Slashdot Mirror
Whose Burden is it to Recycle Computers?
bostons asks: "California places the financial burden of dealing with the electronic waste on consumers, charging a $6 to $10 disposal fee on every computer and television purchased. Maine puts the onus on manufacturers, demanding they pay the full cost of recycling their computers or televisions and pick up a share of the recycling tab for products of unknown origin. Starting next year, Maryland will require manufacturers to offer free computer take-back programs or pay the state a fee. Which do you think is the most effective and appropriate option?"
Sorry I didn't RTFA, but $6 to $10 isn't a lot to include in the total price, so this recycling-tax should be prepaid before it gets out of the shop. I think it'll be more difficult to enforce payment during the disposal.
This extra cost is likely to go unnoticed because a single CPU/RAM/HDD price drop can easily cover that amount.
One common problem with prepaid tax (like petrol) is they took the money, used it on something else, and turned around to say they don't have enough money for roading/accident management.
Hence it's important for the authority to not only impose the tax, but also acknowledge it, so that consumers can simply put the computer/TV out on the street for collection and the authority must fulfill its duty to dispose them appropriately.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
... You mean we can't just keep stacking them up in a corner somewhere?
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Ha! Joke's on them! Most of my computers were fished from dumpsters.
Unknown host pong.
I don't think anyone on slashdot has ever thrown a computer away..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
And rather than make two small piles of garbage. . .
Sing it with me the next time it comes around on the guitar.
KFG
Knowing state governors, they will probably charge us at POS, then go ahead and bill manufacturers, who will in turn put the tab on our bills.
Oh i can forsee it something like this:
- Cost of iBook 14" 512 MB RAM: $1456.00.
- State cess towards hazard disposal: $10.00
- Manufacturer charges for waste disposal: $10.00
- County charges: $6.00
We will end up paying $26.00 for a $10 charge because the stupid state billed US and the manufacturer for the same.Manufacturers obviously will NOT abosord the charge. they will load it onto the cost.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Odd logic: you go dump your old stuff on roadside when you could, with approximately the same amount of effort, bring it to some collection point and have people, who are effectively paid by you with the $10 recycling fee you've already shelled out, take it away from you.
If you care about recycling, then you'd see your tax dollar at work and you'd feel good about doing your bit for the planet. If you don't, you can still watch people work for you instead of having to haul junk out of the trunk by yourself. Not to mention, not having to watch right and left to avoid getting caught littering...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
..but it will always be the consumer that pays. You don't think manufacturers will just let any government levy come out of their profit margins, do you?
According to basic economic theory, no matter who the tax is levied on, the end result will be the same, depending on the elasticity of demand. If demand is highly elastic, then the manufacturer ends up bearing the burdern of the tax, and if demand is flat, then the consumer ends up bearing the burden, with a whole spectrum in between.
You mean you don't actually pile all the old stuff up in your basement? The yawning chasm of clutter is my solution.
Well, except what you pay in higher taxes to cover the cost of cleaning up the pit.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
The ideal situation would be to place the burden on the market in such that there is an incentive to reduce costs.
Therefore, if manufacturers have the burden, they will have to charge customers indirectly by increasing purchase price (after all, customers pay for everything in the end).
And if manufacturers carry the direct burden, they will also have the desire to lower disposal costs. Instead of a flat $6 for disposal costs, the manufacturer will want to lower it as close to zero as possible.
This becomes a win-win. It costs the consumer in the end (as it always does), but manufacturers have a strong incentive to minimize the disposal costs.
At the end of the day, I'll speculate that this could be a profit center for the manufacturer - the resale of whole components and quality recycled raw materials could wind up making them money.
Biodegradable Comptuers.
The action should reflect the purpose as directly as possible.
That said, I am reminded of the fact that, in Texas at least, places like JiffyLube and any place that changes oil are required to accept old motor oil for proper disposal at no charge. This is a burden on these oil changing places but the purpose is to benefit the evironment, not to "tax" people. This approach is definitely not a tax and has the least amount of bureaucratic overhead. (The benefit to the oil-changing people is that because the outsiders still need to dispose of their used oil properly or face heavy fines if they are caught which means it is less convenient to change their own oil and since they need to make the trip to the lube shop anyway, they just might get more business in the process.)
With that as my own mental image of what an appropriate solution might be, a mandatory "take-back" program is the only way I think is appropriate. Then the sellers can do whatever they [legally] need to do in order to dispose of them properly. This would accomplish the main purpose, which is to decrease the amount of this waste in landfills. Taxing is not appropriate in this case.
You're all talking as if recycling stuff is a burden rather than an opportunity.
For a start, pull scales better than push so instead of making people recycle what you want are people going around scavenging old kit to use for other stuff. At the moment the economics are such that it isn't worth doing this but what if you made it extremely tax friendly for those who do the scavenging? After all, they are providing a social service by taking this unwanted kit.
