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HP Wants Manufacturers To Bear PC Disposal Costs
Makarand writes "The Mercury News is
reporting that HP,
which had earlier persuaded the Governor to veto an innovative e-waste measure, has changed its mind and
is
throwing its weight behind California's e-waste
bill which would require PC manufacturers
to bear the cost of PC disposal.
This reversal by HP is close upon the heels of a a
series
of articles, carried by the Mercury News, detailing how the industry relied on cheap overseas labor to make a profits and at
the same time distanced itself from the responsibilities of dead PC disposal."
Shouldn't the CD-R manufacturers bear some cost as well? And what about my worn out tires...
WANTED: Good sig, funny, concise yet somewhat esoteric.
My initial thought is that yes, they should bear the costs. Computers have all sorts of nastiness inside of them, and *someone's* gotta take care of it. However, where do you draw the line? Styrofoam? Plastics? Bleach? Can't have the lifetime costs built into everything - that would make just about everything price-prohibitive.
Anything that increases the barrier of entry is a good thing to a huge business competing with many small ones.
Oh, and can I please do one of those soviet russia lines again?
"In Soviet Russia, PCs dispose of YOU!"
How sad is it that this hugely important piece of legislation is not swayed by the voters but rather by the money required to buy them.
It makes me ill.
Kill Trolls Dead. Here's
HP wants its customers to pay for PC disposal, but it knows that regular people would oppose legislation forcing them to do such things. So they make a chivalrous 'pro-environmental' move to legislate that the corporations should pay for disposal.
But of course the regular people will still pay because the corporations will just factor disposal cost into the purchase price.
It's the same result as making people directly pay for disposal, but HP looks a lot better and there's no public outcry.
Nevertheless, I give kudos to HP for recognising that we can't just ship off all our old computers to China and must act responsibly to dispose of them in an environmentally and socially responsible way.
I'm glad to see a technology maker taking this on. I know that it's going to result in higher costs to consumers in the end, but honestly the cost will be trivial compared to the total value of the item you are purchasing. I imagine it's not the exact same bill (I don't have the bill in front of me) but it could simply be the way that something is worded that significantly changed the stance of HP/Compaq on the issue. Waste, whether it is technology related, or other, is a problem for everybody... we all create it, however few want to deal with it... Kudos to HP/Compaq for getting on the bandwagon... Glad to see someone trying to make it a truly clean(er) industry.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
small cornershop PC whitebox assemblers wouldn't be able to afford this. It'd put them out of business.
If adopted, proponents say, such a law could pave the way for federal regulations on computer recycling, How about national recycling of more commonly thrown away things like glass, plastic, paper etc...? It may be too expensive for smaller communities but it would be much more efficient if done on a national level. Sure it would be nice to be able to recycle PC's, but i throw out alot more beer bottles than i do computers :P
My bugbear isn't PC's and Consumer Electronics so much as composite packaging. See those drink boxes they've been pushing the last ten years? How do you cost effectively recycle paper/aluminum/plastic containers? And I don't mean just crush them into a little cube and use them for filler in junk made of molded various plastics in park benches, etc. The packaging industry has a lot to answer for, too, as landfills are really cloggin up with composite junk you can't recycle.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The real reason they are doing this is because they want to raise the barriers to entry for new competitors. It doesn't require much of an investment to become a PC manufacturer (anyone can assemble the parts and sell them online out of their house). The HP/Compaq juggernaught can afford this, smaller manufacturers cannot.
But I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars per year to get filtered or bottled water because of toxic chemicals that leached out of your PC. You should bear the cost for its proper disposal.
Am I the only one who remembers PC components with a near-infinite lifetime? I just threw out, not because it died, but because my S.O. complained about the floor space, the very first Linux box I ever built. A 386sx with 8MB of RAM, ISA NE2000 clone NIC, and a 420MB Seagate disk. It still booted. The motherboard dated around 1990. Nowadays, it seems that stuff is replaced within a few years, NOT because of the endless MS upgrade treadmill, but because things simply crap out...
With a spate of recent PC component reliability problems (HD warranties, bad capacitors, etc.), we're shifting to a more disposable PC market (ever wonder why a whole system, incl. monitor, can be had for less than $500 ?)
The solution is to purchase quality components, avoid the "upgrade your HW or die" FUD, fight off PHBs who want shiny new P4-3GHz boxes, and instead concentrate on value.
THAT'S the solution to PC recycling costs - stop throwing so many away!
I'm still using a box I built from components thrown away by various clients, it suits me perfectly.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Wow, I would love to have your outlook on things.
... doesn't it strike you as funny that:
Too bad we live in a society where companies are expected, gasp, to make money. How do they do that? They charge for goods and services.
Who pays for these goods and services? Their customers.
Who are their customers? You and me.
We'll end up paying for it all.
As for cigs
1) All but five states have already spent their tobacco money on non-tobacco related expenditures?
2) That the tobacco companies were allowed to continue to sell cigs? Why if they are so bad? The states need the money from taxes.
3) That states knowing that cigs are so bad continue to tax them at a high rate and use the money for their general revenue funds.
Regardless of whether you think PCs should be disposed of properly or not you're kidding yourself if you think this impacts the company one bit. It doesn't. It allows them to charge for it.
