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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?
This is a good idea. The recycling is good idea and the only way to get it done is for it to be paid up front. If we legislated recycling but allowed aftermarket payment, we'd find the roadsides littered with abandoned PC's. The EU is trying (rather unsuccessfully) to do the same thing with cars.
If that meant I could plunk my old box on the sidewalk and let it be picked up by the recyclers (garbage crew, because it ain't recyclable), sure.
But what do you want to bet that "since there's a recycling programme, we can ban picking it up at the curbside", the way they have in California?
In other words, I pay the tax, and I still can't throw away the boat anchor? The only difference I can see here is that some preferred contractor gets a cushy pork-barrel project.
Given a choice between styrofoam or mercury and cadium, I'd take styrofoam
Why not just make it illegal to throw away monitors, etc. in the regular trash, then have a collection point with a fee for disposal, just like oil and tires?
Yeah, and why not make swapping copyrighted files over the Internet illegal? I wonder why nobody has thought of that before.
Having a fee to be paid up-front makes it difficult to cheat. As soon as getting rid of stuff gets expensive, people will illegally dump it everywhere (the means to prevent that would be _way_ more intrusive than a fee). It's incredible what people will do to save a few bucks.
It is actually quite convenient to drop electronic garbage at the shop, knowing that they will take care of it properly. Even if the store you bought it from went out of business, the costs are already covered. And because the service is free for the stores, too, they have no incentive to dump it somewhere themselves. All you need is collect the fee properly, and that you can do very well without a major investment in law enforcement.
Systems like that work quite well in parts of Europe.
Motor oil is a perfect example of why pay-for-disposal doesn't work. If you have to pay to throw away the oil properly, people will just dunmp it in the sewer and let it get into everyone's ground water. I'd prefer a system where you pay a deposit when you buy the oil, then get it back when you dispose of it properly.
Miko O'Sullivan
Every old machine I've ever gotten rid of, I've done so at a garage sale or swap meet. I don't think I've ever thrown a piece of hardware away into the garbage. Working or non-working.
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Although I have some old ISA SCSI cards and 48-pin 4-meg simms I'm thinking of tossing. .
(Ironically, I've got about 250 megs worth of RAM in the form of 48-pin simms that are probably all perfectly working, but obsolete to the point of useless. I think they'd make good secondary storage if there was some sort of PCI card to plug em all into - they'd make a great RAM drive - they'd outperform disk).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If we try to charge extra at collection then most people will find some way around the approved collection points. Not everyone collects old computers; many people think 1 computer is too many :) If I had the choice of paying $25 to recycle or paying nothing to leave my old stuff in a college dorm parking lot then I would probably do the wrong thing.
Collecting for recycling at the point of purchase makes sense from that perspective. But if we could get some cash back when we recycle then there would be added incentive to recycle computer parts properly.
Does this sound just like our current recycling system? It sure does! Making folks pay for recycling up front and giving them a cash incentive to follow through is the best way to make recycling work.
It makes people say "The environment is expensive to keep. Stuff it!".
:-)
Trust me, anyone who goes through _forced_ environmentalism _hates_ it. A city local to me (Guelph, Ontario) has forced garbage separation. I avoid even eating in the food courts there. I refuse to go trash picking. I ain't no hobo! After asking others outside that city what they think about that rule they usually say "Huh?", then "Oh yeah, that stupid city where I have to pick through my trash. Ugh!".
Same thing here. I'd gladly pay a few extra dollars of tax money for the option of putting the old computer beside the blue box, or even pay a few dollars to get it taken away knowing its going to be reused.
But if you _force_ me to pay directly, without any direct benefit to me (and not seeing my computer in a landfill is not a tangible benefit to most anybody), you've made me your enemy. I don't take being forced to do anything very well when it doesn't harm anyone else, and neither should you!
I believe this is the reason the EU is having a hard time applying this idea to cars? Because people are tired of paying hidden taxes to support a bunch of soft-hearted-and-headed green thumbs?
Oh, there's also the little problem of the fact that recycling certain materials is actually more harmful to the environment (energy usage and byproduct wise) than making them in the first place (eg: Can recycling plan hooked up to a coal/gas power station).
And no, we wouldn't find the roadsides littered with cases at all. Very few people throw anything out like that (speaking from personal experience). Example: Most everywhere you have to dispose of old paint specially. As someone living in the country (which is usually a popular dumping ground) the worst I've EVER seen around here is a set of tires. Never any paint cans. Why? Because the paint cans can usually be left at the curb for pickup, unlike tires. I've never once seen an old computer tossed out randomly here because these can either be left beside your garbage or at a dump.
The answer is to make recyling paletable and easy, never _force_. _Force_ is exactly why you don't get voted in and is exactly why you never get into government in the first place. (ever seen someone choose to vote for someone by choice in a democracy?
Choosing my words carefully to avoid becoming flamebait:
Why is it that when something like this comes along, the first thing we geeks do is complain about how stupid it is? We are a minority, we who keep machines long past their prime, using them to their full capacity as web servers, mail servers, firewalls, gateways, etc... The majority of computer waste comes from major corporations, who dispose of these machines after they have passed the point of obsolescence. The cheapest method of disposal right now is to have it "taken care of" (i.e. put in a landfill in China). See this site for real info.
Giving major corporations an incentive to recycle computers is an incredible step towards changing the way we deal with computer waste. Who knows, maybe the next step will be to device a whole new model for computer sales that generates less waste by creating more interchangable parts; rather than throwing out the whole machine every 1.5 years, companies can purchase core processing units that all machines use... distributed computing... but i digress.
Yay, lots of replies from people who don't read the article first.
It's easier to finance the recycling program if it gets money up front than if it has no money until people start recycling the things, wouldn't you agree?
New cars are already more expensive as a result of laws mandating what percent of the car be recyclable -- I forget if the U.S. has such a law yet, but all it takes is one European country (Sweden, I believe) to mandate it, and suddenly everyone effectively has to do it for every car they sell. Would you be happier, then, if the $25 were added under the table so that you don't know you're paying it anyway?
Maybe you should just have to pay for it when you throw it away.(Not the item - the recycle fee).
I'm all for conservation. But why pay for an item to be thrown away, when you buy it(new)?
...is to encourage manufacturers to develop PCs that can be efficiently recycled. If someone figures out how to build a PC that can be recycled for less than the deposit amount and makes a profit, cool, the system works.
Same idea behind the European car recycling deposits. It's more-or-less the same market principle behind the pollution credits program President Bush announced today, which is based on an existing successful program.