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Growth of E-Waste May Lead to National 'E-Fee'
jcatcw writes "A bill in Congress would add a recycling charge to the cost of laptop PCs, computer monitors, televisions and some other electronic devices, according to a story at Computerworld. The effort to control what's called e-waste could lead to a national 'e-fee' that would be paid just like a sales tax. Nationwide the cost could amount to $300 million per year. Already, California, Washington, Maryland and Maine have approved electronics recycling laws, and another 21 states plus Puerto Rico, are considering them."
That would mean that we can just leave them anywhere, right?
We already pay for removal when it works.... Well, Ill just open my truckbed with all these computer junk parts and gun it. Thats what road crews are for, right?
Reminds me of the stupid "music cd" tax. And the RIAA still sues, even when you buy and trade tariff'ed discs that go directly to the labels for 'assumption of copyright infringement'.
If I pay the tax, then drop the stuff in the trahscan to get picked up by the muni wate trucks, does that money vanish? Does it just line the pockets of the contractor that gets the disposal contract? Does it just end up the general fund?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
E-waste has been a big problem. I like what Microsoft did, with converting their e-trash bins into e-recycle bins. Thought it would be nice, *cough cough* if they made the "bright idea" lightbulb in MS Word a CFL.
You gotta think, we just use and use all these 1's and 0's, but no one realizes that their deletion increases the entropy of the universe.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I'm all in favor of putting the real costs up front. It's almost impossible to enforce a fee at disposal time. People will just find some other way to hide these things in the trash or dump them.
Overpackaging goods with three layers of boxes and plastic should be taxed, too.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
When I've got a PC that crashes and burns, I strip out any useful parts and put it by the curb. Some idiot will always take the thing home thinking it might work.
To say "Nationwide, that cost would amount to about $300 million per year," is disingenuous at best. The price is already being paid in the long-term destructive consequences of not recycling toxic electronic waste. Something like this fee (assuming it works) doesn't add cost, it makes the cost more visible and more constructive.
As a longtime dumpster-diver/rescuer of unwanted computer parts, I look forward to drawing a salary from the taxpayers.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It's well-intentioned and poorly conceived. Now we'll get a new tax for the government to "just increase a little bit" at a time, so we don't notice how our total tax burden increases at absurd intervals every year. Just like wage withholding and social security actually costing you 15% of your paycheck, but only having us ever see 7.5% taken.
And it seems to be working... we've got a pretty good eRecycling program going here.
http://www3.gov.ab.ca/env/waste/ewaste/faq.html
Of all the things that they can and do tax, now they want to put a tax on recycling? Don't we already have plants that do recycling? I know I already pay fees to have my garbage and recycling picked up and processed-- I sure don't want to pay a second fee on my electronics. I don't care if the tax is no more than 10$ like the article says, it's an additional grievance that I certainly don't want to deal with. Either they have the means to recycle the sorts of material that are in electronics, in which case the fees I already pay for recycling can cover that, or they don't have the means to recycle this stuff. In that case, they need to quit their porkbarrelling and use some already existing tax money to get that infrastructure in place and then come back to me.
Considering how many of these e-waste PC's are perfectly functional computers with 1+ Ghz speed processors, which can be upgraded to 512MB-1GB of RAM and remain functional for another 5 years for Grandma Internets...yet they are thrown out because they are full of spyware and adware and molassesware, it would be fair to tax the source of the problem: poorly programmed operating systems, like Windows.
I'll just have to dump it in the e-river!
The original generic sig.
"Reminds me of the stupid "music cd" tax. And the RIAA still sues, even when you buy and trade tariff'ed discs that go directly to the labels for 'assumption of copyright infringement'."
That only applies to Canadians. And the situation isn't comparable on several points.
We already pay a recycling tax on electronic equipment here in Belgium. As far as I understand it, you can just return electronic equipment to stores selling such, and they dispose of it.
No wonder, Democrats won on Nov 2. I can't believe that the war in Iraq will finally affect me.
donate those machines to public schools and filter them throughout the school system and recycle the oldest machines. Work out a deal with Microsoft (or just use something else) and put whatever software needs to be on the machine for the school to use it properly.
