Recycle Fee For Each PC?

UncleJosh writes: "The New York Times (free reg rq'd) has a story about a $25-30 fee to be added to the price of a new PC to cover the cost of recycling it. Sort of like a bottle deposit, but you don't get the money back." What if I just want to buy the case?

Comments

Recycling already a money-loser

[Tackhead]

Ironic that there's also an NYTimes article on a proposed New York City recycling halt.

That's right - even in a densely-packed metropolis like NYC, where you don't have to haul small amounts of junk halfway across the state to recycle it, the "blue box" types of curbside recycling are big eaters of tax dollars.

Apart from paper (which is marginal), most plastics/glass, while recyclable, aren't recyclable at a profit.

If you want to recycle, you can either pay a tax at the point of purchase (like the one being discussed for computers), or in the form of higher bills for waste disposal and property taxes (like the "recycling programs" at the municipal level.

Of course, nowhere is the notion of "Hey, how about just stuff it into landfills, because we don't want to pay more" ever discussed. Funny, that.

Why not just make recycling voluntary? Those who want to "help save the cute fluffy bunnies" can pay market rates to dispose of their waste in an environmentally-friendly manner, and those of us who don't give a rat's ass can just dump it. (Hey, if you enviro-types really believed that recycling stuff - even at a net energy loss - why aren't you buying landfills, digging them up, and recycling them with your own money? :-)

Interesting note - apparently, you burn less fossil fuel over time if you "dig more oil out of the ground to make new plastics from scratch" than you do in "melting down old plastics to make new plastics". Newsprint is about the only commodity for which recycling makes sense (on either an energy-use or a dollar-cost basis)

Re:Strange.

[aozilla]

Slashdot editors don't have to pay a recycle tax for the articles they keep repeating over and over.