) users were refunded enough of their fee to incent them to return the equipment for proper processing and (2) it were national in scope. Such a system would have little long term impact on computer purchasing decisions and actually improve the financial and environmental efficiency of recycling operations
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you pay X at purchase or if you pay X at recycle time you still pay the same amount! Just because you pay when you purchase the system does not make it "low cost"
It ain't cheap to ship all those old PCs to Asia, ya know.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The /. introduction from Jeff is a little misleading - Byron Sher's bill is for CRTs, Gloria Romero's is for everything.
I seriously wonder if Sher really knows what he's talking about - a CRT is not a pop bottle and has a much longer life. My Macintosh (Model M0001) still can attest to the life of a CRT. Collecting fees on the consumer level is utterly silly and isn't going to make me want to move to Cali any time soon.
Romero's plan might have some feasibility in that the emphasis would be placed on the company to come up with a reclaimation program, not placing fees on the consumers. I personally think that, in the long run, it would be cheaper for a company to take back the old machines. They can reclaim the gold from the boards, etc., and if they use proper plastic they could recycle to cases.
Now, I'm not a fan of Dell (politcally or in terms of OS choice), but I'm throughly impressed by the fact that whe Dell receives an off-lease machine back they clean it up and sell it on eBay for a decent price. I consider that a first step in the direction Romero and Sher are headed. I just think Sher could have talked with some folks in the real world before drafting his bill.
begin rant- I went to California once on a vacation trip. I found thay had way too many fees for stupid things. Just to connect to a propane tank for filling is a $5 fee regardless of the size of the tank. I took a small 1 gallon tank for use with a lantern and stove. It cost about 1.20 to fill in Oregon (price of the propane at the time. It cost 6.10 to fill the same tank in California. I usualy travel with an empty tank for safety and fill near my destination. I don't do that on trips south anymore. I learned my lesson. Why would PC disposal be any diffrent? I expect to see them littering the roadside when they do that as people will just let them fall off the truck someplace instead of paying another fee. /rant I know -1 troll -1 offtopic. However I think a fee like this may trigger illegal dumping of stuff. Goodwill will no longer take it. They can't pay to get rid of it for you.
The truth shall set you free!
Its not just computers. I would think that by now there are so many discarded AOL disks that entire subdivisions could be built on landfills full of them.
Why is this "Off-Topic?" 9632 makes a perfectly good point. I figure we can charge id, to, while we're at...
I am trying to get my mind around just what 'recycling' computers would entail ... I mean other than the occasional reuse that I find for random parts from various and assorted closets and shelves around the house.
I guess that I will just take it as a given that there is an actual need and a viable plan for this computer 'recycling'. I would want to know if the government will actually spend it on what they claim it is needed for. If it is for the 'starwars project (I mean missile defense system)' or some other half concocted pipe dream, I would be rather upset.
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
That's OK; most Californians I know can't name the two U.S. Senators they elected (Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein)
Additionally, it assumes that the computer wil someday be recycled. Perhaps when it no longer serves me I'll part it out. Or perhaps I'll upgrade it and not need to throw it out. Or perhaps it'll run on a Linux box and never have to be upgraded because it gets the job done.
How do I get a refund if I never trash/recycle my machine?
More left-wing tax-and-spend envrionmental-based psycho-babble. Taxes must be resisted in all its forms. If they want money to do this, take it out of one of the useless programs they already spend my tax dollars on.
Maybe we could collect up all this junk equipment and make a series of Junkyard Wars (aka Scrapheap Challenge here in the UK) for those of us who don't feel confident in our welding or engine maintenance skills? I can see it now...
"You have ten hours from when the ball reaches the bottom of the Scrapheap clock to bulid... a working firewall!"
"W00t! I found a dual processor mobo!"
"Excellent! DDR Memory!"
"I know we wanted a 10Gb hdd, but all I could find is these 200Mb paperweights."
"Jackpot! Linux distro!"
Maran
This is in California, right? What's to stop people from using the 'recycling' tax to just ship it to China where it can rot in the open?
[o]_O
I find it highly ironic that they're going to charge you to "recycle" your computer...which could possibly mean sending it to Asia to be taken apart, selling some of the parts and thrown onto riverbanks. What's even funnier is that this report about e-trash was posted on CNN yesterday.