So when I was in high school, we desperately needed better computers in various locations throughout the school. I imagine that both elementary and middle schools are in the same boat. Businesses are on what, a two or three year hardware upgrade cycle? Wouldn't this kill two birds with one stone?
Schools get new machines and their old (and likely least environmentally friendly) machines would be recycled. Keep the e-fee so that such a program would be funded but in theory it could work. But perhaps I'm just looking out the window of an ivory tower.
What the fuck is with this "e" bullshit?
what once was a passing fad has turned itself upside down (not unlike the "i" phenomenon)
Before you know it...
e-blood
e-murder
e-cstasy
omg. The roots were always there.
Of course, ecstasy might have provided something a little smarther than such an annoying prefix...
Living With a Nerd
. . . if you can sweep a problem under a rug -- or, in this case, bury it under some trash bags in a dumpster -- it doesn't show up on the Accounts Payable.
Or, put another way, externalities are for the next generation to deal with. Or ignore and pass along.
If the fee is high enough (say, $10 or even $50), you will want to bring the dead equipment for (partial) refund to a place, which will gladly process it (paid for by the rest of the fee).
Kind of like cans and bottles, except their meager 5c fee is not enough to encourage anyone to clean them up, not even the "poor" homeless...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Had these fees for around a year in Ireland now - and its great. I dump all my broken shit back on shops telling them I bought the same type of item off them in the previous month. They usually don't ask for a receipt, and even if they do... well, I got rid of three years of broken or just poor quality headphones (I DJ, they wear out...) with one receipt.
http://www.weeeireland.ie/ is the manufacturers/sellers grouping that manages it all. On the downside, Amazon no longer sell electronics to Ireland as they're unwilling to collect the fees.
For something like this to have any sliver of a chance of doing any good, they'd need to set it up in some form of deposited cash refund, like soda/pop bottles in some states. For example, a retailer charges $15 up front, must accept hardware for recycling, and gives you $10 back for each computer turned in for recycling.
Without any incentive to get stuff recycled, most people would simply prefer to hide it in the trash somehow. Yeah, I realize that a deposit fee system would be a royal PITA to administrate, but without it, you'd never even see 10 percent of computers come back for recycling.
Will the revenue stay in the communities where the items are purchased, or go into a larger, federal pool? There are arguments for each.
And if I'm being taxed a recycling fee up front, then I shouldn't have to pay anyone when it comes time to dump my old hardware, right?
I think my city's homeowner hazardous waste recycling center already accepts, for free, consumer electronics/computers from individuals, as long as they have proof of residency, anyway.
There are recycling places that sell and donate old equipment. Check this one out.
I'd say that any recycling place will set aside anything with resale value.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I'm all for recycling but adding a tax onto the buying of a computer is just going to make it less likely that someone poor will buy one. The net effect is poorer families will have fewer computers.
There are good ways to pay for public project and there are good ways to tax. It doesn't seem like this is one of them.
Why not force manufacturers and service providers to pay for the waste they generate from their items? If McDonald's had to tack on a fee for every napkin or every Big Mac box, you can bet that they'd cut down a lot on waste to keep people from not being able to afford eating there.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
So, if/when the feds enact their fee, the states will repeal theirs, right?
No?
why aren't I surprised?
The answer to everything in the world is not having the federal government charge a fee and create more wasteful programs.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
You pay the tax up-front. You can hand the unit in to a recycling centre, they pay you some sort of refund (to say thanx for not dumping it, or -- like cans -- to promote dumpster diving homeless folk to bring them in) and they get paid to reprocess out of the rest of the tax.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Or we can just gather up all our trash into giant garbage ball and shoot it into space. Then we let the people in the year 3000 worry about our trash.
\
There's no doubt that the growing amount of ewaste is a huge problem, but if we're going to charge the consumer for the fee, then there should be stiff penalties for companies like Epson and HP that put kill-switches into their printers to cause them to fail prematurely.
