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Comment by Newtopian | Hacker News Reader

Disposable goods are not cheap, they are in fact very expensive. They are perceived as cheap because a very large portion of the true cost is hidden, externalized. Creators have no incentive to create things that are easily recyclable because they are not responsable for what happens to it at the end of it's life. To close the loop one must integrate the economics of garbage management as an integral part of the product being designed on equal footing with production, distribution etc. Taxing pro-rated to the recyclability of a product, tax break on repairs, second-hand markets and other means to give a product a longer life. Make practices like planned obsolencence illegal, criminal even. I'm no expert but there are a great many solutions, implementing them however might require a lot more political good-will than most of our leaders are ready to spend.

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These moves are also a bet on the future: a bet that the future cost of disposal stays high, so that increased costs earlier in the lifetime are justified.

The future is discounted for a reason, however. The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward from investment today. It takes not just political good will, but a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now instead of later.

For planned obsolescence: here's another way to look at it. For a designed lifetime, we can coordinate across all the inputs to a product and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity. If we don't have a designed lifetime, the actual lifetime will only be as long as the shortest-lived part that can't be economically replaced. Making everything economical to replace means compromising on design, and often quality: a phone that plugged together like Lego would be substantially worse than our current integrated devices in weight and size.

(The idea of building something without a designed lifetime seems a little bit crazy to me, from an engineering perspective. It frames a whole bunch of decisions and trade-offs. I think it's better to put stuff into more people's hands rather than keep things expensive and exclusionary, which would undoubtedly be a side-effect of outlawing designed lifetimes.)

"The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward..."

For how long can this be true when there are finite-easily-accessible resources?

Don't underestimate how many resources there are. There's a lot of stuff in the Earth's crust, and the sun is going to be shining for a while yet.

> and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity

That's the crux of the matter. What's the "right" tradeoff?

With things like waste disposal an externality, often times the "right" tradeoff is one that encourages frequent replacement. At best, this encourages a materialistic (wasteful) culture. At it's most cynical, this is a way of padding corporate profits by encouraging recurring revenue.

Don't get me wrong -- this is the rational choice when all incentives are towards maximizing shareholder value. I think the question is what principles do we want guiding the choice of the right tradeoff?

We can make a moral distinction between making practical tradeoffs and intentionally engineering a product to fail so its user has to buy another one.

> It takes...a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now...

That's some incredible pretzel logic, framing the practice of creating extra garbage to make a quick buck as "investing in the future."

- how do you prove planned obsolencence? That sounds like a witch hunt waiting to happen

- integrating garbage management as part of the product - so that entail would subsidies for biodegradable and taxes for unrecycleable materials? Lets say a coke bottle is recycleable. It is now up to the consumer to recycle it. A television has many parts, some unrecycleable, some recycleable. Its often more expensive for a consumer to recycle it than to just dump it.

In the US, many states require the consumer pay a deposit upon purchase of a Coke bottle. On return, this is refunded.

- how do you prove planned obsolencence? That sounds like a witch hunt waiting to happen

It's trivial to prove for for e.g. inkjet printers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#Programme....

The Phoebus lightbulb cartel is probably the first group of manufacturers to actually do planned obsolescence http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbu...

We have to question whether it is feasible to implement a circular economy in our current old-fashioned system.

If you suppose this is the only system possible then you must assume so and fight within those constraints.

I propose, though, that new types of high-tech economic/political/social protocols/structures/systems can make it much more practical to achieve these types of goals, such as costing in externalities.

The problem as I see it is that we still run our society _manually_ like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. New decentralization technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. show that it is possible to begin to automatically organize and regulate on a large scale.

These more sophisticated high-tech systems, when integrated into society, will make it much more realistic to track and integrate external effects into a company's bottom line, for example.

This requires changing overall core social organization into a high-tech process.

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