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Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away. These things sho
by smashed 9mo ago
Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away.
These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.
- jaggederest 9mo agoWhy stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.
- rvba 9mo agoBecause it has to start somewhere. Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
- Waterluvian 9mo agoTrash piles is one way the actual cost of things is obfuscated and punted to future generations. A lot of people wouldn’t want this because it’s asking for stuff to become more expensive for them.
- Earw0rm 9mo agoIf people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions. That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
- teiferer 9mo agoYou don't need to get it perfect though. The right incentives get you most of the way. Perfect is the enemy of good.
- pyrolistical 9mo agoGo further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life. Any items found by garbage program will be collected and returned to manufacturer at cost. All items sold in country must be identifiable for this purpose. Importers are considered the manufacturers and must retrofit products. Then we would be getting closer to capturing the total burden to society.
- irishcoffee 9mo agoThe amount of completely useless plastic garbage that we would be sending back east would be mind-numbing. They don’t have anywhere to put that trash either.
- teiferer 9mo agoSo maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is currently just externalized) then they might start disappearing by not being produced in the first place by lack of demand. People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.
- irishcoffee 9mo ago> People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap. This is an interesting thread to pull on. Why is it so inexpensive for the east to make plastic garbage and sell it to the world?
- pyrolistical 9mo ago1. Plastic is cheap 2. Importers of cheap plastic crap are not on the hook of the eventual disposal. So the cost isn’t seen by the consumer at point of purchase but instead indirectly seen in increased taxes for garbage disposal
- lend000 9mo agoI don't hate the idea. But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale. Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle. I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.
- hippo22 9mo agoWhy is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
- throwmeoutplzdo 9mo agoIt should be at a minimum stored safely. How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
- loeg 9mo agoRegular trash is already stored safely.
- lostlogin 9mo agoThe great pacific garbage patch disagrees.
- loeg 9mo agoAs mentioned in the other thread, ocean plastics have nothing to do with landfill-disposed trash. They're mostly fishing nets waste, and at that, mostly from mismanagement by a handful of poor countries. I'll assume good faith here and that you were simply unaware of the origins of the so-called great garbage patch, but in future discussions I think it would do your arguments some credence not to bring up ocean plastics in response to discussion about landfills.
- schrodinger 9mo agoIt's an externality because the entity that sold it to you doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a beach.
- loeg 9mo agoTrash disposal (to regulated landfills, not beaches) is enormously inexpensive and increasing the cost of every item through a laborious return program doesn't improve anything.
- hammock 9mo ago> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags. But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a “litterbug” and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the manufacturers.
- tomcam 9mo agoIt was amazing being a kid back then because you could earn some decent coin returning bottles
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- foolfoolz 9mo agothere are still people today who roam neighborhoods collecting bottles and cans
- tombert 9mo agoMy neighborhood recycling occurs on Thursday night, so I take all my empty cans and put them in a clear plastic back and put them next to my trash. I do not think that the garbage people have ever gotten the cans; there is always a homeless person that will walk around and pick up the bag of empties, presumably to redeem them somewhere. I don’t have an issue with it, if they want to do what I am too lazy to do, more power to them.
- teiferer 9mo agoNowadays the homeless or other less-than-living-wage earners do that for us. You can see them everywhere in cities all over north america and europe if you pay attention.
- throw101010 9mo agoSwitzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate. The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return something. [1] https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezogener-Recyclingbeitrag.html https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezo...
- Domenic_S 9mo agoWe have it in California, just for monitors for some reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax vapes (???) https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste-recycling-fee/getting-started.htm https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste...
- array_key_first 9mo agoBig tobacco strikes again!
- Espressosaurus 9mo agoProbably originated for disposal of CRTs, due to all that leaded glass.
- consp 9mo agoSame here in the Netherlands. But only for larger appliances. Washing machines for instance. Smaller ones you have to be able to send for free but there are too many exceptions. My internet provider switched out the modems and simply said "it's yours now, for free!" Meaning: we don't want to pay for disposing of our inventory. I send it to their free postage address they use for broken items with a brick, since they are charged per kg.
- lostlogin 9mo agoI’m reading ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan’s Weisman. Last thread like this had someone recommend it (thanks!). Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a small amount we have burnt. That’s concerning.
