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Japan Introduces Consumer-Paid Computer Recycling
Azuma writes "According to the Japan Times, starting Wednesday, new Japanese legislation takes effect that compels personal computer manufacturers to collect used PCs from households and recycle their parts, with consumers footing the bill, which will total anywhere from 3,000 yen ($28) to 4,000 yen ($37). So from today onwards, if you buy a new computer in Japan, your new computer should have a new logo besides commercial ones such as Intel Inside... 'Recycling Fee Prepaid'."
That's all? I wish the US would do the same. $27 is not that much, and it really does help out the enviorment.
:)
Sometimes, I wish we all were Japanese!
with linux installed ofcourse. That way, both poor countries and linux will grow more and more powerful
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
Ever live in Japan? There is simply no room for keeping all your old stuff. Incidentally, when I was there in 1987-88 there was a Japan Times article about people (usu. us gaijin) furnishing there entire apt with stuff from the gomi, i.e. trash on the curb. We're talking fully functional stereo equipment - simply because the old owners had no room to keep old stuff around.
There is no off postion on the genius switch. - David Letterman
just have to see how it works out.
actually NHK had a lil program this morning (morning in JP) showing one of the recycling plants and how they recycle - basically smash everything with little hammers and separate (to a degree) the metal from the plastic from the PCB from the rubber sheets (keyboard) etc.
they also smash the ICs for some reason, probably because when it melts in the pot the molten silicon would trickle through (pure and absolute speculation)...
This creates jobs (though mundane), and helps with waste - japan is not known for having a lot of area for landfills; so as long as things get recycled (instead of, say, shipped to china), I am cool with it.
Though it would change the recycle shops (read: used stuff shops) business model on old computers... maybe it becomes cheaper to sell your old PC to a recycle shop? Would the recycle shops be totally fscked because they have a collection of junk PC sitting around?
Heck, my company has an array of junk PCs (actually, Pentium II class, which I am amazed that they are tossing out) sitting around. Maybe they will be sitting around a lot longer now that it costs money to dispose... hmm...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
the legislation seems to be talking about manufacturers. what is to stop consumers from simply dumping a computer in the bin or landfill or whenever is convenient?
If Japan is so upset about people tossing computers away instead of recycling them, why not charge customers more for hauling away the computer as trash instead of mandating them to send them back to manufacturers? These companies ought to be paying the consumers for their (recyclable) merchandise anyway since parts can be stripped from a few obselete comps and used to rebuild a less obselete one. Personally I think it would be better all around: computers would be recycled instead of tossed, consumers could get paid for recycling the parts, and companies could turn over a profit by reselling the parts as rebuilt comps. Anyone have any other ideas/thoughts on this?
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Oh crud. Less than $40 added onto the price of an over $1000 investment is negligible, and really is a worthwhile effort to drop wastage.
Indeed, and it stifles the economy in years down the road as well when all those jobs are lost to cleaning up the enviromental impact of improperly disposed of waste.
In this light we suddenly realize what a boon the terrorists provided for the international community by devestating the World Trade Center.
I can see the bumper stickers on the future cars of the building industry:
"Support the economy, support arson."
Some jobs, as it happens, while a personal boon to the job holder represent a loss of wealth. That is why you will see natural disasters couched in such terms, rather than being reported as a gain to certain individuals and industries. Man made disasters are just as much loss and natural ones.
You may not, of course, see it this way, but I'd hazard a guess you'd change your mind if someone stole and wrecked your car (stimulating the auto industry and creating jobs) or dumped a ton and a half of trash in your living room (stimulating the waste disposal industry).
You just miiiiiight see that as an overall loss of wealth.
KFG
Unfortunately it's only for the US but after reading the linked page, it seems you only pay shipping.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
This isn't exactly new. Taiwan has been doing this since July 1998.
0 72 1b6.html
"The Environmental Protection Administration has decided in principle to require mandatory recycling of computer printers from January next year.
EPA officials said a disposal fee of NT$154 to NT$195 will be imposed on each obsolete printer, depending on model. The move is expected to force up the retail price of printers on the domestic market.
Total sales of printers are estimated to reach 1.29 million in Taiwan each year. The EPA aims to recall 435,000 for recycling each year from 2001.
Meanwhile, the EPA plans to sharply slash the fees for waste desktop and notebook computers because the special fund collected for recycling in Taiwan since June 1988 has now resulted in a surplus of NT$260 million."
http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000721/2000
I think this is a great idea, if u wanna play, u gotta pay to clean up your mess when you're done with it.
