20 ms·

I kind of wonder if we're looking at solving this the wrong way. Instead of mandating that manufacturers take specific steps to fix the waste problem, maybe it

I kind of wonder if we're looking at solving this the wrong way. Instead of mandating that manufacturers take specific steps to fix the waste problem, maybe it would be better to tag items at manufacture and charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream. Manufacturers could solve this by either: - Making their things easy to repair - Creating in house recycling programs - Making equipment more durable and longer lasting Any combination of the above. By picking one specific way of reducing waste, we are ignoring other factors. Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. It doesn't matter if the hardware is repairable, the device is greatly devalued at that point. Like wise, if it's super expensive to repair an iPhone, people aren't going to bother and will just replace it. By focusing on the end result -> Devices entering the waste stream <- the manufacturers are responsible for ensuring hardware gets responsibly recycled, repaired, or just doesn't break. Obviously, to make this work the cost per device entering the stream would have to be significant compared to the cost of the device. Also, the cost should be the responsibility of the maker. Currently in some place in the US, consumers pay the cost to dispose of/ recycle televisions. The result is we end up with TVs on the side of the road. Often on the way away from the dump where people refuse to pay the disposal fee then toss the TV out the door on the way home.

aembleton 6y ago
Making the producers responsible for the disposal might be the best way. I don't exactly know how it would be implemented but I'd like to see it for packaging too. Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Make them responsible for its disposal. Then they will be incentivised to reduce the amount of packaging that they produce.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Absolutely! It is far too easy to create disposable crap that ends up dumped all over the planet. I get so frustrated seeing garbage all over the place in natural places. I do think its a lot easier to focus on the higher ticket items first.
  - hippich 6y ago
    You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. If cost of throwing something away increases - may be that will make consumers choose something more reliable and serviceable. As if right now residential trash pickup service probably covers just the labor and machinery to get trash to the landfill
    - mab122 6y ago
      Sure but first there have to be products to choose from.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      They tried that with televisions in California. The result? Televisions are one of the most common forms of road trash now. Often on the way to/ from the dump. As soon as you charge someone to get rid of something, the temptation to just dump it on the side of the road increases.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        At scale this ends up being a public health issue because if you disincentivize getting rid of rotting food people get sick.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Roads, or rivers. In rural areas of Poland, it's still common to find illegal trash dumps in the woods or by the streams; any ditch will do. And there goes everything, from biowaste to furniture and television sets.
        ogre_codes 6y ago
        Yeah. One of the places I ride has a few very conspicuous dumps of obvious construction trash and it is extremely irritating. In this case, it's a bunch of asphalt roofing... very heavy and likely expensive at the dump. Its bad enough I almost think we should just eliminate all dump fees and charge everything upstream. If you charge for disposal at the time of sale, then you don't need to charge at the time of disposal. Then you remove the incentive to dump elsewhere.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Yes, with a bill for the cost of collection and at some point (after repeated failures?), a fine to motivate a course correction.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    > after repeated failures? Failure to do what?
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Failure to address the problems they are causing. Eg near me is a nice park. Every single evening the car park gets a dump of McDonalds and Wendy’s rubbish. Yes, it’s their customers and not them, but if those companies addressed their waste by creating less, making more efficient packaging or finding other ways to improve the situation, they would make way more difference than any customer could.
      - aembleton 6y ago
        That should include allowing drive thrus to stamp the car number plate onto packaging.
        esyir 6y ago
        Feels like we get closer to big brother every day, only this time it's self-monitoring.
        curryst 6y ago
        I truly do not understand people who whip trash out the window of their car. It's not even convenient to maneuver around in a car to collect trash from in there. And you have nothing to do while you sit at the gas pump, where there are conspicuously placed trash receptacles... Personally, I think they should drop the fines for littering and change it to being required to clean up litter for some duration, maybe 20 hours. Go see the fruits of your labor, and what it takes to clean up after you and what we put city workers through to clean up.