Doing a search on Google for "recycling computers" takes a person to a lot of "we'll take your old computer and shuffle it off to little kids at 4-H for reuse". Nothing about actual recycling in the sense of "What happens when the computer can no longer be used and needs to be thrown away?" I shudder to think about the cathode tubes exploding in garbage dumps.
Pay to dump it in Native American land? Unlicenced toxic waste disposal is big money maker for them - almost as big as casinos.
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!
I think they do this with car batteries, too, due to the lead/acid problem.
Personally I think these are awesome ideas. I think we're all collectively better off shelling out a couple of bucks each to deal responsibly with hazardous waste, rather than assuming that people will do the right thing. I think they've demonstrated that they'll do the wrong thing every time when it comes to asbestos, batteries, tires, etc.
Although I don't know for sure I've heard that in some places in Europe a company is responsible for paying for the recycling of the packaging from their products (i.e. McDonalds held responsible for the piles of styrofoam boxes and cups on the sides of the highway).
I stole this Sig
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.
Tolls and trolls, tolls and trolls...
I don't want to belabor the point, so I'll make this my last reply on this subject...
But I still tend to disagree with you, to an extent. (Where I do see your point is where you talked about the ridiculous "red-tape" in place, that prevents you from giving away the donated PCs to students or even throwing them out.) Honestly, I think that type of legislation was put in place with good intentions, but they didn't forsee this type of thing happening.
If the right legislators were written, explaining the problem, I'd bet these laws could be changed. It probably wouldn't hurt to call up the local TV stations either, and tell them how you're "not allowed to give away old PCs to students to further their learning and education at home" because of outdated laws preventing it.
I guarantee that it will, indeed, feel "adventurous and exciting" if a student's project is to get an old PC fully working and able to perform basic functions (get on the Internet to check email, write papers, etc.), and afterwards, said student gets to keep it!
If you feel DOS is "too arcane", then why not Linux or FreeBSD? It doesn't really matter what OS you choose, as long as it's something one of these old machines can run respectably well.
Even today, if you gave a kid a broken calculator, their level of excitement would have a lot to do with the quality of teaching that accompanied it. I bet someone who knew enough about the design and components in a calculator could manage to make a very good class out of that. (People have been asking kids to dissect frogs for years, and they're considerably less appealing to tear into than most electronics. I never had a calculator that smelled bad or got goop all over my hands.)
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.
Ah, recycling. What a noble concept. I wonder when (if ever) we're going to start doing it?
"Recycled" US computers typically end up as Chinese landfill.
At a local level, my local civic amenities centre has finally started taking sorted refuse... but when pressed (again and again and again) they finally admitted that - with the exception of lead-acid batteries - it all goes to landfill. Glass, card, paper, everything. They can't give it away, not even to burn as fuel. The sorting is just to build up a reliable supply in case someone can be persuaded to recycle some of it in the future. YMMV, and I truly hope that it does.
My point (now that I'm finally getting to it) is that recycling is a feel-good crock. Unless you actually know for a fact that the components you hand over are going to find their way back into the manufacturing chain - and without being stripped out by unprotected third world labor - then the best thing you can do with old equipment is re-use it. A Pentium-anything with at least 16Mb of RAM will never be obsolete, because you can use it as a DSL router. You don't even need a monitor, if you use an OS that supports a serial console. In fact, you don't want to use a "modern" system, because they just turn more electricity into heat, for exactly zero extra useful work.
If you absolutely can't find a use for it, then sure, give it to schools or colleges (and if they won't take it even to pass on to students, ask them why not). Sell it for chump change in your local paper. Give it away in your local paper, or at yard sales. The one thing I wouldn't recommend is the (semi fatuous) method of leaving it lying around with a "free" sign on it. Yes, you'll probably be rid of it, but the taker will most likely toss it in a dumpster once they find out nobody wants to buy old hardware.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
> Hahah, always funny to see how many environmental-wackos don't understand economics.
Even funnier to see someone who doesn't understand economics lambast someone else for not understanding economics.