HP killswitch.
Epson killswitch.
We already have this system "over here" in Belgium, and it seems to work. For example, I would pay 60 eurocents at the purchase of a new PC, and 3 euros for the purchase of a new screen. And 18.50 euros for a freezer. On the total pricing, it is not a large contribution. Tariffs can be found on recupel's site.
In return, any supplier is obliged to accept the return of an old appliance, even if he did not sell it. If you buy a new device, the supplier has to accept the old one, free of charge. As far as I know, you are not even obliged to make a purchase if you just want to drop off your old junk at a store, although I am pretty sure that it will be appreciated if you would bring the gear to a recycling center instead.
Typical for us Belgians, I presume, is that our 'recupel' is not a tax, strictly speaking, as it is not paid to the government. It is a obligatory contribution to the coffers of a collection of non-profit organizations. These more or less coincide with the professional organization of the major suppliers of consumer electronics, who do have a legal obligation to take back old equipment. Everything is organized by law, but its day-to-day running is not in the hands of the government. Probably this is more efficient, and besides, it encourages the suppliers to design their devices for easy end-of-life processing.
Just put it all in a dump. WAY cheaper than conventional recycling, and when Plasma Gasification gets to be ubiquitous, someone can make a profit turning it all back into its component elements.
It costs me in the region of $25 to dispose of an old computer & monitor now. Charging up front would surely make the cost drop.
Sure it's moving to an up-front cost instead of an end of life cost- but it's still there.
It would seem that if you've got $500 to spend on a computer, then having to pay $515 is unlikely to deter you.
The much more likely result is that computers will be $15-slower so that they can maintain the same price points.
...not a federal issue. Federal taxes do not pay for land fills or toxic clean ups. WHy should they tax us for e-waste?
I have no problem with this "E-fee" concept, I actually think it may be a good idea if it really helps to recycle old electronics. That being said, I hope the fees collected will actually be used on recycling old electronics, not used on some government bureaucrat for totally unrelated things, just like the telephone tax that was supposed to help fund the Spanish-American War.
In California we get charged $8.00 (not applicible to sales tax) for every monitor or laptop we buy here. But it's nice when we go to the dump they just take it.
Though if you run a retail business they charge you for dumping monitors (This usually means thrit stores may not have those useful $5 Commodore 1702 monitors on the shelf anymore, only some huge 22" PC beheamoth monitor.)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
In Switzerland you pay a recycling fee when purchasing anything electronic (to cover the retailer's recycling costs).
People return things to the shop instead of throwing them in the trash, because rubbish collection / dumping fees are insanely high, and because people are more environmentally conscious (it's not socially acceptable to just dump everything in the trash).
I'm sure that discarded computers are pretty low on the list of things filling our dumps. Are there taxes on other things like cars or home appliances to cover the cost of disposing of them?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
REAL geeks don't need e-waste recycling - they just hold on to their stuff until the Computer History Museum offers to haul it away.
(Ok, so I'd still be holding on to the VAX, but with my girlfriend moving in there just wasn't room for both. It was a tough choice.)
It sounds good on the news. Money chages hands. No one can vote against it with being smeared as "anti-environment". And yet it will do absolutly nothing.
Its the perfect law!
Just to clear things up, I like the environment and want recycling, but guys, this is just stupid.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Just leave your PC's by the curb in a busy urban area, and they WILL be picked up. We used that technique to get rid of two EXTREMELY heavy 286 servers in London. We were about a block from the British Museum, wiped the servers, left them by the curb and ten minutes later, they were gone.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
E-waste is a huge problem and I doubt that adding a tax will be the solution, unfortunately most of the e-waste recycling that happens just ends up shipping stuff over to Asia in the containers that import the soon to be junk anyways. A sustainable operation like Freegeek.org where old computers are taken and triaged to determine whether the components on them are fried and then the useful ones are built into linux systems for and by volunteers and the rest are stripped down to their recyclable parts and taken over to a place that actually grinds the curcuit board down and woalah a lot less e-waste.