- anoncake 6y ago
  More realistically, make them pay for the disposal of as much garbage as they spread.
- corty 6y ago
  Germany has had this for years. Producers have to pay a recycling fee covering the disposal of the packaging they use. The yellow garbage can for recyclables is paid for by that fee. Also, merchants have to take back and dispose of any packaging they sell or use to ship. Hasn't really helped, amount of packaging is still increasing.
  - toper-centage 6y ago
    It's really not something we can control effectively as consumers. My supermarket sells fruits and vegetables mostly pre-packaged. Fees are not enough, we need to make this kind of barely useful plastic containers illegal. Potatoes don't need to come in plastic containers.
    - corty 6y ago
      Yes. The "make producers pay" trope is also a fallacy imho. Packaging cost is just passed through the price to the consumer. Packaging and recycling are quite cheap for most products, so unpackaged goods are barely cheaper (often even more expensive, since enviromentally conscious stuff is "premium"). And unpackaged goods are damaged more often than properly packaged ones, so they'll rot on the shelves to be thrown away in a higher proportion. Consumers like their products nice and undamaged in presentable packaging, so they will subconciously prefer packaged goods. Therefore even with a slight decrease in per-item profits, producers will choose prettier packaging. So with only a slight price increase like paying for recycling, packaging will stay. So to get rid of plastic packaging, we either need to ban it, make it vastly more expensive, far more than the consumer would want to bear, so they'd pick something unpackaged. But that is dangerous, because a cartel of producers could stay with packaging, then it is just another tax the consumer cannot avoid. Or we need to just ban certain kinds of packaging. Also, there are hurdles for the sale of unpackaged goods, e.g. meat: I cannot take my own (reusable) plastic or metal box to the butcher's and have it filled with meat because of hygiene regulations preventing the butcher from handling my box. Supermarkets also are ill-equiped to deal with unpackaged goods in great quantities, dispensers, scales and stuff needs vastly more space. Just imagine the jam-shelf taking up as much space as the produce section, with some sticky floor due to the drippings...
- LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
  Sounds quite easy to be solved by producers. Just send the trash to third-party country. Mission completed. When there is the news leaking out, producer could blame on the contractor and sue them. A nice model. Isn't it?
jka 6y ago
Your suggested strategy isn't mutually exclusive - consumers could have the right to repair and manufacturers could be billed based on the value (negative or positive) of waste material that they generate.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  What I'm suggesting is the problem isn't repairability, its stuff breaking and getting tossed. I don't care how manufacturers address this issue, but I do think it's clearly their responsibility to address it. Also, any legislation should recognize that these devices aren't just physical devices that might need to have a screen replaces. A device which you can replace the screen on, but can't get secure software for is just as worthless as one you can upgrade but can't replace the screen on.
Buttons840 6y ago
I suppose there would be some regulatory agency that takes samples and estimates the number of items disposed, and then levies the costs?
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Much trash is already processed before it's buried to remove recyclables regardless. I would suggest requiring some kind of RFID chip or other scannable code which can be checked in the refuse stream.
- bigfudge 6y ago
  Incentivise consumers by giving them a cut of the charge to manufacturers when they report trashing an item. That is, if you recycle a phone within 5 years you get £5 (or some percentage or sale price) which is charged back to the manufacturer.
tshaddox 6y ago
Or go even a step further and directly address the fundamental problem, which is externalities. "Time to entering waste stream" still isn't the fundamental "end result" to optimize. Just require that the cost of plastic and other materials includes the cost of safe disposal or recycling, just like the cost of gasoline ought to include the cost of the externalities of burning it.
- oauea 6y ago
  It's difficult to predict how much something will cost in the future. If your example was followed then a device that lasts a year and a device that lasts 10 years would have the same added cost. This is not ideal, since it may not be obvious to consumers how long the device will last.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    > If your example was followed then a device that lasts a year and a device that lasts 10 years would have the same added cost. This is not ideal, since it may not be obvious to consumers how long the device will last. That seems entirely orthogonal to me, and market forces would presumably be able to handle consumer preference for longer-lasting products (barring other market failures, like monopolies, but that's also orthogonal to the externalities of using certain materials). The device that gets thrown away in 10 years still imposes the same externality as the one that gets thrown away after one year [0], and thus I don't see any reason for changing a fee based on that. Note that the person who buys the 1-year devices every year pays 10x the "externality fees" as the person who buys the 10-year device. [0] Of course, the externalities themselves can change over time, e.g. new better recycling methods, so the externalities would have to be appraised periodically.
