3 ms·

While I agree that moving away from the throwaway culture is a good move, it seems like an uphill battle. Resource recovery / recycling approaches, such as syst

by kardos 9y ago

While I agree that moving away from the throwaway culture is a good move, it seems like an uphill battle. Resource recovery / recycling approaches, such as systems that separate dead electronics (and more widely, post consumer products) into constituent elements might be more feasible.

Broken_Hippo 9y ago
I view this as something separate but equally important. "Right to repair" should ideally be something that strengthens such processes and I find it sad that it isn't already in place as a standard. But I also think for it to work, it should be simple and easy for the consumer. Ideally, they could mail smaller items or put their larger items in a special trash bag on collection day. Less ideally but also somewhat feasible would be requiring stores selling or repairing certain classes of things to accept the same class for recycling regardless of whether or not the customer buys something from them. We could require a recycling fee on such purchases, refundable if there is a trade-in.
anonymfus 9y ago
Repair requires both easy assembly and easy disassembly of the device, recovery/ recycling greatly benefits from improvements to the disassembly. There is no conflict.
- kardos 9y ago
  But it's an uphill battle to force manufacturers to make things easy to disassemble/repair as they wish to discourage both in pursuit of more profit. There's a bunch of hairy details about what constitutes "easy to disassemble", and some perhaps more legit concerns about imposing differing requirements to different products, resulting in claims that the government is trying to 'select market winners', etc. Further are the unintended consequences where the manufacturers come up with creative ways to do an end-run around the rules, eg, rental gadgets where you don't get permission to repair it, but still win in the market as they're not subject to repairable rules and thus have a cost advantage.

by kardos 9y ago

Broken_Hippo 9y ago

I view this as something separate but equally important. "Right to repair" should ideally be something that strengthens such processes and I find it sad that it isn't already in place as a standard. But I also think for it to work, it should be simple and easy for the consumer. Ideally, they could mail smaller items or put their larger items in a special trash bag on collection day. Less ideally but also somewhat feasible would be requiring stores selling or repairing certain classes of things to accept the same class for recycling regardless of whether or not the customer buys something from them. We could require a recycling fee on such purchases, refundable if there is a trade-in.

anonymfus 9y ago

Repair requires both easy assembly and easy disassembly of the device, recovery/ recycling greatly benefits from improvements to the disassembly. There is no conflict.

kardos 9y ago
But it's an uphill battle to force manufacturers to make things easy to disassemble/repair as they wish to discourage both in pursuit of more profit. There's a bunch of hairy details about what constitutes "easy to disassemble", and some perhaps more legit concerns about imposing differing requirements to different products, resulting in claims that the government is trying to 'select market winners', etc. Further are the unintended consequences where the manufacturers come up with creative ways to do an end-run around the rules, eg, rental gadgets where you don't get permission to repair it, but still win in the market as they're not subject to repairable rules and thus have a cost advantage.