> Whether the fee results in an increase in prices (which equals a reduction in sales, period) or a reduction in manufacturer profits (which means a reduction in employment as well as capacity) the net affect of any additional cost on marketing a product is a reduction in efficiency of the economy and also tends to put upward pressure on inflation.
Sorry, but this is only in the case of perfect capitalism, and such a thing doesn't exist in the real world. More importantly, it shouldn't, because of many, many reasons, some of which I'll address presently.
> Every cost is important. The fact that liberals don't understand this is why they are so eager to tax the rich and companies more and more every day as if it were an endless supply of money. It's not. Reagan reduced taxes and we got the longest-growing economy in our country's history. Clinton raised taxes and brought that growth to a stop and turned it around by the end of his eight years in office.
Delightful rhetoric, but it merely demonstrates that you grossly oversimplify to prove your point. If you think that lowering taxes, and only lowering taxes, contributed to the boom of the 1980's, you're deluding yourself. The boom was in no small part a response of a recovering economy that had taken massive beatings in the '70s and was going strong before Mr. Reagan took office. In case you forgot, that means that the start of the boom could by your logic be credited to Jimmy Carter, but I imagine that would be blasphemy too blatant for you to accept.
> EVERY FEE AND TAX LEVIED ON PERSONS OR COMPANIES IS BAD FOR OUR ECONOMY. The only question is whether society feels the negative effect of the fee/tax is outweighed by the potential benefit.
Again, this is a gross oversimplification. To take an obvious example, let's consider the interstate highway system. Are you able to present any rational argument that this system could have been put together by private industry? Nobody in the '40s could either, and so it was delegated to the government. Next, could you rationally argue that the taxes thus spent did not help the U.S. economy by providing a functional infrastructure for travel? The auto manufacturers of seven countries would argue that it did. So would a multitude of construction contractors and workers who were and are currently employed building houses and such in suburbs that would be inaccessible to business centers without public roadways. I could go on, but my point is obvious by now. Now, extend that to the military, or police or fire departments, or a host of other public systems like utilities or the phone system that would, without government regulation, never have developed the way they did.
It is very true that the controls of government break down in many places, and they are subject to abuse. However, to say that the loss of profit is a net negative effect is to take a ridiculously short-term view of how economics works. J. M. Keynes's statment aside, in the long run our children will still be around.
Virg
I agree that electronics waste is a major problem that should be worked on, but I think a simple tax is a stupid way to go about it that does nothing to get these products out of the waste stream. Why not do for PCs/TVs/DVD players/etc what we've done for aluminum cans & plastics for decades? Have cash return value for recycling CRV-labelled products, and require retailers to accept the trash electronics & pay back the CRV (getting reimbursed from the state pool of CRV money produced), where it can be sent to a recycling center.
Rather than throw another tax on people, you charge them a certain amount (maybe about $10 per PC or monitor, for example) with the product, which is stamped, like cans, with its CRV value. Then, the user or homeless guy who collects it or whatever can turn it in for the cash! Tah-dah! Hell, I'd drag an out-of-use old PC or monitor to Best Buy for $10 off a game.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Uh... obviously SOME DAY it WILL be recycled. You won't be using that thing 50 years from now will you? Or anyone else? Ok MAYBE your particular 386 will end up in a computer museum and you'll have been rippeed off by $5 but the other 99 million 386s DO end up in the garbage heap. So try not thinking about yourself for just ONE SECOND and try looking at the bigger picture. Thank you.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
> A much better solution is for Earth friendly groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, etc., to spend 5% of thier budget buying back: [old cars and computers]
Five percent of the operating budgets of every environmental lobby in the world wouldn't put an appreciable dent in the stuff being discarded. Hell, neither would fifty percent.
> They want to whine about pollution but do little other than [produce commercials / soundbites and lobby for larger, more oppressive government]
While I disagree with their methods and often their messages, advertising is an appropriate way to gain popular support and everyone has the right (and responsibility) to lobby their government for changes that they feel are important.
> How about putting your money where your mouth is and actually spending it to buy back the things you so despise in order to remove them from the marketplace?
Because that would be an ineffective way to solve the problem, as they see it, so that would not be putting their money where their mouths are. Frankly, I see nothing wrong with trying to increase awareness of a problem, and since most companies that make these things are for-profit concerns whose first concern (rightly so, for a corporation) is profit, there needs to be a counterbalance in government to prevent rampant profiteering from overriding social responsibility. Although, again, I disagree with hardcore environmental concerns as to the extent of that intervention, I'd be a bit foolish to think it's completely unneccessary.