    - curryst 6y ago
      > Note that the person who buys the 1-year devices every year pays 10x the "externality fees" as the person who buys the 10-year device. That may not be clear at time of purchase though. You could express this as an estimated rate per year, though. Both devices have a $50 externality fee. One has a 1 year warranty, 1 has a 10 year warranty, so the first has a $50/year externality and the second has a $5/year externality. Doing it by warranty period also helps prevent claiming a device should last much longer than it does.
PeterisP 6y ago
The problem here is with the time delay between manufacturing and the waste, especially as many manufacturers are abroad and short-lived. It's feasible to enforce repairability conditions and documentation requirements before a device is sold, at the point of manufacture or import - if you're not compliant, you get excluded from the market. It's not feasible to reliably and effectively enforce consequences for manufacturers years down the road, when it's plausible that the original overseas manufacturer and the importer/wholesale distributor both have shuttered their operations. We can't wait and see how much waste will be generated from this device, we if we want to charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream, this needs to be based on an up-front guesstimate - which IMHO is a subjective metric can't be reliable and just invites corruption and abuse.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > It's feasible to enforce repairability conditions and documentation requirements before a device is sold, at the point of manufacture or import - if you're not compliant, you get excluded from the market. Yes. Someone else pointed out just charging for waste at the time of manufacture/ import and that is an excellent way to resolve this. Though companies which reclaim/ recycle old products should get credit for that effort as well.
  - corty 6y ago
    In Germany, producers or importers of electric and electronic devices are already paying for collection and recycling or disposal. https://www.stiftung-ear.de/de/startseite https://www.stiftung-ear.de/de/startseite Didn't reduce the volume of the respective waste and didn't prolong lifetime of products in the slightest.
stretchcat 6y ago
> 1) Making their things easy to repair. 2) Creating in house recycling programs. 3) Making equipment more durable and longer lasting The first and third should not be on equal footing with the second. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is meant to be applied in that order. Many environmental crimes can be hidden in a recycling program. Many products are not truly recyclable, but tell consumers they are. Sometimes they are only partially recyclable, or other times the recycling is technically possible but economically infeasible and consequently doesn't actually happen. Corporations know this and have promoted recycling to equal footing as reuse and reduction. They would rather people consume more and casually throw broken products into their recycling bin, naively believing they're being responsible consumers.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Many environmental crimes can be hidden in a recycling program. Yep But by the same token, many materials in consumer electronics are mined unethically and/ or end up causing toxic pollution. If companies can effectively recycle these products without, a great amount of environmental (and human) damage can be avoided. I would argue that having a responsible battery reclamation process is more important that having questionably repairable devices. Also, while we're being cynical here. If we make a device "Repairable" that doesn't mean it's going to ever actually get repaired. If it doesn't make economic sense from the end user perspective, repairable products end up in the trash. This is particularly true in this world where manufacturers stop releasing software for old hardware. (Or worse, remotely brick old hardware)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Exactly. And the most impactful solution is also one incompatible with growth-based consumer economy: buy less stuff. Recycling won't be an answer even if, through some miracle, everything would became fully recyclable in practice. The reason is that most materials cannot be recycled indefinitely - they degrade. On top of that, turning trash into input material usually consumes some non-recoverable matter (e.g. chemicals to clean and process it). Then there's production waste that isn't recoverable too. All of this adds up into continuous churn. So with recycling, instead of a Mine->Manufacture->Use->Trash pipeline, you have... Mine->Manufacture->Use->Trash pipeline where a fraction of matter makes a cycle from Trash to Manufacture. Two perhaps not immediately obvious facts: one, that fraction of matter that gets recycled becomes a fraction of a fraction on its next cycle - which is a series that converges to 0. Two, none of this matters as long the pipeline itself is going through exponential growth. You may slow it a little, but it's still exponential.