What about those of us that dont throw our old hardware out? I still have my first apple II in the garage.. so i get screwed like when i buy a new tire but ask to keep the old one for the spare?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So where do I send my used jpgs, gifs and mpgs to for recycling?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
My goodness, does this mean I will have to pay for all the E-mail I delete now???????
So what are the odds they'd use the tax for the benefit of e-recycling places? I'm guessing the odds are slim.
I hate the idea of having a law for it , but...
Dammit I want to be able to have a place to drop off old puters and have them RECYCLED. NOT SHIPPED TO CHINA FOR DISPOSAL I can't even computers in the street without fear that they'll end up in a landfill, and in the meantime I have 30+ machines taking up space in a storage unit waiting to dipose.
Does anyone know a place that disposes of machines in the NJ/NY area, and don't say 'check google' because all the links I find are worthless.
The tax is reportedly supported in Service Pack 1 for Vista.
"To empty the Recycle Bin, please enter your E-Tax confirmation code: ______ [C]ontinue, [C]ancel"
"Windows could not determine if your confirmation code is authentic. Operation aborted. [C]ontinue, [C]ancel"
"Warning, Low Disk Space! You are running very low on disk space on C: To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, please click here."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Meh. This is a problem; but please, not another tax. How about a deposit instead? Then, instead of old computers being left with "free" stickers on them out on the street, which happens all the time here in DC, they would be returned for the deposit. This will take time to work though. The sweet spot of the curve might be passed. I don't see any compelling reason to replace my current system. It's powerful enough to do just about anything. It seems like there was a lot more turnover as we moved from DOS to Windows98. The stuff you see on the street is usually very early Pentium, and of course there are plenty of CRTs--nobody wants those. Printers are popular too, along with CD players that sometimes still work but are cosmeticly defective and just "old" and no longer stylish. Sometimes people even chuck this stuff into a regular city trash can, which is illegal AFAIK.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm sure I seen companies recycle computers and seperate all the valuable metals and such. I thought they were very profitable, assuming they get all the old junk computers for free.
Already on the boards up here. www.sweepit.ca
Check it out, there's a flowchart and everything!
But the literature clearly states it is not a tax. >__<
That's all well and good if the money actually goes to a recycling program and doesn't simply pay for a boat trip to a third world country!
"...yet they are thrown out because they are full of spyware and adware and molassesware, it would be fair to tax the source of the problem: poorly programmed operating systems, like Windows."
But not the geek computers which are full of beaverware.
If the electronic device is likely to have any kind of processor and read-only/read-write media for storing the processor's instructions - especially if the device is any kind of computer or game system, even moreso if it is unpopular or unknown, leading to rarity - the right way to recycle the device is as follows:
Step 1: Contact the MESS (http://www.mess.org/) team via their message board and say, "Hey, I have [insert computer or system here], has its media been preserved yet?"
Step 2: A project member will either reply "No, it hasn't!" or "Yes, it has." In the case of the former, go to step 3. In the case of the latter, go to step 5b.
Step 3: Inquire with that project member on where to send the device in question to have its firmware and software preserved, and send it.
Step 4: The project member in question will subsequently preserve the firmware and software as necessary, and if there is sufficient interest, the device's hardware will then be emulated as well to enable the re-creation of its functionality via said preserved firmware and software.
Step 5a: The project member in question will recycle the device when appropriate.
Step 5b: You may now recycle the device (if the aforementioned reply was "Yes, it has.")
Step 6: The device is now recycled.
But the real tragic cost of this program would be the resulting mercury-deficiency and lead-deficiency in our ecosystem. Let's face it: stupid people are hilarious. And although the USA has backup plans for creating new generations of stupid people, even "reality shows" on our televisions and "intelligent design" supporters on our schoolboards just can't compete with the degenerative effects of heavy-metal poisoning in our bloodstreams.
Why, if we ever run out of the national supply of stupid people, future Slashdot readers might never get to enjoy comments like these:
Creepy Crawler: That would mean that we can just leave them anywhere, right?
