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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?
Politicians don't have to pay a recycle tax for each stupid piece of boneheaded legislation they keep recycling from election year to election year.
Does this mean I can take my machine to Michigan and get my $25 deposit back?
Believe nothing -- Buddha
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
This is the single most important piece of information, and they nearly swept it under the rug in the article. I saw a program about three months ago on one of those TV "news" magazine shows covering this problem.
The used PCs being "recycled" are essentially shipped to third world countries. Peasants there then melt down the boards to "recycle" them. They essentially grab the parts that have resale value and let the other parts seep into the environment.
The video on this program was disturbing, to say the least. A huge junkpile of cases and monitors, everything covered by the soot of the burning fires melting the boards... and the people doing all this completely unprotected in any way. Not even masks. The ground around the entire site had been poisoned beyond any possible near-term use.
This program interviewed a clean recycler in the SF Bay area that said the costs of recycling locally in accordance with California environmental laws was very expensive but that this particular outfit never shipped anything overseas.
Basically, this has to be paid for somehow. Right now we're paying in environmental capital in third world countries. If we want to recover that, then the payment needs to come from the profit margin of the machines, the consumers' payments, or the government (taxes). Your choice.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
OK. I work at FREE GEEK and we reuse and recycle a lot of these gizmos.
Monitors are the worst
Here's what currently has to happen to a monitor to dispose of it safely and responsibly (without shipping it to Asia). Note: We're on the west coast, USA:
Now, we could try to cut costs by doing some of the work ourselves. (We already do the testing.) But:
Same story goes for TVs, BTW.
There's a lot of stuff in the computer that's worth pulling out (gold, paladium, tantalum). There's some stuff that's break even (most of the other metals). But a lot of it is just expensive to deal with.
These proposed deposits are not hidden costs. The real hidden cost (from the consumer's point of view) is the tax that he'll have to pay a decade down the line to clean up the water supply, etc.
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