toper-centage 6y ago
For a short while, it was super trivial and cheap to fix smartphones. Lots of little shops would have spare or alternative parts for popular models. Today, it's extremely hard and expensive to do so. If we would get "calorie labels" on smartphones using iFixit reparavility scores, I'm sure maybe people would be influenced by them.
- curryst 6y ago
  They should have to include a list of prices for common repairs. I know a few people who would probably shop based on the price to repair a broken screen. We're at the point where repairs are an expected part of a phones lifecycle. Battery replacements are basically required now unless you want to buy a new phone every year or two. We really should start adding info about that to packaging.
sitharus 6y ago
I think all products should come with a disposal fee incorporated, based on the reuse/recycling/compostability ability of the product - with items that are fully biodegradable at home and landfill having no fee at all. This would drive producers to use the most degradable packaging possible so they can drive down the cost of their products. It would also help reduce the problem of producers combining two recyclable plastics in to a single non-recyclable whole. I'd also like to see a rebate program at recyclers for big-box goods. People are more likely to do the right thing if there's an incentive. Probably paid for by a fee on sale, but again scaled based on recyclability (and possibly repairability / waste from repairs)
- Someone 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee shows Some states in the USA have something like that. The EU has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni.... It doesn’t pay consumers for returning items, but does make it easier. Larger shops _have_ to take in old equipment for free, for example (for smaller electronics even if you aren’t a customer) In some (¿all?) EU countries, if you have an item (washing machine, television) delivered to your house, the deliverer must take in a similar item, working or not, for free. That makes recycling easier than disposing of the item yourself.
tomc1985 6y ago
The problem with the latter two options is that it allows manufacturers to continue with proprietary DRM and anti-consumer dickery. The waste issue is important, but so is not invalidating physical things because of planned obsolescence, or that the manufacturer decided to stop reporting it.
cafxx 6y ago
> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. I sincerely hope the EU will actually do something about that as well. As you point out, it makes no sense to allow to repair something that receives no support for its software components. What I hope they will do is actually mandating that, if an item is sold as having networking capabilities, the manufacturer is required to maintain (as in, provide security updates for) the software required for the item to continue working as sold, at least for the intended lifetime of the item (that should be explicitly stated by the manufacturer). Maybe exceptions could be granted - after a minimum period of mandatory first-party support - if all code required to build the firmware was open sourced.
jeswin 6y ago
> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. This is a mistruth (add: unintentional I'm sure) - and I hope people stop repeating this. I'll explain in detail. 1. Older versions of Android aren't crippled in the way an older iOS version is. On iOS for instance, Safari is tied to the iOS, while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version. Any phone running Android 7 (or maybe even 6) would run the most Google and non-Google services without any problems. 2. Most good Android phones such as those from Samsung or Google get 3 years of updates. If you have a Galaxy S8 from Apr 2017, you're still receiving updates in 2021. 3. Finally you have LineageOS. If you choose the phone correctly, you can potentially have very long term support with the excellent LineageOS. Now this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for most people on HN it's fairly trivial to do.
- tpxl 6y ago
  > while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version Apps are compiled for target SDKs and if your phone is too old the apps wont work.
  - jeswin 6y ago
    You're right, I should have been clearer. I meant the Google Apps bundle of essential apps (especially the Web Browser).
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  LineageOS regularly ends support for old devices. Its builds are made by a handful of volunteers in their spare time, and any of those volunteers may lose interest and walk away. Because Android building is so byzantine, it is not trivial for someone else to come along and restore support for an abandoned phone. The LineageOS team has repeatedly emphasized that they do not owe anyone long-term support, so please stop recommending it as such. This is one of the reasons for interest in the PinePhone: it is now supported by the mainline kernel and much easier to build for in perpetuity than an Android device.
  - 6y ago
s1artibartfast 6y ago
In addition to the other concerns, I would say the biggest problem would be tracking and recording the time to disposal. Most electronics end up in a drawer somewhere and for tho that don’t, Who is digging through the trash to log them in this scenario
RMPR 6y ago
> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. A little nitpick but, for Google's phones it's way more than that.