Virg
according to this news article they are just sent elsewhere to be dumped and pollute.
...is that when all of the toxic crap that bleeds out of China into the ocean travels around the Pacific basin, the first people it'll kill are the Californians.
(sarcasm off)
Now shoo until you can learn to think farther ahead than your next meal.
Virg
While I like the idea of requiring manufacturers to take back their products (and packing materials as well) (thereby removing the external costs of disposal and putting them on the consumer and manufacturer), there are a few things to consider:
1. It will favor large companies that can afford the RD costs to design recycle friendly products. Since they can lower tehir reccyling cosst, they can charge less (or make more profit) than smaller competitors that can't match their Rd or have to pay to haul stuff away. Ultimately, this will prevent companies from entering the market.
2. Given that some x percent will never be recycled, the "recycle cost" will become a profit center for manufactures. (Much as bottlers in NY get to keep the non-refunded deposits, which, even at 5cents a pop, are not small amounts - so much they fight efforts for the state to take over the refund program). That also means that bigger companies will push for recycle law expansion, once they see the dollars in it.
3. Who will be responsible for taking stuff back when a company fails? Since there is no deposit, there are no funds clearly definded as recycle money.
4. Patents on recycling processes will limit companies ability to recycle - unless they license the process, which makes them less competitive.
While I like the idea of moving the life cycle costs to the purchaser as a way of reducing waste, it will have some interesting effects on the economy.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
your right! people will spend 50 dollars on gas, just to save 20 dollars on a computer!
idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> Heh - apparently, irony is completely lost on the /. moderators.
Hey, we're discussing old computers here. There's very little irony in them. It's mostly steely, aluminumy, silicony, coppery, plasticy and leady, with a little goldy and heavy metalsy.
Good thing I cleared that up.
Virg
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.
The job of Freddy J. Bumfuck High School down the street is to teach things like reading, writing, math, history, biology, physics, chemistry, etc, not to make dozens of computers, all different mind you, function. It's a high school for God's sake, not ITT Tech. 99% of schools have enough trouble with the basics to bother teaching kids how to be computer repair people. The idea that you can throw your useless piles of 10+ year-old hardware their way and have them do something with it is idealistic to the point of silliness.
I'm amazed at the naivete of this. You're computer people dammit, doesn't "Garbage In Garbage Out" mean anything to you?
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
First, it'd be more like 10 or 20 dollars in gas, max.
Second, believe it or not, people DO do things like that whether it is logical or not.
Third, who said the trip would be JUST to get a computer? Perhaps on a weekend trip to Las Vegas or Reno you pick up that computer you've been meaning to get at Best Buy since it's cheaper.
I currently live in Mexico where prices are higher than they are in Texas. I often put off purchases so that the next time I drive up to the border I stock up on everything I need.
It's worked in Germany. Don't impose the fee on the consumer. Impose the fee on the manufacturer. In Germany they started charging toy manufacturers for packaging on toys. Instantly the toy manufacturers just started putting the Barbies on the shelf, without the giant unnecessary box. Here California could charge the monitor manufacturers money for every one of their products that ends up in the municipal waste stream, and use that money to recycle the product. Charge a fee that's much higher than the cost of just recycling it themselves, and they create a financial incentive for the company to set up its own recycling program. The company may even give the consumers back a small 'deposit' fee to create an incentive for the customers to return the monitors, computers, whatever.
Our industrial economy needs to become a closed cycle and this is the first step. Now that we know how to build monitors and computers, we need to figure out how to build them so that they're easy to take apart and modular enough that old components can just be re-used. Re-using the gallium and mercury and other raw materials is a first step, but really a lot of components can just be re-used. Do you really need a new component that's ten percent smaller? Or can you just use the old one? Now if you're talking 90% smaller then yes you may need the new component. But for many needs old parts can be recycled.
Should have gone with your original instincts. No-one would have suffered.
Please tell me, how will free trade and consumption benefit you when you and the rest of the human kind has gone extinct because of the crap your precious "free" enterprise produced.
