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National PC Recycling Plan Proposed, Again
ThinSkin writes "Two U.S. Representatives have proposed a bill to resuscitate a national recycling program for electronic waste, following the successful launch of two state-run programs. The bill would create the National Computer Recycling Act, and if approved by Congress and signed into law, would tack on a $10 administrative fee to the sale price of computers and monitors to fund recycling efforts."
My Texas city has a program like this (HEB Hurst Euless Bedford city district) and the stores charge a 30 dollar fee for recycle efforts. I don't see where the extra charge comes in though, as nobody seems to actually -RECYCLE- the computers they buy.
Where's this extra charge come in?
Just today I found a place in Indianapolis called Virtual PC Scavanger or something like that that is doing a hefty job of recycling and reusing old computers. The guy mentioned that they are about to get national sponsorship. Interesting timing.
From what I understand of physics, different elements and compounds have different weights per volume. So gold, being heavy, would be heavier than the same volume of hydrogen.
Archimede's principle dictates that an object will displace its weight in water, which leads to the conclusion that the heavier something is, the lower it will sink in relation to other material surrounding it.
Computers are made up of meltable parts. By melting the computers down, would it not be possible to skim off various useful elements and compounds at certain depths? This is how they separate kerosene jet fuel from high octane gasoline. It's all together in a vat, but sucked out from different depths.
Such a system could be set up in someone's back yard (given a large enough back yard). It's well known that some manufacturers use gold to conduct electricity, and silicon is resaleable. So is copper and a host of other really common elements in computers.
I'm surprised no one's done this yet.
The only reason why i dont recycle much computer parts is that no one will take them without charging you for them. Even then, you dont know if it will get recycled or end up in a dump in china.
If i paid the recycling fee up front, and was then able to drop off the only stuff at a recycling center at no cost, i would do it much more often. Though without oversight the stuff could still end up in china.
I guess im still paying the cost reguardless, but I much better about paying when i purchase the item than when I get rid of it.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
First of all, in many places (such as here in Oregon where I live), we have to pay a deposit to buy soda in cans or bottles. The deposit is in addition to the price of the can/bottle of soda. If you recycle, you often get this as a "refund". Some people game the system by buying cans/bottles in one locale and taking them to another where the deposit is higher (as in the Seinfeld episode where Kramer and Numan try to do this in a mail truck.)
Second, there are pretty good reasons why your Pentium 1 motherboard cannot be a Pentium 5 motherboard that have nothing to do with the electrical engineer who designed it "not being creative enough" or "the government trying to scam you". The fact is that you would not be happy if the P5 were on the P1 mother board because you would not gain much extra speed from having the P5 on there as the bus would be far too slow. The bus speed is only one of many similar problems you would have with such a scheme.
Third, electronics companies are in fact moving to more environmentally friendly manufacturing techniques. At my company, we are currently making a transition between normal type electronics and moving to "lead free" electronics for our circuit boards. One of the electrical engineers on my team was pissed recently when he had to redesign a circuit board to be lead free for this initiative. (He wasn't pissed because of the redesign. He was pissed because he originally started to design it as lead free and was told by his boss to design it "leaded" and then after doing all the work over again to create the regular design, had to re-do it again to make it lead free.)
BTW. Lead free electronics manufacturing requires higher temperatures for the board to be "baked" because it takes more heat to melt lead free solder. Also, I learned recently (I'm a software guy and knew nothing about hardware before I came to this particular company) that newer type circuit boards typically can have circuits at several levels within the board and have parts on both sides of the board. Its pretty interesting.
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I read that too: the term `central processing unit' includes a case and all of its contents
So, how would this apply to people who build their own computers? If I buy by the part, would I only be taxed on the monitor?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
we go through lots of hardware at my company (customer hardware breaks down after 6 years of being on constantly and we replace it)
When we get rid of the broken stuff, we strip out the non-toxic pieces, and then we pay a secondary company by the pound to dispose of the bad stuff. They rip out what is useful and still worth something, and then pay to dispose the rest of it.
This system works perfectly fine without any extra levels of existing government bureaucracy. This just seems to be another example of needing to enforce current codes and regulations, instead of creating new codes and regulations.
No.
First of all 10$ are barely enough to transport a large monitor to a landfill site. Definitely not enough for recycling it.
The correct solution is the EU and Japanese one - the companies are made legally obliged to take care of recycling their goods (they sometimes manage to offload it to the reseller, but legally they are responsible for it). As a result if a company makes a product easier and cheaper for recycling it improves its margin.
With computers it is less evident, as the consumer electronics goods (recycling of) directive is relatively new and few companies have made design decisions based on it. However, it is possible to see where it is going when looking at cars where the legislation has been around for longer. As a result of the similar car legislation recent Japanese cars that are strictly for the European/Japanese market have less then 5% of the car made from non-recyclable materials (IIRC highest are Daihatsu at 98, followed by Toyota and Honda at 97%). Europeans are not far behind.
Computers are going down a similar path. This in fact is the reason why some companies have gone back to making separate US and EU models. This is also the reason (besides VAT) for the mystic difference between prices for some products in the EU and the US. The Mac mini price in the EU includes VAT and what it will cost Apple to take it back once its lifetime has expired and take care of it.
There are other aspects to this as well. Introducing such laws causes serious changes to the recycled material market. Recycling has a limited demand and capacity, so filling it with "newer" goods makes recycling old goods economically pointless. You can no longer scrap an old car and get money for it. You have to pay now. The situation with computers is likely to become the same.
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