aembleton 6y ago

Making the producers responsible for the disposal might be the best way. I don't exactly know how it would be implemented but I'd like to see it for packaging too. Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Make them responsible for its disposal. Then they will be incentivised to reduce the amount of packaging that they produce.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Absolutely! It is far too easy to create disposable crap that ends up dumped all over the planet. I get so frustrated seeing garbage all over the place in natural places. I do think its a lot easier to focus on the higher ticket items first.
- hippich 6y ago
  You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. If cost of throwing something away increases - may be that will make consumers choose something more reliable and serviceable. As if right now residential trash pickup service probably covers just the labor and machinery to get trash to the landfill
  - mab122 6y ago
    Sure but first there have to be products to choose from.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    They tried that with televisions in California. The result? Televisions are one of the most common forms of road trash now. Often on the way to/ from the dump. As soon as you charge someone to get rid of something, the temptation to just dump it on the side of the road increases.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      At scale this ends up being a public health issue because if you disincentivize getting rid of rotting food people get sick.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Roads, or rivers. In rural areas of Poland, it's still common to find illegal trash dumps in the woods or by the streams; any ditch will do. And there goes everything, from biowaste to furniture and television sets.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        Yeah. One of the places I ride has a few very conspicuous dumps of obvious construction trash and it is extremely irritating. In this case, it's a bunch of asphalt roofing... very heavy and likely expensive at the dump. Its bad enough I almost think we should just eliminate all dump fees and charge everything upstream. If you charge for disposal at the time of sale, then you don't need to charge at the time of disposal. Then you remove the incentive to dump elsewhere.
lostlogin 6y ago
> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Yes, with a bill for the cost of collection and at some point (after repeated failures?), a fine to motivate a course correction.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > after repeated failures? Failure to do what?
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Failure to address the problems they are causing. Eg near me is a nice park. Every single evening the car park gets a dump of McDonalds and Wendy’s rubbish. Yes, it’s their customers and not them, but if those companies addressed their waste by creating less, making more efficient packaging or finding other ways to improve the situation, they would make way more difference than any customer could.
    - aembleton 6y ago
      That should include allowing drive thrus to stamp the car number plate onto packaging.
      - esyir 6y ago
        Feels like we get closer to big brother every day, only this time it's self-monitoring.
      - curryst 6y ago
        I truly do not understand people who whip trash out the window of their car. It's not even convenient to maneuver around in a car to collect trash from in there. And you have nothing to do while you sit at the gas pump, where there are conspicuously placed trash receptacles... Personally, I think they should drop the fines for littering and change it to being required to clean up litter for some duration, maybe 20 hours. Go see the fruits of your labor, and what it takes to clean up after you and what we put city workers through to clean up.
anoncake 6y ago
More realistically, make them pay for the disposal of as much garbage as they spread.
corty 6y ago
Germany has had this for years. Producers have to pay a recycling fee covering the disposal of the packaging they use. The yellow garbage can for recyclables is paid for by that fee. Also, merchants have to take back and dispose of any packaging they sell or use to ship. Hasn't really helped, amount of packaging is still increasing.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  It's really not something we can control effectively as consumers. My supermarket sells fruits and vegetables mostly pre-packaged. Fees are not enough, we need to make this kind of barely useful plastic containers illegal. Potatoes don't need to come in plastic containers.
  - corty 6y ago
    Yes. The "make producers pay" trope is also a fallacy imho. Packaging cost is just passed through the price to the consumer. Packaging and recycling are quite cheap for most products, so unpackaged goods are barely cheaper (often even more expensive, since enviromentally conscious stuff is "premium"). And unpackaged goods are damaged more often than properly packaged ones, so they'll rot on the shelves to be thrown away in a higher proportion. Consumers like their products nice and undamaged in presentable packaging, so they will subconciously prefer packaged goods. Therefore even with a slight decrease in per-item profits, producers will choose prettier packaging. So with only a slight price increase like paying for recycling, packaging will stay. So to get rid of plastic packaging, we either need to ban it, make it vastly more expensive, far more than the consumer would want to bear, so they'd pick something unpackaged. But that is dangerous, because a cartel of producers could stay with packaging, then it is just another tax the consumer cannot avoid. Or we need to just ban certain kinds of packaging. Also, there are hurdles for the sale of unpackaged goods, e.g. meat: I cannot take my own (reusable) plastic or metal box to the butcher's and have it filled with meat because of hygiene regulations preventing the butcher from handling my box. Supermarkets also are ill-equiped to deal with unpackaged goods in great quantities, dispensers, scales and stuff needs vastly more space. Just imagine the jam-shelf taking up as much space as the produce section, with some sticky floor due to the drippings...
LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
Sounds quite easy to be solved by producers. Just send the trash to third-party country. Mission completed. When there is the news leaking out, producer could blame on the contractor and sue them. A nice model. Isn't it?

