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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.
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
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.
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...
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.
Yes, it SHOULD. But right now, for most materials, it doesn't. It requires a government-imposed extra fee in order to show a 'profit'. But that profit is just a bookkeeping game to cover up what is actually and obviously a waste of resources.
The core meaning of 'unprofitable' means: consumes more energy than it produces. So when a thing fails to make money, that's the market's way of telling you that you are wasting your natural resources... your time foremost among them.
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.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
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*.