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Comment by stefco_ | Hacker News Reader

I hope at some point we'll start including recycling/disassembly and replacement externalities into price somehow. I don't know how you would do that in a fair way, but it is frustrating that there aren't a ton of corrective market forces to encourage manufacturers to make highly reusable, repairable, recyclable devices.

All of this electronics churn is environmentally terrible, and it's frustrating that, as with carbon energy products, the entire world is forced to pay for the environmental externalities rather than the actual tech users.

You can make an accelerationist argument about not discouraging tech development and dealing with the problems using more efficient tech in the future, I guess. But I'd honestly rather have electronics cost a bit more and know that manufacturers had a financial interest in maintaining rather than replacing.

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The main issue is this: We need to reduce consumption overall!

It is well known that Americans consume far more natural resources and live much less sustainably than people from any other large country of the world. “A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil,” reports the Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford, adding that the average American will drain as many resources as 35 natives of India and consume 53 times more goods and services than someone from China.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt...

This is a very bad extrapolation that doesn’t acount for the constant increase in consumption in those countries, whereas the US consumption leveled.

I actually don't even want to compare numbers or countries directly. I just want to remind that consumption in Western countries exceeds available resources by far. We're bankrupting the planet, it's the wrong path and it simply can't last.

Well, yes and no.

We've finally cracked the nut with renewable resources. Its cost a great deal of environmental damage, but I see no good progression to go from hunter-gatherer to high tech. That's just entropy laws.

Now, it could certainly be argued that certain trajectories should be followed and aren't. But progress costs.

In Europe, any thing one buys must be guaranteed by the supplier for 2 years. If one could just push that up to, say, 4 years, it'd nice....

Warranty for 6 months, right to complain for 18 months after that.

The difference is the burden of proof. For the initial 6 months, the manufacturer/store has to prove the item was not somehow defective from the beginning, due to manufacturing errors or similar mishaps, even if it broke 5 months and 29 days after the sale.

In the following 18 months, the burden of proof shifts to the buyer, to prove that the fault did not happen to due mistreatment during (ab)use of the item.

That's how it is in Denmark, at least.

Doesn't that make sense, though? If you have a physical product that you use daily, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to ask how a failure after 700+ uses (or many, many more) can be confirmed as a manufacturing issue and not use [over|mis|ab]use.

How can a user prove they didn't misuse an item, though?

That would depend on the specific item, I'm sure. For example you can tell if a phone has ever been wet because there will be signs on the interior. No situation will be perfect but at some point the burden of proof has to shift from the company to the user. I think six months is probably a bit soon but sometime between that and two years seems reasonable to me.

Six months, not two years. I personally tend to ignore warranty periods of under a year anyways, since products with such short warranty periods (30-90 days is common here in the US) tend to be cheaper to replace than to get warranty service on anyways.

On the other hand, warranty here in the US can be annoying to deal with anyways--I've failed twice at getting replacements for Samsung flash memory cards that have been in production for less than their warranty period. There a some problems (microsd becoming read-only) that can't be caused by user misuse. That might be more reflective of Samsung as a company, however I've had similar issues with other companies as well.

Yes, I think it does. I find it a reasonable balance between weeding out early failures and not letting customers get away with abusing their devices and still claiming a warranty repair.

I don't think overuses should be a reasonable cause for defects within 2 years. If 99.9% of users use it less than X, then covering the last 0.1% is not a significant issue.

The top 5% on the other hand are IMO within normal usage patterns.

The exceptions seem to focus on using consumer products like a coffee maker in an industrial setting. But, 2 years is rather short term to be replacing these devices not to mention the overhead of a regular breakdown > replacement process.

In theory maybe. In practice handing it in to a seller with for example a faulty PSU or dead backlight your implicit claim as the buyer is that it was not manufactured to spec (to last at least those two years) and they would have a hard time fighting that claim unless there are obvious traces of mechanical abuse.

I don't know the detail, but the way you put it, "prove that the fault did not happen to due mistreatment" basically means that user has to prove the he didn't do something. I can prove that I did something, but prove I didn't do, that's a whole lot different.

That's why some manufacturers put water "sensors" in cellphones; once water enters, the "sensor" (in quotes because it's not an electronic part) changes its state forever revealing that water poured into the phone even well after it has been cleaned and dried.

In isolation, maybe, but those 2 additional years are hardly free.

... controlling for income distribution?

Make trees drop fewer leaves for the environment!

In Poland, and I believe it's an EU regulation, every seller is obligated to take your old appliances when you buy new ones in the same category. For example when you buy a freezer you can drop your old one for recycling free of charge (so the cost is included in the retail price).

Sometimes it's even used in marketing ("bring your old TV, get new one 10% cheaper"), maybe because they need to meet some quotas so they have to actively convince people to bring their old stuff.