- bloppe 9mo agoAll petroleum products come from the fossilized remains of the first trees to evolve lignin, which was tough and durable enough to allow trees to grow taller, but also too tough and durable for any other living things to decompose it. At the time, fallen trees would not rot, and the resulting buildup of wood all over the place caused all sorts of ecological problems. Many of those trees ended up buried deep underground before microbes could evolve the means to eat them, where they became fossilized and turned into coal and petroleum, which we eventually turned into plastic. Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days. I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably adapt to. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_...
- defrost 9mo agoYou are boldly and confidently at odds with the usual explanations of the formation of oil: * https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum these other sources all assert that The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, particularly planktons and algae.
- aaronblohowiak 9mo agoI think they are conflating Carboniferous Period / white rot slowing _coal_ formation with Oil formation.
- Ericson2314 9mo agoMechanism design for better trash economics is hard for the same reasons that making a good linearly typed programming language is hard. I'm not kidding :)
- jaggederest 9mo agoIt's funny because I'm working on a type theory first toy language as we speak... so you're not wrong, but I'm also foolish enough to be ambitious.
- teiferer 9mo ago"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more. Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time. That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago> Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Yeah, because they suck. Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can. If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior. Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent. People actually like having LED bulbs and seek them out. The same cannot be said, and likely never will be said, of paper straws.
- dyauspitr 9mo agoYes let’s burden any fledging company with the added bureaucracy of having to set up trash collection, disposal and recycling.
- erfgh 9mo agoIt will raise the costs and the prices, people will be unhappy and this will result in far-right populist parties taking over.
- sneak 9mo agoStopping there makes sense because plastic sitting in a landfill isn’t harmful. Lithium batteries require special hazmat procedures.
- lagniappe 9mo agoWhat if it worked like the carts at Aldi? Put something reasonable like 3-5 bucks on the sale amount, and redeem the same amount when returned.
- margalabargala 9mo agoYes, that is also how the deposit on a can of soda works.
- calvinmorrison 9mo agoi pay 25c to leave my cart in the lot
- anonym29 9mo agoYou paying a nonzero cost for creating a negative externality is an improvement compared to the status quo, in the context of this economic philosophy of discouraging production of negative externalities by aligning economic incentives.
- calvinmorrison 9mo agobig words for you. I pay for it. If i do not pay, i always return the cart.
- pests 9mo agoCongrats.
- triceratops 9mo agoSomeone else brings it back and makes 25c. Win-win. That's how any deposit program works.
- robertjpayne 9mo agoWhy though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs. It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive. 100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- gnopgnip 9mo agoI see more vape litter on the beach than bottles and cans. The deposit is part of why that is
- throwmeoutplzdo 9mo agoHow and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
- seemaze 9mo agoI just received a $10 deposit refund for returning my motorcycle battery to the battery shop.
- zelon88 9mo agoThat's a good point. In America we call this type of deposit a "core charge." The "core" is the component you return to the store to get your deposit back. This is done for components like starter motors, alternators, power steering pumps, batteries, and a variety of other components. The complex components are re-manufactured to like-new specifications and the less complex components are recycled to recover materials. The battery is a probably the only component where the potential ecological impact drives the cost of the deposit.
- mindslight 9mo ago
- tjohns 9mo agoThe problem is you can’t find any company willing to recycle them. Because of the nicotine content, I’ve heard e-waste recyclers consider them hazardous waste and refuse to touch them.
- Domenic_S 9mo agoyeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals. Here's a slightly old investigation finding 40% of ewaste being shipped off to china: https://www.ban.org/news-new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-project-finds-that-your-old-electronic-waste-gets-exported-to-developing-countries https://www.ban.org/news-new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-proje...
- mamonoleechi 9mo agovape products does not all contain nicotine, it's an ingredient you choose to add in your blend, you can choose to either vape a flavour version only, or one containing a certain amount of nicotine
- tjohns 9mo agoSure, but the people doing the recycling have no idea what's inside of it.
- SlightlyLeftPad 9mo agoThey should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst. This guy[1] explains the problem quite well. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
- bjackman 9mo agoYeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use. Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive. I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead. Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.
- contravariant 9mo ago> Trouble is that, [...], even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use. Well that is fixable, it's even one of the solutions posited here. Just make them artificially expensive by adding a deposit, which you'll get back when you return it to the shop (instead of throwing it away).
- bjackman 9mo agoBut they don't need to be taken back anywhere. They are reusable. So this just ends up back at what I said about "taxing waste".
- dan-robertson 9mo ago
- Freedumbs 9mo agoBased on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
- RulerOf 9mo agoSmoking is expensive, and people carry these in their pockets, and replace them within hours once they run dry. If there were a deposit scheme of say five bucks a piece, I'd wager you'd see >80% return rates with every purchase.