No, it would mean that you can just leave them at any recycling center, knowing that the cost of recycling them has already been paid for.
Overzeetop: If I pay the tax, then drop the stuff in the trahscan to get picked up by the muni wate trucks, does that money vanish?
No - like the "trahs" those "wate" trucks will be taking to the landfills, the money would be out of your hands but wouldn't have vanished entirely. Because no recycling center would be able to redeem your old electronics, the money would remain in government hands. Ironically, instead of keeping heavy metals out of US groundwater supplies it might just end up putting heavy metals into Middle Eastern groundwater instead.
Needs Food Badly: Of all the things that they can and do tax, now they want to put a tax on recycling?
No, they want to put a tax on buying things that will have to be recycled, then pay that tax back when the recycling actually happens. The goal here is to make it cheaper to reclaim toxic chemicals than to send them to landfills.
And this is what I get just browsing at Score: 3. I can only shudder to imagine what's getting modded *down*.
I have personal objection to me doing the sorting for recycling. I don't mind trash being sorted and recycled by professions, just not me. I actually wouldn't mind a very small across the board "recycling/trash sorting" tax in addition to sales tax on everything if I believed that it would do good and not line some one's pockets or be suffled around for other uses. I've been observing my local city government lately. I don't have faith that any government would properly run a recycling/trash sorting tax in good faith with their citizens. They'd be too tempted to use the money for other uses.
There's a parallel here with the "shipbreaking" industry (photo essay) in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries. It's dirty, dangerous work, and people willingly do it because it pays and it's one of the country's main sources of metal. What Greenpeace and others are lobbying for is to forbid those people from being able to volunteer for the job, awful as it is.
Revive the Constitution.
Wow, given how fond slashdot folks are of criticizing the government, I'd think they would see this for what it is - a new source of general fund revenue. If this were made law, what would happen is a very small percentage of this tax would be used for it's intended purpose. Most of it would just be spent on the worthless shit the government excels at. We would still need to cough up money to get our electronics recycled. We would just end up paying twice.
There was a time when movies had plots. So you knew who's ass it was, and why it was farting.
-Not Sure
These days more regulations and taxes have been established as the answer to all problems, and the automatic first reaction of politicians to any situation regardless of party. It's not only oppressive, it's unimaginative.
Revive the Constitution.
...wouldn't it be iWaste?
This looks like a case of governmental robbery. Itis well known that electronics are very valuable waste. They contain gold, copper, tin and a lot more expensive material that can be easily processed. In fact, the recycling would generate a lot of cash. IMHO this is a war fee (some extra needed for a Iran offensive I suppose).
"Adding $15 to the price of a $500 dollar computer may not deter you or most people, but for a lot of people spending that extra $15 will make a difference."
Ditch the GUI. There I saved you $15.
Actually, my municipality has electronics recycling, and they are really good about it. Just bring it over to the landfill, pay them $7.00, and they'll throw it away for you!
I'm not kidding... somehow you can throw it away for free (well, it's considered part of your waste removal fee), but if you want to recycle it you either have to pay for it, or hold-on to it for the free recycle day event that happens every 6 months. They're so good at advertizing these events too, signs up all over the place, if you consider all over the place to mean less than 2 miles from the landfill.
We have the same thing where I live but we only have one free recycle event a year.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Exactly!!! A person should be able to collect some money recycling. Growing up I used to go around collecting glasses and cans which I'd then take to a recycling station and get a little extra spending money. The way things are now though, is if your area collects recyclables you have to pay extra. At least I know of no place that collects recyclables curbside that don't include a recycle fee in property or other tax.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Until such time as recycling processes are actually profitable, it's better to bury the junk in a landfill. There it will stay until an engineered bacteria or nanobot or digester robot or whatever gets invented to reprocess it cheaply.
That's short sighted. By dumping toxic stuff in the dump all you're doing is passing the cost of cleanup onto others, either those who don't produce or use it or to future generations. And that's discounting the risk of drinking water being contaminated along with other stuff such as the distruction mining causes.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"Probably this is more efficient, and besides, it encourages the suppliers to design their devices for easy end-of-life processing."