I'm not sure what happens with the items they collect, but hopefully it's shipped to some recycling center instead of getting dropped in a landfill, which would be the case when consumers didn't have this option.

> In Poland, and I believe it's an EU regulation, every seller is obligated to take your old appliances when you buy new ones in the same category. For example when you buy a freezer you can drop your old one for recycling free of charge (so the cost is included in the retail price).

In Italy is the same. Keep in mind that the retail price includes a tax to cover the costs of recycling, so it is not really free :-). The amount depends on the type of appliance. This too should come from an EU directive.

I think in Belgium they specify how much the recycling premium is when buying something new.

> Keep in mind that the retail price includes a tax to cover the costs of recycling, so it is not really free :-)

They didn’t say they thought it was free. In fact they said

> so the cost is included in the retail price

And you quoted that!

Ops ! You're right. Too little coffee I guess :-)

What happens if you do not want to return your old appliance when you buy a new one? Do you still pay the recycling tax?

yes :(

The recycling tax is for the product you're buying, so it doesn't matter if you're bringing one to be recycled or not.

Yes, but you also have the value of the old device.

This is very common in the US, although there is no regulation governing it. Most places will take your old appliances away when they deliver your new ones.

Heck, our power company will pay you $35 if you recycle a working fridge or freezer through them. With them coming out to pick it up for free. The idea being that a lot of people stick their old, inefficient fridge in the basement or garage when they get a new one and it sucks down a lot of power.

I'm surprised they don't want you to pay for more electricity. Good on them

In Michigan at least, these programs are funded by the taxpayer. $Power_Company gets to make a profit on every crappy fridge they haul away or every LED lightbulb they install.

They didn't start doing that of their own accord.

If the truck has to come back after making deliveries it's usually better to load it up with scrap metal than to send it back empty.

It's a pretty damn good example of the market solving a problem by itself.

This only really falls apart when the cost of new stuff is less than the cost of recycling. High wages are not good for recycling/repair businesses.

When you get new tires on your car most places will take the old ones for free. They get recycled into filler for lower quality rubbers (you can't re-vulcanize rubber, it's like un-baking a cake)

> I believe it's an EU regulation

Yep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni...

Nope. A directive is not a regulation. A directive means the member states must implement into their own law a comparable version of the directive. A regulation is when the countries must enforce the EU regulation as if it were their own law.

(The difference is marked in the case of the General Data Protection Regulation, which will become enforceable in a few months. There is no wiggleroom in interpreting it, compared to its predecessor, the Data Protection Directive, where each member state has implemented their own version, with varying levels of data protection.)

I always thought that a regulation along the lines of "if you sell it, you must give the customer the ability to dispose of it" would be nice. And, yes, I do think that means Amazon would have to have some sort of bricks-and-mortar operation: at minimum there must be a shop owned by someone, which Amazon has a deal with, that you'd be able to drop your discarded Amajunk off at.

Also, I also think we should have a carbon recapture tax added to gasoline, but no one I know really wants to pay an additional tax of 7-10$/gallon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili..., which, in the EU, led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni..., which puts the responsibility on manufacturers, rather than sellers. That takes care of that Amazon problem.

As always in the EU, the exact effect of these differs by country (EU directives describe goals, and leave the means to get there to member countries)

Amazon wouldn't need a brick-and-mortar operation. Just log into your account and print out a postpaid shipping label. They keep your purchase history; so, you could look up the order and click a link next to the item. There are far more Post Offices than any shops they could make a deal with.

Wait, does Amazon ship the junk back to China too and then China disassembles it and ships the elements back to their respective holes in the ground?

It seems like a better idea would be to just have Amazon give you a voucher for the recycling fees in your local community.

Most "Recycled" electronics are sent back to china at least in part

Edit: summary at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste_in_China

Sure but it seems a little inefficient to send them individually is my point.

You never ship them individually, you use containers. And it's probably quite efficient: the shipping boats have to return to China anyway to get more stuff.

It's basically free.

There's far more stuff coming from China to the west than vice-versa. A ship can't travel empty, but needs to be ballasted with an appropriate weight of cargo. If there isn't enough booked cargo on the return leg to China, they'll make up the weight with scrap metal or rubble.

I'm referring to the shipping of the broken goods to amazon individually. That's the part I'm critical of.

Sure, send them back to China, I don't care, it just seems silly that we would all just mail our broken junk back one piece at a time to AMazon who then puts it in a container and sends it to China.

Better to take it to alocal recycling facility for them to send it en masse. Have Amazon give you a voucher to handle the recycling fee.

Trucks coming from the Amazon warehouse also have to come back.

Still, Amazon just gifted me an item when I tried to return it since I ordered it by mistake (and I was honest on the form). I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to avoid recycling returns too.