jka 6y ago

Your suggested strategy isn't mutually exclusive - consumers could have the right to repair and manufacturers could be billed based on the value (negative or positive) of waste material that they generate.

ogre_codes 6y ago
What I'm suggesting is the problem isn't repairability, its stuff breaking and getting tossed. I don't care how manufacturers address this issue, but I do think it's clearly their responsibility to address it. Also, any legislation should recognize that these devices aren't just physical devices that might need to have a screen replaces. A device which you can replace the screen on, but can't get secure software for is just as worthless as one you can upgrade but can't replace the screen on.

Buttons840 6y ago

I suppose there would be some regulatory agency that takes samples and estimates the number of items disposed, and then levies the costs?

ogre_codes 6y ago
Much trash is already processed before it's buried to remove recyclables regardless. I would suggest requiring some kind of RFID chip or other scannable code which can be checked in the refuse stream.
bigfudge 6y ago
Incentivise consumers by giving them a cut of the charge to manufacturers when they report trashing an item. That is, if you recycle a phone within 5 years you get £5 (or some percentage or sale price) which is charged back to the manufacturer.

tshaddox 6y ago

Or go even a step further and directly address the fundamental problem, which is externalities. "Time to entering waste stream" still isn't the fundamental "end result" to optimize. Just require that the cost of plastic and other materials includes the cost of safe disposal or recycling, just like the cost of gasoline ought to include the cost of the externalities of burning it.

oauea 6y ago
It's difficult to predict how much something will cost in the future. If your example was followed then a device that lasts a year and a device that lasts 10 years would have the same added cost. This is not ideal, since it may not be obvious to consumers how long the device will last.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  > If your example was followed then a device that lasts a year and a device that lasts 10 years would have the same added cost. This is not ideal, since it may not be obvious to consumers how long the device will last. That seems entirely orthogonal to me, and market forces would presumably be able to handle consumer preference for longer-lasting products (barring other market failures, like monopolies, but that's also orthogonal to the externalities of using certain materials). The device that gets thrown away in 10 years still imposes the same externality as the one that gets thrown away after one year [0], and thus I don't see any reason for changing a fee based on that. Note that the person who buys the 1-year devices every year pays 10x the "externality fees" as the person who buys the 10-year device. [0] Of course, the externalities themselves can change over time, e.g. new better recycling methods, so the externalities would have to be appraised periodically.
  - curryst 6y ago
    > Note that the person who buys the 1-year devices every year pays 10x the "externality fees" as the person who buys the 10-year device. That may not be clear at time of purchase though. You could express this as an estimated rate per year, though. Both devices have a $50 externality fee. One has a 1 year warranty, 1 has a 10 year warranty, so the first has a $50/year externality and the second has a $5/year externality. Doing it by warranty period also helps prevent claiming a device should last much longer than it does.