Uhm, I'll let you know when it happens and I'll bet the farm I'll never have to let you know because it won't happen.
Here's a clue for you: If the human race goes extinct it will be because we got hit by an asteroid or decided to nuke ourselves. It won't be because we threw PCs in the garbage.
That's the problem with environmentalists. They're alarmists. Everything is an emergency to them. Nuclear waste? Big problem (agreed). Computers being thrown in landfills? Big problem (disagree).
The psycho-babble fear-mongering of a typical environmnetalist is like a baby taking a dump. It just keeps on oozing out...
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
Ok, I wasn't going to post again - but I will reply to your flame, just because you're exactly the type of individual I have a problem with.
High-schools right now are a prime example of "garbage in, garbage out" - and why? Because they're full of teachers who don't want to make any extra effort to make the environment learning-friendly. I'm not just attacking the public schools here, either. The private schools are just as much to blame, but for different reasons.
I went to both, and in my experiences, private schools are to "full of themselves" to provide nearly as high quality of an education as they could be providing for the money. They waste a lot of time filling students' heads with a generic idea that they're somehow destined to be "better" than average, simply because they went to this private institution with a good "heritage". This, compounded with a strong emphasis on religion in many cases, makes for a less-than-ideal learning environment.
Anyway, my point is not that high-schools need to become "ITT tech", but that computers are valuable tools, when properly implemented. Yes, even *old* computers. Perhaps even *better* tools for the purpose than new computers, because of the cost-savings on expensive software licensing and outright budgetary expenses to buy new PCs every 2 or 3 years.
Take a look at the Linux Terminal Server Project, for example (http://www.ltsp.org). Here's a great way to serve a complete graphical desktop to a number of lesser machines that don't have anything in them except for a network adapter with custom boot EPROM. There's an offshoot of this project going on right now to build a "school friendly" version, with proper security restrictions implemented so students can't trash the environment they're using on the server.
If your school is full of teachers who aren't willing or competent enough to do something productive with 5 or 6 year old PCs - then maybe you need to start asking if they're competent enough to teach your kids other subjects?
If a school thinks they can teach everything the students need to know without the use of any computers, fine. It was certainly done long before the PC existed. I just have a problem with schools refusing donations of used PCs, merely because "it's too hard for us to find anything useful to do with them", and then turning around and spending *my* tax dollars for shiny new ones instead!
Okay, this was meant as a joke, Japan would be more at risk than California if the toxins washed out to sea, and in reality, most of the toxins (lead and most of the heavy metals found in computers) leach into the groundwater, not out to sea. The ugly part is that Chinese people tend to drink water on occasion (and even cook with and bathe in it!) and they tend to have to breathe the air that's full of the smoke that comes from burning circuit boards, and just because they're half way across the world and don't look like me doesn't make it right for me to hand my dead computer to someone who's more interested in making money than protecting the health of everyone near his computer-stripjoint.
Virg
I do agree with it being nice if they could use old computers in the schools, and I also agree that Linux is what cost-conscious schools should be doing (if they can) or at least looking into. However, anyone who's ever supported a large-scale network of computers (not me, but I know those who do) knows that standardization and knowing, at least to some exent, what to expect with each box is critical to providing decent support, and without decent support you end up with dozens of refurbished paperweights for teacher's desks.
Where I disagree is that somehow teachers, making about $30k a year mind you and not necessarily as familiar with a saudering iron or a computer's innards as you & I, should be expected to work with old hardware & make it do something.
If your school is full of teachers who aren't willing or competent enough to do something productive with 5 or 6 year old PCs - then maybe you need to start asking if they're competent enough to teach your kids other subjects?
Where do you get this? Ms. Brown the english teacher should know how to cobble together a good PC from 2-3 broken ones, then install Linux on it? She majored in English & got a credential. She's qualified to do that, not fix computers. The comment above is a great example of the anti-teacher rhetoric that the uninformed love to sling at the public schools. You expect them to be everything from social workers to personal mentors to substitute parents for your kids, but you don't want to pay them more than $40K a year.
Sure, sure, maybe the computer class teachers (probably no more than 2-3 in a normal high school) might be able to do something with some machines, but do you expect them, on their own time in the evenings at home, to work on PCs constantly? They want personal lives too. Or do you only think that personal lives are reserved for those who work in the private sector?