Hmmm. That's nice. So when you have a car crash, your car comes apart in "easy end-of-life processing" pieces?
- Well isn't that the point of these changes? Right now it costs you to choose to recycle it. Now you'll have to pay recycling fees up front so it's no longer financially beneficial to not recycle it.
Short term it doesn't cost you anything to just trash it either, unless where you live has a law outlawing it and you get catch. Better would be to pay a deposit when you buy then when you turn it in for recycling you get at least some of the deposit back. Maybe it can be made so that if when you buy you bring what you're replacing the deposit will be waived. Say you buy a computer and when you do you bring in an old one, turning in the old one means you don't have to pay a deposit. Some places already do this with things like car batteries and tires.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I see you know it but many people don't know plastic was originally made from plants. I wonder how many remember or have heard of cellophane plastic wraps for sandwiches and such. The "cello" comes from "cellulose" which comes from trees and other plants. Eastman Kodak, the camera company, has a webpage on this: The Process of Making Trees into Plastic . Part of the reason people don't know is because of people and companies like Du Pont, in the 1930s Du Pont was awarded a patent on making plastic from petroleum after which they started pushing to have hemp, aka marijuana, outlawed. Hemp was a good source for making plastic. Henry Ford even built a car on his Iron Mountain Estate using hemp for some of the material used. The car was also powered by hemp, Ford made the fuel from hemp. Hemp is also a better source of fiber for paper than trees, one acre of hemp will produce more paper than an acre of forest.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Even if you're only taxing working adults, that's maybe $3 to $4 a year.
What do you think the odds are that we'll actually pay that little? What are the odds there'll be a $30/PC tax or $15/household increase in garbage collection rates to cover the staggering burden that's barely a fraction of what they then charge?
I've no problem with paying what's reasonable. I find it interesting that the real number quoted works out roughly a buck a person per year though I'm yet to be charged a recycling fee even close to that small.
Two big advantages:
Yes, of course, the manufacturer will up their prices a little. But, that makes the fee proportional to the actual cost, instead of a flat government fee.
Ideally you could apply this to ALL consumer goods - including televisions, monitors, and automobiles.
This is not about environmentalism, whether you are for or against it. Putting a tax on anything is just giving the government more of your money to waste, often on things that have nothing to do with the cause of the tax.
In California, in the early 90s you could take your cans and bottles to automatic recycling machines and quickly get some cash back. Since then, the situation for recycling has improved because many if not most garbage contractors now include recycling services as well. But where does that leave the recycling tax?
I buy boxes of soda for $3.50 apiece. CRV (California's recycling tax) adds $0.50 to that. That's over 14% in tax, and there may even be the usual sales tax in addition to that. Do I actually get any money back from the cans and bottles that I recycle? No, because I put them in the recycling bin. I'm being taxed and penalized because I recycle. Does that make any sense to you? Now consider this. The state charges me for the cans and bottles, but I don't see any of that money back for recycling. So where did it go?
Whenever somebody proposes a new tax under the guise of "helping XXXX" or "saving XXXX", people need to think really long and hard about how that money is going to be handled. If you cannot name the recipient of each and every dollar, you need to vote NO. If you can name the recipient of each and every dollar, and more of it is going to bureaucracy or unrelated programs than to actually supporting the actual cause, you need to vote NO.
Manufacturers won't pay, the consumer will. Any costs will get passed on in higher prices.
