States Push Makers' Role In Disposing of Electronic Waste

AaronParsons writes "An interesting NY Times article describes currently available programs for post-consumer electronics. One of the many interesting points in the article is that electronics manufacturers should be held responsible for recycling their products post-consumer: 'Maybe since they have some responsibility for the cleanup, it will motivate them to think about how you design for the environment and the commodity value at the end of the life.'"

Comments

This is a terrible idea

[Art Popp]

I live in Washington and take my old computers to RePC. They charge a fee, $5 to $10 a unit that depends entirely on the labor to rip it apart into its "differently recycled pieces." They have huge heaps of PCBs in one pile, metal caes in another, I assume crushable plastic was hiding behind those.

If you get the federal government involved they will put a tax on the manufacturers (which we will pay for our new toys), and then they'll go spend it elsewhere (e.g. social security). That's inane. I'm sorry the mega-corps have to deal with all the state laws, but they have lawyers for that sort of thing already.

Even if the money collected were in a closed loop, (which it won't be), having the consumer put the five dollar bills in the hands of the company doing the work seems vastly more efficient than anything that we could do with "national taxes by weight/volume/content," "recycling-prepaid" stamps and typical regulation details.

Re:This is Bullshit

[Darkness404]

While this post is written in an inflammatory style, I would have to say that I agree with it. It makes no sense for companies to have to recycle things that they made years down the line. There are some things that /will/ go obsolete no matter how "green" you design them. Heck, governments create part of it too (look at the DTV transition). You make a product and you sell it, once it is sold you should have no liability for the product unless it was defective or unsafe along with limits on when you can get damages. For example, 30 years from now if we find that the glass used in the iPhone caused skin deformities but Apple could have no knowledge of that, it makes no sense to sue Apple for that. Similarly, when I want to throw away an old computer, its not the computer makers fault that I want to throw it away.