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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?
I pay a fee for oil disposal when it gets changed. I pay a fee for tire disposal, when I change my tires.
Personally, since I've never had to dispose of a computer (I still have all but one that I've ever bought, the other one I sold) Why should I get stuck with a disposal fee that I may never use?
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?
Personally, I have no problem with this, as long as recycling centers are widely and easily available. I have half a dozen cases and a few boxes worth of broken parts I can't do anything with (and yes, I've tried donating them to a school or non-profit--they are even less able to use them than me) but I can't throw away because its unsafe for the environment. I would gladly pay an extra 20-30 dollars to finance being able to take this crap somewhere and forget about it and not have to worry about poisoning drinking water or wildlife. Look at it this way: at least microsoft (probably) won't see the money.
Heh, sounds like my personal fleet of servers. I've probably parted out about 10 machines to get 3 shell servers up. Most of which were home users who were going to throw away their machines, and I said 'PFFT! I'll take it!'. They thought I was crazy for wanting those 'pieces of junk', but hell, I have machines that work. One mans trash is anothers treasure I guess.
Can all fish swim?
Where I live, if you want to throw away a PC or a monitor, you have to buy special stamps that say that you've paid your "disposal fee" or whatever.
Then you can just put it on the curb once a month.
The trash guys see the stamps on the stuff and know that it's ok to pick up - otherwise you get a visit from the local police and a fine, I think.
(So, if you find a PC on the curb in Tokyo, leave the stamps on - that way you save a few bucks if you ever decide to pitch it later...)
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
I used to be one of those geeks.
An old 386 running DNS. A 486 running sendmail. Another 486 router/firewall. A Pentium 60 webserver.
Then I blew $250 on a Duron 800 board and midtower case and consolidated all the services on it.
Guess what? It paid for itself in just a few months due to lowered electric bills!
And my office is quieter and more spacious.
Beware false economy.
This type of recycling fee is already built into the cost of rechargeable batteries.
http://www.rbrc.org/licensee/
According to this web site, 90% of rechargeable battery manufacturers are members of this organization. They recycle the batteries and they are funded by the battery makers, which means that a recycling fee is built into the cost of any battery bearing the RBRC symbol.
If you think spreading lead and other poisons around the countryside isn't hurting anyone else, then you haven't thought things through.
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
That is debatable, but somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand -- the important thing is that the computer parts don't end up spread all over the country, leaking into the ground water, or being burned into the air in China. So the goal here is to make sure they are collected and dealt with safely; whether that means recycling them or just sequestering them in a safe location is a separate issue.
The answer is to make recyling paletable and easy, never _force_.
Nobody is proposing forcing anyone to recycle anything here. On the other hand, when you choose to recycle your old PC, under this plan, you won't be charged to do so. An improvement on this plan would be to charge $10 more on top of the recycling cost, and give that back to the consumer when s/he recycles their computer; this would be a further incentive to bring the computers in instead of just dumping them somewhere.
Note how well a similar system works for income taxes... by giving people a refund check every year, the IRS encourages everyone to send in their tax forms on time. Even though people were charged more up front, and thus aren't really getting any money, they feel like they are getting something out of doing the right thing.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I disagree.
You bring up Guelph as an example. While I haven't been in Guelph lately (I'm from Toronto), I agree that getting people to separate their garbage is a bad idea, because they won't do it (or at least won't like it). The difference between that and this is that garbage separation is done after the fact and not up front. If you had to pay an extra quarter and they had somebody else separate the garbage for you, you'd do it and be glad that your quarter is being spent responsibly (to help the environment).
Secondly, you bring up EU. While I don't know anything about EU recycling cars, I believe that in Germany the manufacturers had to guarantee recycling of major appliances. This caused manufacturers to redesign their products so they contained less materials and were easier to recycle. The result were CHEAPER appliances that were more environmentally friendly.
You see, the problem with this legislation is not that it's up front and doesn't rely on people's good will and knowledge of the system. The problem is that it's not up front enough. This is more of an end-of-pipe approach than a solution to the real problem.
The government should make every manufacturer and importer pay out of their pocket a fee for transporting the equipment to their recycling facilities and make them recycle it. The result would be that the recycling fee would become included in the cost of the equipment, but it would be up to the manufacturer's ingenuity to reduce the cost and thus make their products cheaper. Creating a flat fee only allows the manufacturers to continue producing products that are not friendly and point their finger at the government and say "But they will recycle it!".
Remember, necessity is a mother of all inventions.
m