Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Actually we have already implemented that here in Ireland and I have to say as a consumer it's something I'm happy with. I pay an extra couple of cent or maybe a couple of euro on the big electric/electronic items and I get to have my old items disposed of correctly in a manner that is better for the environment.
It's pretty similar to the plastic bag tax. Many resisted it at first but it really did put it into perspective for shoppers. Everyone here reuses their bag-for-life, and when you really do have to buy a plastic bag you make sure it's used a few times. I don't usually welcome new taxes - and why would I - but it's nice to see something being done for the greater good.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
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
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.
>
> We already pay for removal when it works.... Well, I'll just open my truckbed with all these computer junk parts and gun it. Thats what road crews are for, right?
Naw. Y'see, the last time someone figured he'd rather than make two little piles of garbage...
Sing it with me the next time it comes 'round on the guitar.
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.
. . . 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.
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.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I do what every self respecting geek does. Fill my basement with hardware going back 20 years... never know what you might need.
There Can Be Only One...
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.
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.
\
That's pretty standard pricing for aircraft toilet equipment. Remember the mythbusters where they did a myth about being sucked into the toilet when it flushes? They had to buy one for the myth test and it was thousands of dollars.
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.
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Used to do that. But then new harddrives kept getting new cables standards - so while the old cable worked, it wouldn't allow for the highest speed. Flat screens made the 3-4 CRT monitors laying around obsolete (and much less attractive on a desk). Some of the older ethernet cable from a few years back isn't good enough for gigabyte ethernet that is coming out. Some of the cable isn't good enough. No one uses floppy anymore. PCI video cards are way obsolete. Extra internal modem is laughable. Old sound cards not really better than newer integrated solution - besides all these cards may not have easy to find drivers (in Windows, good old linux supports them). Old USB sticks are way too small for modern needs.
About the only thing that hasn't changed are the case screws. Except for screws, telephone/cat5/cable lines, threw out lots of obsolete hardware last summer. Take up space for no good reason. Buying a new computer is usually cheaper when I consider time involved. Besides, with energy costs, have one computer be the be-all server is more efficient than having several old computers do the various jobs. Better yet, cut down on servers - let google handle email. Modern laser printer costing more than the minimum includes print server too - no need for seperate computer sucking up energy.
Yada, yada, yada.
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.
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.
My goodness, does this mean I will have to pay for all the E-mail I delete now???????
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.
So I just leave all of it sitting in my yard. (joke)
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*.
....Also, I'm extremely skeptical of any new taxes.....
So am I! Let there be a law that says that the commerce system has to close the circle. That means anybody can take the device or item back to a seller and that seller would have to send it back to the maker. Yes it would add to the cost to close the goods distribution system, which is presently an open loop. Finally the gadget would get back to the manufacturer who could then decide what to do with it. Rebuild, re-use or recycle it. Every item sold after a certain date would be stamped with a return tag, making eligible to be returned, eventually to the maker thereof. No government involvement needed save for the passing of a well written set of laws closing the distribution system loop.
All theory is gray
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?
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.
It's a nice idea, but this is the US, and the way these thing usually work is that the tax is imposed, the money goes into the general fund, and that's it. No funds go towards the purported purpose of the tax, which in this case means there will still be no place to take my old computer gear except for the dump or that place over on the other side of the city where they refurbish stuff and give it to the poor.
To be honest, I fully expect a double whammy -- an e-fee on new purchases, and either a penalty or complete prohibition of disposal, which will be sold as the politicians "doing something about the problem". Computer stuff will just collect up in back yards like refrigerators do now.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this article is that I need to pull all the old stuff out of the attic and make a dump run while I still can.
Ron
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Well unfortunately the idea of paying us to recycle just isn't economically viable, especially when we're talking about hazardous materials like those found in electronics. The issue of course is that expecting people to do the right right thing simply for the sake of doing it is a stretch at best, expecting them to pay extra to do the right thing is bordering on the insane. The only clear solution to that is to force people to pay the recycling fees upfront so that at the very least there's a reasonable chance they'll do what's right.
TFA also mentions another recycling scheme in Maine in which the manufacturers are forced to pay the cost of recycling. I think both manufacturers and users should pay towards the cost of recycling, that way it encourages manufacturers to try and find recycling-friendly methods of production and for the users I guess there's a chance they'll recycle if only to feel they got their money's worth. After all, even if the manufacturer paid the whole bill it would in all likelihood be passed on to the consumer in higher prices anyway.
You've never disposed of any electrical goods? Never had a faulty HDD, blown PSU, bad DIMM, fscked CRT monitor? I've still got every computer I've owned too since they all work, but I'm only 22 and I've already gone through enough broken parts and appliances to see that I'll get my money's worth if they ever introduce a recycling tax here. Even if by some fluke you never personally had to recycle a single electrical item ever it'd still be nice to know that this kind of thing could encourage others to recycle their old crap which might otherwise end up in a landfill or just get dumped - hazardous chemcicals and all.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.