Where I live we have big disposal fees for tires, dishwashers, etc. Isn't that just the free market form of an incentive? Does Sweden not have garbage disposal fees?
We do but for the kind of garbage like tires and dishwashers the importing/producing/selling party is required to also take care of the costs related to the product after its life-cycle.
Effectively this trickles down to the consumer of course so you've already paid for the disposal indirectly.
http://www.swedishepa.se/Guidance/Guidance/Waste/Guidance-fo...
Recently I managed to repair an old iPod Video - it's about 25$ if you want to buy used, working one. I managed to order the parts from AliExpress for about 10$ total. I make enough money to buy myself a new music player if I wanted to, but the fact that there will be one less potentially toxic piece of garbage somewhere in a landfill feels really good.
Wow, I just went down the iFixit rabbit hole of seeing what that entails. My hat is off to you on repairing yours.
Had I been you, I feel like I would have spent the $10 on parts, destroyed the iPod while trying to repair it, then still bought the replacement item--probably something new for $100+ that gets good marks for hackability, and then failed to make full use of it.
I have iPhone 5S and the battery is kind of giving up. Still going to try to find a shop (too bad it won't be Apple official one) where they'd do a battery replacement before buying a new one.
Throwaway society stuff is generally dumped on Eastern European outlets (prime example are used cars, white goods, even clothes etc.).