Maybe 1 more reason to vote "NO" on recall ;-)
I think this could work, but sort of like it already does here... what about, they tack on this extra charge on the sale, and then you get some or all of that back IF you recycle? You would have to have a machine that you paid the amount on (Receipt or what-have-you to prove that you did), but if so, take it in for recycling, get $20 or whatever... people are more likely going to do that than without any final incentive... and if you throw it away, well, you loose that money then.
The customer pays a fee that covers the "reverse logistic" of shipping the unit from the customer location(s) to the Apple recycling vendor.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Sell that old crap on ebay! People like me buy it! I've got FIVE used computers (2 Intel, 3 RISC) here that I use to make me money, each running a different OS (plus one more I bought new, I'll never do that again).
"It's just another way that the Japanese government has found to stifle the already depressed economy."
Of course, that's the aim of the Japanese Government.
"Derp de derp."
A subject that really hits close to home for me right now since I am about to move back to the states from Tokyo. I'll tell you what getting rid of old stuff here is very expensive undertaking.
Its hard to sell stuff because since most of us here don't own cars transportation to would be buyers is a difficult proposition. I have a perfectly good 27" TV, washer/dryer, fridge, stereo, air conditioning unit (air conditioning is almost always wall mounted in Japan and generally speaking even if one is included with the apartment it isn't stong enough to cool/heat the whole place), 5 computers, and various shelving. It will cost me about $500 per cubic meter to ship stuff back so I'm obviously not going to ship the older/bigger stuff back. Unfortunately unless I can sell it to someone who is willing to pick it up, I am going to have to pay a fair amount of money to throw it away.
I figure everything said, and done it will cost me about $300-$500 to throw out the stuff I can't ship. This situation leads to a lot of illegal dumping, and I really think this built in recycle tax is the way to go.
--wyn
If you live in Hawaii in the United States, you're subject to quite similar problems. Everything costs more because things have to be imported. Land is at a premium, so you can't just go buy a plot of empty land and build your new house on it - like you could at a reasonable price, say, in the Midwestern continental U.S.
Recycling is sort of a pet-peeve of mine, though. It's not that I'm against recycling. I think it's very sensible. The problem is, the end user/customer usually gets saddled with its costs, and doesn't see a direct benefit from it.
EG. Take the hype about "the energy used to create a single aluminum soda can being enough power to run your home for 30 minutes". Yeah, that's an impressive figure and all - but if I recycle (at my time and expense), do you really think the energy I save Pepsi or Coca-Cola will come back to me, the consumer, in the form of price cuts on soda? Much more likely, any savings goes into the owner's pockets.
If a manufacturer chooses to build products that can cause problems if they aren't recycled, it seems like it should be part of THEIR responsibility to cover the costs. As it stands now, they can crank out products (like CRTs with lead in the glass) without a care in the world. The customer ends up suffering if he/she needs to dispose of it a few years later, and finds out the local trash people designated it as "hazardous waste" and won't take it.
The upshot - this only slows down the industry if the industry was being artificially subsidized in the first place.
I live in japan first of all, and here if you want to throw something big and complex away you need to pay to have it taken. Say a desk, a monitor, a TV, a computer, all of which you need to pay for. Now I had to pay about $60US once to throw away some furniture, so this may actually be cheaper/the same price.
Also, that depressed economy comment. Japan's economy is still the second strongest in the world, hands down. Furthermore, as of late they have had incredible recovery and the yen is actually stronger than they want it to be (anybody noticed that it hit 110 to the dollar yesterday!?). Not to mention the new bank consolidation is working like a charm, P.M. Koizumi is an economic genius.
And as for this, it will help the already bad trash problem and people here really aren't afraid to pay for such things. This is a great thing as far as I can see.
Sounds reasonable to me, as long as the money actually pays (ultimately) to disassemble the computer and reuse the materials or components.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
So do elitists who insist that Linux is only for a small cadre of geeks who are smart enough to use it.
And we wonder why Microsoft still owns all the desktops?
This is a great idea in principle. However, I live in Japan, and mountain biking here is a great opportunity to see enormous piles of industrial waste. More than a few companies use this system to make a few extra yen, by charging for recycling, then simply getting some small-time trucking company to either landfill the items, or as is often the case, to drive up into the mountains and dump the load off the edge of the road.