- subscribed 9mo agoThis is so incredibly simplistic it cannot be an argument in a good faith. Addictions exists. To stop smoking is HARD. Nicotine addition us on par with benzos, prescription opiates or amphetamines.
- Freedumbs 9mo agoIt's a summation. Go pick up litter for an hour or 2 in your neighborhood and categorize the rubbish you collect. When I do this (large sample) the results are: ~80% tobacco, 14% fast food waste, 5% alcohol waste, 1% other. Point being, many smokers litter. My thesis after a lot of public service is they do this because: they don't care about themselves, so why would they care about anything else?
- subscribed 9mo agoOh, I agree with you in this regard, but your take was... overtly simplistic in a crucial, key detail. Concerning litter presence in general - as much as the poor manners the distinct absence of the bins strongly amplifies the problem. At least in my country (pretty large western country) - most of the public spaces (streets, etc) lack ANY sort of the bin, and while it's easy to tuck the plastic wrapper from the food and take it home, I'd say people are much less inclined to carry a stinky cigarette but or leaking can for a couple of miles.
- pjmlp 9mo agoMost countries don't do enough at all. For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down, or call the city hall to collect it. We should go back to the old days, when electronics were repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential growth in sales.
- computersuck 9mo agohttps://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
- bojan 9mo ago> As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.
- pjmlp 9mo agoFor used toner/ink cartridges yes, for electric devices in theory yes, in practice not everywhere. However that doesn't change the disposable garbage thing, I bet most of them land in some African landfill instead of being properly recycled.
- nicbou 9mo agoThose are mandatory in Germany. Recently-ish they started forcing supermarkets and other large retailers to accept small electronics, but in practice I never managed to do it. You pretty much have to argue with the staff every time. https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany
- HighGoldstein 9mo ago> For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. Because German environmental policy is about virtue signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about disposable packaging, car regulations and city design dictated for decades by the car manufacturing lobby, combustion engine limits/bans only when said manufacturers thought they could get on the Tesla gravy train and subsequently rolled back when reality became apparent, it just goes on.
- eru 9mo ago> Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans [...] Yeah, the deposits for cans are a bit stupid: people already widely recycle aluminum (and scrap metals in general) purely for commercial reasons. No need for extra regulation there like mandatory deposits.
- lm28469 9mo agoIt's much easier to recycle things when everyone participate and bring their trash to a common place. I've lived in places with no deposits and there is much much much more littering compared to places having deposits on every types of metal/plastic beverage containers
- csomar 9mo agoI don't want to advertise for the brand but I bought a disposable "looking" vape today where they split the liquid from the core. So the end result is a very small stick but is actually re-usable and they had a re-cycling digital bin.
- flexagoon 9mo agoI've seen some universities in my country have deposit boxes specifically for single-use vapes
- hennell 9mo agoI feel like the take it back approach, just ends with the retailer/manufacturer throwing it away anyway. Looking at this device it feels like it shouldn't be hard to have a reusable base with battery and electronics, and a disposable capsule that attaches on top but is replaceable.
- xmprt 9mo agoWho bears the cost of that improvement? Either the manufacturer, the retailer, or the customer. The problem is that the waste created by vapes is a negative externality so there's no incentive to improve their design. Until the government starts requiring safe disposal of these things, we won't see a change. Think about what people used to do with old car oil before new environment protection regulations.
- comonoid 9mo agoGod bless these horrible devices are not disposed in billions every day as bottles are!
- fennecfoxy 9mo agoYou think China is gonna take all of em back?
- subscribed 9mo agoWhy should that be China's problem? Someone imported it, someone's selling it in the stores. If the price of the "disposable" is, say, £5, make the deposit £50. Suddenly all the vapes will end up back at the retailer. And make sure retailer has the financial incentive to return the used disposables and that's it. I'm confident the lawmakers have been bribed to refuse to tackle the problem, otherwise how you can explain minimum price on plastic bags but tolerating toxic landfill fires and staggering waste of lithium (recycling will inevitably br fixed soon).
- fennecfoxy 9mo agoWell realistically just ban imports. But then people will import them criminally anyway. And to your point; what if Chinese companies assist in evading import bans or customs, as they do now and have done for decades. Even in the UK, they've added restrictions to it but...surprise, surprise the Turkish/Kurdish corner shops all have a steady supply, with nothing being done about it. As a foreigner living here it's honestly pathetic how disengaged the public here are with things like that. People drive like absolute wankers, too.