Deleted
>
> And rather than make two small piles of garbage. . .
>
> Sing it with me the next time it comes around on the guitar.
This post is called "Natalie's Restaurant", and it's about Natalie, and the Restaurant, but "Natalie's Restaurant" is not the name of the Restaurant, it's the name of the post, and that's why I named this post "Natalie's Restaurant".
Now, it all started about two posts ago, it's on two posts ago when CmdrTaco and I went up to eat some hot grits at Natalie's restaurant...
So we took about half a ton of monitors and stuck 'em in the back of a VW microbus (with RedHat on an old laptop hooked up to a GPS receiver and other implements of destruction) and headed away from the grits shop.
We got back to the University and there was a big sign across the dorm rooms sayin' "Prepaid Recycling Tax Effective As Of Thanksgiving". And we had never heard of payin' $10 for reusing garbage on Thanksgiving before, so with tears in our eyes we drove off lookin' for another place to hand out the free monitors.
We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the road there was a classroom in a fifteen-foot trailer, and inside the trailer was a little pile of 14" monitors. And we decided that a portable classroom fulla 21" monitors was better than a portable classroom fulla 14" monitors, and rather than see a buncha kids tryin' to work at 640x480 on 14" screens, we decided to give 'em ours.
That's what we did, and drove back to Natalie's to post about it on Slashdot, had a plate o' Thanksgivin' Grits that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until the next morning... when we got a phone call... from Officer Obie of the California Computer Recycling Use Fee Commission.
He said "Kid, we found your name on a Post-It Note on the bottom of a 21-inch CRT in a classroom, and the Teachers' Union just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And I said "Yes Sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie... I put that Post-It note on that CRT."
After speakin' to Obie for about 45 minutes on the telephone, we finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down and take back the untaxed freebie monitors, and also had to go down and speak to him at the Environmental Officer's Station. So we got in the RedHat VW Microbus with the old laptop, GPS navigation system and other implements of destruction and headed on down towards the Environmental Officer's station.
Now friends, there was only one or two things Obie coulda done at the police station, and the first was he coulda given us a medal for bein' so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and the second was bawlin' us out and told us never to be seen upgradin' school computers around the vicnity again, which is what we expected, but when we got to the environmental officer's station, there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested. Handcuffed.
One way or another, the customer is always the one who pays, it is just a question of "how much?" and "when?"
My preference is that the fee be levied as far down the "value chain" as possible - probably at point of sale, like it is for the states with recycle fees on soda containers.
Charging the fee at point of sale does a couple of good things:
1) The customer knows what they are paying for, it isn't hidden away in the total price. This knowledge helps to prevent the fees being raised as an arbitrary form of taxation - income tax gets taken out of most people's paychecks before they ever even see the money, thus obscuring the direct impact of the tax. I wish to avoid that happening with any new taxes.
2) If the fees were directly assesed to the distributor or manufacturer, then they would be inflated with each step in the process just as the price of the system is. In effect, paying the fee at point of sale is like paying the "wholesale" cost but charging the manufacturer the fee would result in it being marked up to "retail" pricing by the time the end-consumer pays for it, possibly even doubling the original "wholesale" fee level for no added benefit to the environment or the consumer.
It seems that people have missed the point. It's 10 dollars max. The guy who can't afford another 1 percent on the deal probably isn't buying computers or TV from stores, He's buying them at garage sales. Get a grip people
Can't take it AutoZone or Checker, can't take it to a gas station...
I went to a garage sale once, and picked up a very nice and old 5 gallon metal gas can (like for a jeep), welded seams, etc for very cheap - with one hitch: it was full of 5 year old marine gas! I figured, what the heck - somebody will take it, right...?
How wrong I was! The above mentioned places wouldn't take it, the city wouldn't take it (I couldn't even take it to the hazardous materials drop off!), I even called a local custom gas tank repair/manufacturer - they could dump it, but they wanted a $50.00 disposal fee (and even then, they made it clear to me that doing this was really a violation of their disposal license, and they didn't really want to do it)...
You can't just dump it in a car - I had no idea if somebody mixed oil or what in it, plus it being so old who knows what kind of gunk on the bottom it turned into...
Does anybody know what you do with old gasoline (besides burn it!)?
Technically you can get your deposit back by bringing in the bottles and cans yourself. I used to take them back to the store as a kid and use the money I got to get more soda. I noticed that in Oakland (some parts at least) they have little bins on top of trashcans to put your bottles and cans in so homeless people can collect them. Now that's an efficient operation.
[insert witty quote here]
Make it an inexpensive service provided by the local sanitation company. I know mine has a once-a-year event when you can drop off your nasty household chemical waste for free -- that would work for this, too.