It's a much more complicated problem than "lazy teachers", and alienating the group of people you want to help do their job is never a good way to go about solving it.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
In the long run, commodity producers do wind up selling at just above production cost (including finance costs for the capital equipment). If the profit margins go up, either the present producers expand their production, or other companies jump in, and this drives prices down. When prices go too low or expenses too high, the least efficient producer goes out of the business (bankrupt or simply moving to a less competitive field).
Exceptions to this are where a monopoly, patent, or regulation controls the market, or where resources are limited. Most of those situations are limited in time -- e.g., patents expire, monopolists irritate their customers into actively seeking alternatives, and the gold market can skyrocket when the demand increases, but if the price stays high for long enough, someone is going to notice that gold-bearing rock that was previously buried too deep or too small a gold percentage to be worth mining has now become profitable. Or if an expanding market is crimped by lack of production equipment, prices and profit margins will rise for a time, but more equipment will be ordered and eventually delivered. (Given a long lead-time for expanded production and sufficient shortsightedness on the part of market participants, this can lead instead to a lasting cycle of shortage, high prices, expanded production, glut, bankruptcies, shortage; on the average, the price is just enough to keep efficient producers profitable, but it can oscillate around that point a lot. The oil market is a perfect example -- but note that governments have always had a heavy hand in this market, and governments don't learn from experience...)
Of course there are many markets where the sales price is unrelated to the production costs -- like $25 tennis shoes selling for $150 because they have the Nike logo. But too many computer buyers are aware that all PC's are fundamentally the same, so hype has never been able to support an overpriced line for long. Apple's Macintosh patents and copyrights (a legally enforced monopoly) have enabled them to sell at a higher price, but into a tiny market that can barely support the engineering effort of maintaining a genuinely different product line.
PC production involves no monopolies (except Microsoft's OS, and that's survived only because so far they've been smart enough not to abuse it to the serious detriment of the manufacturers), and no resource shortages that can't be solved by spending more money for a few months. So profit margins stay low. You take $20 more out in taxes, either they raise the price or they cut back on what goes in the box, because they aren't going to be able to cut back on their net for long and survive.
All of the above applies to production -- sales and distribution is a whole different scenario, where markups are often ridiculously high, and hyped-up advertising seems to be necessary to get customers into the stores. Groceries are an exception -- but everyone needs to eat, while most people don't _need_ a new computer, a 2nd VCR, or a 6th pair of shoes...
I dont block everything that's contrary to my beliefs. I personally think recycling is obviously a good thing. I'm for sensible waste management.
I just don't think PCs are dangerous. Yes, I'm aware of what's in them. But the quantities of material that are dangerous in a PC are so low as to be insignificant.
As for erring on the side of caution, the problem is the environmentalists tend to caution about everything and anything. If we always went with the environmentalists we'd be living in caves and living off of brussel sprouts, "just in case."
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.
I'm not even going to touch that. Limiting private car ownership? Limiting how often I can upgrade to a new computer?
I'm sorry. These incremental losses in our freedom are just not acceptable, even to be on the safe side as far as the environment goes.
As another Slashdot poster mentioned yesterday, "I'd rather die a free man, even if being a free man kills me. And I mean that."
If the Market can't do it, and the Government can't do it, then who? Damned if I know. But don't keep on doing what has already been proven not to work... If you can think of how to structure this "deposit" idea so as not to turn into a gigantic boondoggle, raising the price by several times as much as proper recycling actually costs and quite likely not getting the recycling done, please tell the rest of us.
Just one thing has been shown to lead to actual environmental improvements: prosperity. And the best way to achieve prosperity seems to be to reduce regulation. This is very, very clear in the negative: starving people will do whatever they have to do to get food now, and hope to deal with the consequences later. The worst pollution occurs in China, Russia, and other impoverished and over-governed countries.