Don't believe me? Look at your phone bill under the Universal Service Charge.
>Laws like this do nothing but raise costs for >consumers
That's the point. That the consumer do not only pay for the goods, but also for the needed safe disposel of the goods. What's wrong with that?
Martin Tilsted
This means HP has found an economical way to dispose of waste that they think would give them a competitive advantage over their competitors if they were all forced to pay disposal fees.
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
Why not design computers to be remanufacturable? That is, parts can be reused (like with toner cartridges), chemicals extracted, resold, whatever. Maybe HP realizes they can do this in other businesses, why not computers? EU is driving a lot of this, and yes cars are next. Okay maybe not for a while.
If the price of a box is artificially low because of abuse of the commons, or the disparity in flow characteristics of capital versus labor, or other official or unofficial subsidies, we end up paying for it one way or another.
If we leased the thing instead of buying it, the OEMs would have incentive both to design for remanufacture, and to keep prices down.
No, the costs are already there, and always have been. What such a law would do is put the costs up front where the consumer can see them, rather than decades down the road, when the consumer is asked to pass a bond measure to pay to clean up a toxic superfund site.
You might argue that deferring the cleanup affords certain economic advantages, such as economies of scale (clean up everyone's mess at once rather than piecemeal) and availability of newer, cheaper cleanup technologies. But right now, there is precious little development happening on cleanup technologies, because the dumps, "aren't causing any problems" (yet). As for economies of scale, such claimed "economies" become unclear when superfund site cleanup costs regularly push into the billions of dollars.
So, yes, in an ideal world, you should be paying the disposal costs up front for the simple reason that you're going to be paying it anyway, one way or another.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
There are few good uses for full-size 486 PCs. They are a waste of space and power. Most of the tasks for which you need a PC can be characterized as follows.
There are a few exceptions like the so-called industrial PCs used in smog check equipment (a normal crappy old PC with a filter on the intake fan vent and a keyboard with a skin over it) which do not need much power and can take up a lot of space.
Lots of people over time have considered clustering, but for what it will cost you in energy to run the number of 486s needed to make up one computer which currently costs $300... you could just buy the $300 computer.
On the other hand recycling doesn't have to mean destruction. Let's say you charged people $5 when they turned in a dead or otherwise discarded computer, which is what it costs you to get rid of a tire. Someone could instead take them for free, or give you five bucks for them or something, and put them in a shipping container and send them someplace where people would like to have 486s. They could sell them for the cost of shipping, plus the $5 they charged you, plus some percentage markup to make it lucrative.
Generally speaking, in any country where computers are being discarded, there is little or no practical use for them. Computer parts are eminently disposable, because it costs more to repair them (sometimes even if you do the work yourself, NOT counting the amount of time it takes) than to replace them. If you count hourly charges for work done to repair them, it is almost always cheaper to replace the part. A $45 power supply which takes you half an hour to fix at $30/hour is both $15 spent on labor (plus whatever on parts) and a half hour you didn't spend doing something productive. The power supply is probably the easiest component in a PC to repair, as it is a simple circuit with a single layer PCB. Nearly everything else has a multi-layer PCB and is not worth repairing unless it is unreplacable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We _try_ to donate them, but whenever we donate, we need the reciever to sign a contract holding _them_ liable for disposal costs, our legal department makes us do this, for good reasons, if the institutions we donate to dump the computers, and they are traced back to us, we have to pay huge fines.
Whenever we mention an agreement like that most of these organizations back away and look for thier computers elsewhere. They want nothing to do with disposal fees. About once a year we pay a lot of money to have all our old computers disposed of.
If the computer manufacturerers became liable for disposal costs, then we wouldn't have to worry about them, and we could donate the computers at will.
Heh. First we start "selling" the names on our football and baseball stadiums for extra cash, perhaps soon "The Honorable Senator from Walt Disney" will become more than just a snide remark made about a particular senator from South Carolina, but a bona-fide title bought and paid-for with corporate money.
Just imagine having to choose between Joe "Dell" Schmoe and John "HP" Doe on the ballot. Dude! Yer goin' to the White House!
If all the small PC stores were required to put these requirements and costs in place, they would have a harder time competing with the big boys. This type of law would drive out a lot of the smaller competition. Keep the cost of business up and the barrier to entry high. Keep the smaller competition down and out.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
The idea that PC manufacturers should pay for the disposal of old computers is silly. What other industry pays for the disposal of products after users decide they don't want them? Some might do this as a business practice but none of them (that I know of) are required by law to dispose of older products.
When you buy something it belongs to you. It is your personal property. And it it your job to dispose of it properly. Of course I wouldn't expect the leftist to understand this- most of them aren't too keen on the idea of personal property.
Yeah, and Pepsi should pay to get rid of my Mountain Dew cans ...
Right now, you are paying part of your taxes to get rid of your cans, glass, paper and plastic that your municipality can accept through your recycling program.
There is no incentive for manufacturers to create more environmentally friendly products because they never see the end-costs of disposal.
A law like the one proposed, plus some incentives like a fee reduction for companies that make an effort to reduce non-recyclable components, is better way to put the burden on the right folks.
Laws like this do nothing but raise costs for consumers.
As has been said before, you'll end up paying for it either way: now through the fee, or later when your ground water is contaminated, etc..
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.