PeterisP 6y ago

The problem here is with the time delay between manufacturing and the waste, especially as many manufacturers are abroad and short-lived. It's feasible to enforce repairability conditions and documentation requirements before a device is sold, at the point of manufacture or import - if you're not compliant, you get excluded from the market. It's not feasible to reliably and effectively enforce consequences for manufacturers years down the road, when it's plausible that the original overseas manufacturer and the importer/wholesale distributor both have shuttered their operations. We can't wait and see how much waste will be generated from this device, we if we want to charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream, this needs to be based on an up-front guesstimate - which IMHO is a subjective metric can't be reliable and just invites corruption and abuse.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> It's feasible to enforce repairability conditions and documentation requirements before a device is sold, at the point of manufacture or import - if you're not compliant, you get excluded from the market. Yes. Someone else pointed out just charging for waste at the time of manufacture/ import and that is an excellent way to resolve this. Though companies which reclaim/ recycle old products should get credit for that effort as well.
- corty 6y ago
  In Germany, producers or importers of electric and electronic devices are already paying for collection and recycling or disposal. https://www.stiftung-ear.de/de/startseite https://www.stiftung-ear.de/de/startseite Didn't reduce the volume of the respective waste and didn't prolong lifetime of products in the slightest.

stretchcat 6y ago

> 1) Making their things easy to repair. 2) Creating in house recycling programs. 3) Making equipment more durable and longer lasting The first and third should not be on equal footing with the second. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is meant to be applied in that order. Many environmental crimes can be hidden in a recycling program. Many products are not truly recyclable, but tell consumers they are. Sometimes they are only partially recyclable, or other times the recycling is technically possible but economically infeasible and consequently doesn't actually happen. Corporations know this and have promoted recycling to equal footing as reuse and reduction. They would rather people consume more and casually throw broken products into their recycling bin, naively believing they're being responsible consumers.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Many environmental crimes can be hidden in a recycling program. Yep But by the same token, many materials in consumer electronics are mined unethically and/ or end up causing toxic pollution. If companies can effectively recycle these products without, a great amount of environmental (and human) damage can be avoided. I would argue that having a responsible battery reclamation process is more important that having questionably repairable devices. Also, while we're being cynical here. If we make a device "Repairable" that doesn't mean it's going to ever actually get repaired. If it doesn't make economic sense from the end user perspective, repairable products end up in the trash. This is particularly true in this world where manufacturers stop releasing software for old hardware. (Or worse, remotely brick old hardware)
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Exactly. And the most impactful solution is also one incompatible with growth-based consumer economy: buy less stuff. Recycling won't be an answer even if, through some miracle, everything would became fully recyclable in practice. The reason is that most materials cannot be recycled indefinitely - they degrade. On top of that, turning trash into input material usually consumes some non-recoverable matter (e.g. chemicals to clean and process it). Then there's production waste that isn't recoverable too. All of this adds up into continuous churn. So with recycling, instead of a Mine->Manufacture->Use->Trash pipeline, you have... Mine->Manufacture->Use->Trash pipeline where a fraction of matter makes a cycle from Trash to Manufacture. Two perhaps not immediately obvious facts: one, that fraction of matter that gets recycled becomes a fraction of a fraction on its next cycle - which is a series that converges to 0. Two, none of this matters as long the pipeline itself is going through exponential growth. You may slow it a little, but it's still exponential.