Why should the government take money for this? Are they even doing anything in return to effectively collect and dispose of the stuff? My guess is that the money goes into a general fund and is completely unaccounted for.
This is strange in the USA? Sorry, but it just looks damn bizarre to a Canuck. Here in Canada, trash and recycling pick up are always a municipal service, and the garbage men will often simply not collect your trash if it's improperly sorted. You can drive it to the dump, but that's municipal too. No worrying about "incentives" or separate fees, it's part of the municipal taxes (and thus the price is geared to income).
Yes, it seems socialist, but when handled efficiently it is far better than clumsy private systems where you have collectors competing and stepping on each other's toes and not wanting to offend customers by requiring that they sort garbage. Some times the customer is wrong, and the government can afford to tell them that. The city doesn't have to pay incentive fees for recycling.
Beer bottles still work by recycling deposit though, as they're recycled through the beer store. The deposit's small so I often just eat the cost and recycle them anyways if I'm feeling lazy - but I don't drink a lot of beer.
I think your viewpoint is interesting, mainly becuase it flies in the face of my direct experience.
Here in Indianapolis, IN, USA we burn our trash. Sounds healthy...Anyways, my point related to trash pickup. Indianapolis USED to have a privately contracted system where you chose your waste company, and they took your trash to their own sorting system to be disposed of. You paid these companies privately. They were always on time, the workers were (reasonably) friendly, and they did their job well. The trash was picked up correctly (by correctly, I mean put into the truck and not thrown all over the street).
Then they built the trash powerplant. In order to feed this burning facility, they decided to implement a system that was supposed to be like the one you described -- municipal tax based, government run. And it is. And it sucks. Badly. Granted, its not Horrible but its nothing like it used to be. The trash people come at different times, and sometimes a day before or a day after. In some parts of the city they use trucks with 1 guy who has an automated arm that picks up trash cans to put the waste into the truck. This doesnt work, and shit gets all over the place -- lawns, streets, sidewalks. Its ok, according to the government, because they also implemented a street cleaning government service too. That means there is no parking, mandatory, for a whole day once every 2 weeks on different streets while they clean up their own mess.
Needless to say, your system sounds envious. But we have something that was supposed to be like what you say, but its sucks hard asscakes.
I live on one side of a shallow urban brook that has many good points: ducks, geese, carp, turtles and the occasional heron. Unfortunately, it has a tire in it about every 40 yards or less. 1/4 mile upstream on the other side is the municipal physical plant that accepts recycling. They charge to take tires.
The conclusion seems obvious. Hell, I don't even have incentive to volunteer my time to fish them out if I will suffer the insult of paying to deposit the fruits of my good citizenship.
i posted the following about Japan, it is still relevant to this discussion
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.
In the end the consumer pays for it anyhow. The companies will just tack the cost onto the product. Same as how Telco's tack on a fee to recoup the cost of them being mandated to provide free 911 service. It's probably just best to have the companies price it into their systems, that way the tax isn't blatant to people. Everyone notices sales tax, but most people don't notice the 30cents or so of tax on gasoline, since its built into the price already (at least here in California)
You're confused because you believe something which is not true, namely:
In a perfect world where all costs are properly accounted, recycling would be profitable and end users would be turning in their goods to recoup the cost tied up in no longer useful items. However, one of the reasons we get our copper from Chile is so that we can avoid proper cost of mining it. We're essentially disintermediating the proper environmental, social and labor costs that copper mining in the US would incur. In this sense, we get the copper whithout the side effects of not paying those costs. The Chileans will, eventually. Some corporations and local governments stateside have actaully come to the conclusion that it's actually cheaper to do this stuff abroad than deal with these problems over the long term at home. The hard rock mining industry is a premier example of this and because computers require so many rare earth resources and energy to produce, they're essentially a huge black market of hidden costs that somebody somewhere is stuck with.
Item deposits are not a great way to deal with this problem, but they are one way of dealing with them. The great side effect is that you get the underprivilaged to tidy up the place as they scour your neighborhood for dumped deposit items.
Before you get all huffy at the last remark, please note that it was in the vein of The Onion's story about increasing the bottle deposit to aid the indigent.
Politicus
Exactly. The problem is that for hazardous materials, what is best for a single entity (person/company) is not what is best for the entire community. This is what is known as the "tragedy of the commons". For those who aren't familiar with this phrase, it's worth-while to read about it. In many ways, it is similar to the more familiar prisoner's dilemna.
This is a problem inherent in the capitalistic system. I'm not advocating socialism, but pure capitalism is not a valid economical system as these problems so simply demonstrate. A mixture (which both the US and most of Europe already has - although definitely in different percentages) is a reasonable compromise.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?