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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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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? - 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.
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I do what every self respecting geek does. Fill my basement with hardware going back 20 years... never know what you might need.
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When you buy a car battery, you pay a core fee. You get that fee back by returning your old battery (or avoid it by bringing it in) for recycling or proper disposal.
Why not do the same with electronics? Whenever you buy new electronics, if you bring in old ones for recycling you don't have to pay the fee.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
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*.