And when the manufacturers' sale drop because of higher prices they will find a way to lower their costs. As it now consumers as well as nonconsumers pay. When someone drinks water contaminated by the lead that was leaked from the crt someone else tossed in the trash where it was hauled off to the dump, it's that person who has to pay. The person who tossed it doesn't pay directly, unless of course s/he's the one who tossed it. However the cost will be passed on, if the person has insurance their insurance costs along with everyone else's will raise. If they don't have insurance governmment is sattled with the cost or the person doesn't get treatment. Then there's the cost of the raw material, there isn't a limitless supply of material so as more stuff ends up in dumps mining will get more expensive until the resource is exhausted. And if the resource is coltan this it's those in the Congowho pay with thier lifes. Any way it goes people will pay more.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The voters in that country are a rare few who actually believe the name of the tax describes its use, long after everyone else figured out their "recycling", "environmental", "welfare" taxes only funded government pensions. They just keep paying more and more taxes, forever thinking the next tax is the one that's going to do what the previous taxes couldn't.
In terms of the cost of recycling, more money can be made on recycled materials than is lost on the cost of recycling. What's really happening is the waste is being sent to other countries, where it can be dumped in their landfill and pollute their water supply, the water of less important voters. That's what costs money.
Calif* once charged water rationing fees, earthquake recovery fees, transportation fees, all of which ended up feeding pensions instead. This new tax is destined for the same place. What 7.25% couldn't do, 8.25% couldn't do, and 9.25% couldn't do, now 20% won't be able to do.
The batery contains toxic materials. Most likley large amounts of lead. The acid would likly fix itself if it didn't kill anything in the process. And then there are sulfates in the battery too.
I'm not aware that these dangers are present in a modern day PC or electronic device. If there are dangers like this,I could see a core charge for it. If there isn't, I see this as just one more encroachment the government is masquerading on order to lay a tax on us. We have spoken pretty loud about not wanting more taxes and they need to cover them up to ensure they are not screwing the pooch come election time.
Computers and other electronic equipment may not only have lead and or mercury in them but they also have other toxins and deathly things. One such deathly thing found in electronic equipment, especially cellphones, is coltan. Conflicts, fightings, and war is being fought in the Congo for the money mining for coltan raises. Substitute "coltan" for "diamonds" in the new movie out about blood diamonds and you'll be close to reality.
FalconShould there be a Law?
In Berkeley, the "poor homeless" or the "poor" or the "enterprising" do indeed recycle aluminum cans, wine bottles, etc. They poke through garbage cans, they poke through our curbside recycling. This is a marvellous ecosystem. Make recycling profitable, and no arm twisting is needed.
the whole cost of the product is not just the amount to make it,
but also to dispose of it, so its about time they charged to get rid
of toxic ewaste -- other countries have solved a lot of problems
just by charging for garbage -- germany got rid of a lot of excess
packaging, and a lot of other problems this way...
j
We have this in Alberta, Canada. A pseudo government agency collects $10-$30 on every computer purchase for "recycling", and guess where it all ends up? The landfill, nobody recycles that shit.
If they're going to tax us for it, they better damn well provide better electronics recycling services than most of us in the US currently have, at the moment. Right now, it's a patchwork of poorly advertised local services that in many cases either don't actually exist, or are too much of a hassle for most folks to bother using. I usually end up with this heap of dead or outmoded electronics in a corner somewhere in my house waiting for the magical Brigadoon electronics recycling day to come around again. Having just moved to a new area, I have no idea when or where or how or if electronics recycling is done here. It's a nightmare if you actually give a damn about these things.
Just imagine, creating a new form of tax, without the need to do or spend anything for it, just make people pay some more every time they buy these things, and money will just pour in like sweet autumn rain. This is just unbelievably nice. And, better yet, we still will fine everyone who just junks their electronic waste as before. And even better, remember those recycling places where people can bring their stuff and pay for their stuff to be recycled ? We won't touch them, so they will make money as before and of course that means we will also continue to make money as before, just better :) This is way too cool :)
Well, when you're the one who's collecting the money, that is.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I can understand the need to keep E-waste out of the environment...One thing that would good for both consumers and the environment: Quality improvement in products.
The last few years--especially--I've seen so many items that were either "broken out of the box", or designed to last no longer than the warranty.
Some examples:
These days, it is the "in thing" not to properly lubricate potentiometers. You turn on the volume control, and it feels like there is sand in it. (This is out of the box). You can turn it about 5-10 times, and kiss it goodbye.
