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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?"
... You mean we can't just keep stacking them up in a corner somewhere?
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
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.
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> And rather than make two small piles of garbage. . .
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> 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.
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.