toper-centage 6y ago

For a short while, it was super trivial and cheap to fix smartphones. Lots of little shops would have spare or alternative parts for popular models. Today, it's extremely hard and expensive to do so. If we would get "calorie labels" on smartphones using iFixit reparavility scores, I'm sure maybe people would be influenced by them.

curryst 6y ago
They should have to include a list of prices for common repairs. I know a few people who would probably shop based on the price to repair a broken screen. We're at the point where repairs are an expected part of a phones lifecycle. Battery replacements are basically required now unless you want to buy a new phone every year or two. We really should start adding info about that to packaging.

sitharus 6y ago

I think all products should come with a disposal fee incorporated, based on the reuse/recycling/compostability ability of the product - with items that are fully biodegradable at home and landfill having no fee at all. This would drive producers to use the most degradable packaging possible so they can drive down the cost of their products. It would also help reduce the problem of producers combining two recyclable plastics in to a single non-recyclable whole. I'd also like to see a rebate program at recyclers for big-box goods. People are more likely to do the right thing if there's an incentive. Probably paid for by a fee on sale, but again scaled based on recyclability (and possibly repairability / waste from repairs)

Someone 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee shows Some states in the USA have something like that. The EU has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni.... It doesn’t pay consumers for returning items, but does make it easier. Larger shops _have_ to take in old equipment for free, for example (for smaller electronics even if you aren’t a customer) In some (¿all?) EU countries, if you have an item (washing machine, television) delivered to your house, the deliverer must take in a similar item, working or not, for free. That makes recycling easier than disposing of the item yourself.

tomc1985 6y ago

The problem with the latter two options is that it allows manufacturers to continue with proprietary DRM and anti-consumer dickery. The waste issue is important, but so is not invalidating physical things because of planned obsolescence, or that the manufacturer decided to stop reporting it.

cafxx 6y ago

> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. I sincerely hope the EU will actually do something about that as well. As you point out, it makes no sense to allow to repair something that receives no support for its software components. What I hope they will do is actually mandating that, if an item is sold as having networking capabilities, the manufacturer is required to maintain (as in, provide security updates for) the software required for the item to continue working as sold, at least for the intended lifetime of the item (that should be explicitly stated by the manufacturer). Maybe exceptions could be granted - after a minimum period of mandatory first-party support - if all code required to build the firmware was open sourced.

jeswin 6y ago

> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. This is a mistruth (add: unintentional I'm sure) - and I hope people stop repeating this. I'll explain in detail. 1. Older versions of Android aren't crippled in the way an older iOS version is. On iOS for instance, Safari is tied to the iOS, while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version. Any phone running Android 7 (or maybe even 6) would run the most Google and non-Google services without any problems. 2. Most good Android phones such as those from Samsung or Google get 3 years of updates. If you have a Galaxy S8 from Apr 2017, you're still receiving updates in 2021. 3. Finally you have LineageOS. If you choose the phone correctly, you can potentially have very long term support with the excellent LineageOS. Now this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for most people on HN it's fairly trivial to do.

tpxl 6y ago
> while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version Apps are compiled for target SDKs and if your phone is too old the apps wont work.
- jeswin 6y ago
  You're right, I should have been clearer. I meant the Google Apps bundle of essential apps (especially the Web Browser).
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
LineageOS regularly ends support for old devices. Its builds are made by a handful of volunteers in their spare time, and any of those volunteers may lose interest and walk away. Because Android building is so byzantine, it is not trivial for someone else to come along and restore support for an abandoned phone. The LineageOS team has repeatedly emphasized that they do not owe anyone long-term support, so please stop recommending it as such. This is one of the reasons for interest in the PinePhone: it is now supported by the mainline kernel and much easier to build for in perpetuity than an Android device.
- 6y ago

s1artibartfast 6y ago

In addition to the other concerns, I would say the biggest problem would be tracking and recording the time to disposal. Most electronics end up in a drawer somewhere and for tho that don’t, Who is digging through the trash to log them in this scenario

RMPR 6y ago

> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. A little nitpick but, for Google's phones it's way more than that.