There is significant opposition to the new legislation, which has also covered most major electrical appliances for a couple of years. Getting the store to take your old TV off your hands can cost, IIRC, something like 5000 yen. Instead of paying that, many individuals will just chuck an old TV into a rice field, or leave it somewhere. This extends to dumping cars, as it is cheaper than spending the couple of hundred dollars to get them properly trashed.
The idea that public littering is bad is still a bit of a foreign concept in Japan. The "Japanese love of nature" thing is a bit of a bad joke to anyone who has spent more than a few days in the country.
... and here's why:
I live in Japan now. Going to work every day, I pass by several "auto graveyards". These are just empty spots (usually an area cut out of the forested hills) where people park their cars and leave them, rather than pay to have them taken away properly. Used cars are a liability that no one wants, and you can often get a used car for free (or less than $100) at a dealership. One can also see piles of old furniture, steel drums, electronics and other assorted odds and ends.
When it costs $50 to legally get rid of a TV, most people are going to just dump it somewhere instead. I see no reason why this won't happen with computers, and result in the various tasty bits (lead, etc) leeching into the groundwater.
Printing dollar bills, or running a SPAM operation?
living here in Osaka has been fun for the last ten years.
EXCEPT for when the government wrote the law that said that the consumer must pay the cost of recycling air conditioners, washers, dryers, and now computers.
The reason why it has not been fun is because in the beautiful park nearby - and in the corners of some of the rice fields! - there are piles of dishwashing machines, refrigerators and old "wapro"s (japanese word processors). The city governement becomes responsible after several months of no one claiming them but then the tax payers money gets used for the disposal.
You see, the problematic point is not so much that the little sticker on new machines is there to show that you have prepaid (hence adding to the price of new machines) BUT that all the old machines are levyed for a fee to recycle them.
Many people don't want to spend 7000 yen to get rid of their old air conditioner so they junk it.
Same thing may happen to computers too.
Hopefully some people will be unable to afford the cost of recycling and dump some pentium class stuff!
Hey, anyone want to help start an NPO to help me collect Japanese machines and send them to Asia/Africa?
- Jeff -
If you're living in Japan, I suggest purchasing this money saving device: a sledgehammer. I've smashed up three old pieces of furniture into pieces small enough to be placed into trashbags that were then hauled away free of charge. And on top of saving money, it's a great way to relieve some of the stress you accumulate while riding rush-hour trains, getting bitched out by your bucho, etc.
We have paid such a fee for all electrical appliances the past few years. If your TV is to be scrapped, you just have to go to a shop that sells TVs and give it to them. You don't have to buy anything there, and you don't even need to have bought it there in the first place. Buy anywhere, return anywhere. The fee is much smaller, approx $10.
That's something we've had for years in the Netherlands now. It's called the verwijderingsbijdrage, which would translate to English as "removal fee". But then again, our government taxes everything it can -- and the rest...
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
Why the hell should I pay someone to take stuff away from me? If anything, they should be paying me to let them have it!
Currently, however, it is cheaper for manufacturers to mine raw materials out of the ground than to recycle existing materials. However, the Earth's resources really belong to our children and their children, so mining is really a form of theft {albeit from victims who may not yet have been born}. This is only likely to change when raw materials start becoming scarce, but by that time it may well be too late.
What is required is a tax on the extraction of virgin raw materials where a recycled substitute is available: a tax so heavy that manufacturing companies will pay good money for anything they can recycle, in order to avoid as far as possible having to mine new raw materials. It would also be necessary to place a tax {or an outright ban - cf. ivory} on imported finished goods made where virgin material extraction was untaxed.
Of course this will affect domestic and international trade. So did the abolition of slavery. What's your point? Just because you've been getting away with doing something which is so obviously wrong for a long time, does not make it right.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
For all products, not just computers.
Why is it that when I buy a mcdonalds lunch I pay for the lunch, then I (as a taxpayer) pay for the landfill their disposable (and questionably useful) materials fill up? Why do I pay for a monitor then pay for the lead shielding and toxic metals to be properly disposed of?
Why not require mcdonalds to pay the cost of disposal? Why not require huggies to pay the cost of disposal? Why not require Dell to pay for the cost of disposal? Why not require every manufacturer to pay the cost of disposal for their packaging - heck, lets force them to make everything strictly either recyclable or biodegradable.
Economically incentivize them to make useful, recyclable or biodegradable packaging. The prices for us would raise what? a couple pennies, maybe a nickle? In the meantime we could end the ridiculous land fill phenomenon.
Why do we continue giving corporations all the desireable rights of individuals, but deny them any of the responsibilities?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"