Some of the small buttons also don't work consistently. You have to push really really hard on some, and others a lot less. Still it's quite irritating. The contacts corrode easily, and have had no protectants applied.
Bad engineering is another factor: Weather station electronics that had the PCB board and contacts exposed directly to the elements. User interface boards--with knobs and switches mounted on them--sharing space with surface mounted components...don't push those buttons too hard, now!
Computer Keyboards: I can't count how many of these that I go through. It don't matter how much you spend, the keys still start to bind up after a month or so use.
Anybody notice how items that used to carry a 3-5 year warranty now only come with a 1 year, and sport in the infamous "Made in China/Korea" logo? In the case of some hard drives...I've had them fail (3 of them) at about 1 month after the warranty period. One of the drives was rarely in operation. I guess this means we need to adjust our interpretation of MTBF? Not "running hours", but "sitting there hours".
Motor bearings: These usually go long before the warranty ever expires. I hope that the thermal protection in the motors has better quality than these bearings...
Laptop batteries: I don't need to say more.
Mainboards: I now have to replace mother boards every year and a half...it's too much to even ask for two years of service from them. (Even with "reputable" manufacturers.)
Camcorder CCDs that are not for use outside. The humidity damages the unit and renders it inoperable after 4 months of service. (Sorry kids, we have to film the football game in the air-conditioned living room. I might break this camera, if I take it outside!)
The list goes on...
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Most of these things aren't even designed to be repairable. You can't find the parts at Radio Shack. You can't even open the case without breaking it, because screws are a thing of the past...even if it would be something otherwise trivial to do.
All this stuff is generating probably 5 to 10 times the E-Waste compared to just a few years ago.
I've seen older stereo receiver/tuners last for 20 years. We had a TV that lasted 25. And, those old transistor radios that seem to have an indefinite life span.
On the contrary. Short-sightedness consists in the assumption that future generations won't have a use or a need for all the weird stuff we toss out right now. For example, think of all the effort that people went through to compost their food and yard waste. Composting is simply ultra-low-speed bacteria-assisted combustion, releasing all the carbon back into the air (much of it as greenhouse-causing methane). Whereas now we have landfill-powered generating stations that harness the bacteria-produced methane and generate power from it. The composting movement was wasteful because it was stupidly premature.
BS! Composting is not only not waste but actually returns nutrients to soil. I love to garden and I always compost, I even compost food scraps. Living soil" is not only needed for healthy vegetation but also eliminates the need for added inputs whether they be fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides. And get what is used to make each of these? Petroleum. When all the petroleum is used up what will replace these chemical inputs? Organic compost. The so called Green Revolution was only possible by mechanization and the use of petroleum and it led to the depletion of nutrients in the soil, some of which were replaced by petrochemical based fertilizers. However using said fartilizers don't replace all of the trace minerals plants need, such as selenium which is toxic in large amounts. Heck even humans need trace amount of selenium to properly utilize vitamin E. Fact is is composting reuses and recycles nutrients needed for life. And it does not release all of the carbon into the atmosphere, all that organic matter left after composting is rich in carbon.
That particular problem has been solved.
Can you prove this? Fact is is potable water is not safe in many parts of the world. Even in the US there has been E Coli in water causing outbreaks. Compleatly, thoroughly, composting though destroys E Coli. Then there's other toxins to deal with. Arsenic, though found in most water in South Asia in also found in US drinking water.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I think a lot of people are very nieve about the problem of E-Waste. Just because we're not necessarily affected by it, doesn't mean people should just ignore the problem. The question of 'where does it go,' isn't apparent to the U.S. because it's not piling up in our backyards. Many people living in poverty are forced to live among diminishing piles of electronic waste; unknowingly being poisoned by the harmful effects of the errosion of electronic waste. The sales tax implemented on new technology does serve a well needed purpose. A new E-Waste recycling plant called Electronic Recyclers, located in Fresno, California, has just moved up to the number one in the U.S. and is expanding in other foreign countries. We need to open up our eyes to the problems others are facing due to our own insensibilities.