Several people cited bottle deposits as an analogy to the recycling tax proposal. Bottle deposits do work to reduce roadside litter, but it's a very inefficient system. You pay 7-1/2 or 12-1/2 cents per can, and get back 5 or 10 cents when you turn them in, and the process of turning them in is rather time-consuming due to the necessity of verifying the deposit stamps. After turn-in, I don't know how many of the plastic bottles collected are actually being recycled. Aluminum recycling is economically viable on it's own (that is, melting down a truckload of scrap metal is so much cheaper than electrolyzing ore that scrap alumminum has a positive value per pound), so even without the deposit, put enough cans out in one place and someone would take them to sell as scrap. The most definite social benefit of bottle deposits is that it gives people on the bottom of the social pyramid one way of getting a little cash without being employable or filling out paperwork. I do accept bottle deposits because they work both to reduce litter and to transfer a little income from the rich and careless to the desperately poor, but nobody _has_ to drink soda pop, and if the deposit causes you to cut back your consumption, it's better for your health anyhow. OTOH, taxing computers enough to cover recycling costs plus several times as much for bureaucracy would be a significant drag on the economy, and dragging down the economy _does_ hurt the environment.
By the way, since someone mentioned pig farming: most successful farm operations (in the US, at least) aren't making their profits from selling the products of agriculture, but by collecting government subsidies. Or else they are investing in land and farming it to pay the taxes while waiting for the price to go up. It's the individual family farms that are actually trying to run at a profit, and I don't know many that succeed.
I'll touch three points, and then I'll go away, as it seems we've reached common ground in these points. The first is that I don't wish to imply that I think Reaganomics was completely ineffective, or even bad. I tend to agree with a large percentage of his economic policy, and I also thought Clinton was bad for business (although in slightly different ways than you do). My contention was whether it was his policies alone that did the trick. Since our further discussions reveal that you're not just waving a Reagan banner, I'm satisfied with saying it had a strong influence. Second, while I agree that inflation is hard on the economy because of reduced spending power, I would argue that unemployment tends to be harder, because it packs the one-two punch of idle wage earners and the need for society to support them (in the form of unemployment compensation). Still, without research I can't say for certain, and either of us could likely write a master's thesis arguing one side or the other, so for now we'll have to agree to disagree. Thirdly, I'll concur that economic investment from taxes is not the norm, but since (at least in the beginning) we were discussing absolutes, I differed. If you'll accept that some taxes aren't simply cost/benefit drains on the economy, I'll accept that some are. Of course, this then raises the issue of whether the tax for recycling is the former or the latter, but that's a different argument 8).
Virg
No, I don't necessarily think it should be the job of any available teacher to become instant "I.T. director" and set up a Linux network on the old PCs.
On the other hand, when you have limited resources, it's important to improvise sometimes.
If Ms. Brown, the English teacher, was intelligent enough to major in English - I don't see why she's incapable of lending a hand in some of the PC setup, if that's what it takes to give her students the ability to use computers in her class.
I don't know anything about carpentry or home repair, but after I bought my house, I had to buy a couple books on home improvement, and take a crack at doing some of it. I managed to get it done. Sure, I needed a little help here and there, but I got it done because I don't have the available income to pay a professional to do it all for me.
Isn't it rather hypocritical for teachers to believe that the students (who arrive with little or no knowledge on a whole range of subjects being taught) can grasp this whole variety of subjects -- yet the teachers themselves can't be expected to learn something outside their specialty?
And no, I don't expect, nor want, them to serve roles such as "social worker" or "personal mentor". I think a teacher *can* become a student's personal mentor, but that's just a side-effect of being a good quality teacher.
I'm not even saying it's as simple as "lazy teachers" (though sometimes it can be!). I think the greater problem is of messed-up priorities within the school system. If we'd focus on teachers being teachers, instead of on them being a band-aid for a whole gamut of social issues beyond their control - they'd have more time to ensure that the tools donated to them are utilized better.
Dianne Feinstein is one of the most horrible people ever to be given political power.
Pretty much every bad idea revolving around censoring the internet has been spawned from her desk. Check it out.
Only Ashcroft creeps me out more...
-pmb
Unless you're prepared to defend your assertion with some real data or insights, do not try to participate in the discussion. You're welcome to refute any of my (or the other poster's) points, but simply crying "bullshit" without backing it up just makes you look like a troll. Also, you will notice that we both agreed that we were arguing a small part of a larger topic. Lastly, please don't assume we're gentlemen.
Virg