China is trying to shut this game down because it is bad for their own environment.

This is good. It also appears that a larger share of US e-waste is actually handled in the US then I remembered (its been trending up since the 1990s i think). I have no idea of the numbers but environmental regulations be equal (which they are not but we can one day they are) this seems more efficient to my brain.

Actually, that is more about rare earth elements being recovered, ever since the Chinese supply scare a few years ago (which is also related to the environment as rare earth processing is incredibly dirty if done cheaply). Anyways, there is a lot more effort to recycle and re-use these elements for economic reasons.

Tax on gasoline like that would only affect the poorest of citizens. Charge it on shares of gasoline producing companies and car companies so their share holders scream at them to move to less carbon-y energy creation mechanisms.

The end result would be the same, they would just pass the costs to the consumer.

The poorest citizens don't own cars.

It does depend on where you live. In US they probably do. In EU countries they probably don't.

But they get their groceries from stores that deliver goods via trucks.

Actually they are the only one owning them because they need them

They live outside the cities where housing is more affordable but there's no public transport

The poorest citizens certainly don't own the most extravagant of all luxury items, homes near (decent) transit.

A metro's most car-dependent are its working poor, who need to live the furthest away from the downtown core to afford housing.

There is a solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap_and_dividend

Not really, we have exactly those gasoline prices in Germany and Denmark, and it's actually quite okay.

The poor just take transit or bike.

The problem with the US is that outside of a handful of the biggest cities, transit is extremely lacking and the roads aren't bike-friendly at all. It's very difficult to hold down a job without access to a car, especially low wage jobs like retail that change the schedule around on short notice all the time and are often outside the operating hours of transit. You can also get a used car for around $1000, insurance can be had for $30/month, and gas is cheap so owning a car isn't nearly as expensive as some countries. I still drive a car I bought 5 years ago for $1500, it's over 20 years old now but runs fine.

Even some of the big cities (like LA) have woefully lacking transit and everyone just sits in gridlocked traffic for multiple hours every day.

While everything you wrote may be true, the US still seems to be exceptionally bad by international standards. We have a lot of rural communities here in the UK as well, where people also need private transport because the public alternatives are lacking. But our vehicles are a fraction of the size (and have a fraction of the fuel consumption) of some of the giant monstrosities that seems to be much more common in the US, and so even though our fuel prices are much higher (almost entirely due to higher taxes), people living in rural communities still manage to get around. The same is true across much of Europe.

While running a car may be cheap in financial terms in the US, environmentally and in terms of scarce natural resources it is anything but, and at some point the US is going to have to deal with the social acceptability of one person driving an enormous vehicle for long distances many times per week or within our lifetimes there are going to be serious problems.

> Also, I also think we should have a carbon recapture tax added to gasoline

That can't work for any country that has "country".

In the US, the vast majority of goods are delivered using trucks that burn diesel.

You can't have a gas tax without a diesel tax. Everyone would just switch over.

If you tax gas, you effectively tax everything, and that's not okay for any economy.

> If you tax gas, you effectively tax everything, and that's not okay for any economy.

Why? The purpose of the carbon tax is to capture the negative externality of carbon pollution, and to encourage more energy-efficient industries. Not all parts of the economy use equal amounts of energy, and we should encourage the energy-efficient ones.

I burn carbon when I drive my car to work. I burn much less carbon when I take the bus to work. We want to encourage the latter - carbon taxes let the market do this encouragement. The alternative is doing so by government fiat.

> I burn much less carbon when I take the bus to work.

I understand that. It's the obvious reasoning behind a gas tax.

My entire point is that there are also other effects.

If gas prices raise significantly, then the price of everything - groceries, medication, clothing, cleaning supplies, solar panels, everything - raises, meaning simple things that everyone relies on suddenly become unaffordable to low-wage workers, so their employers suddenly need to raise profits to accommodate the price hike, and raise wages for the bulk of their employees, or (more likely) simply fail, resulting in a significant unemployment increase.

You can't just magically fix climate change by putting the poor out of work, nor should you.

> encourage more energy-efficient industries.

This can be done with much more reasonable methods. Don't forget that transportation is not the only significant source of carbon emissions. The best legislative efforts we can make are to support clean energy (nuclear, wind, solar).

I'm running some code through the profiler right now. I'm working on improving that function that is using 17% of CPU, rather than the dozens clocking in at less than 1%.

If I can get that 17% function to run in 94% of the time, that is a greater gain from less effort than making any of those <1% functions run in 50% of the time.

The same principle applies to air pollution. Focus on the container ships burning bunker oil and the power plants burning coal first. Personal transportation using internal combustion engines is one of those 1% things, and even then, just taxing the gasoline won't help all that much.

As parent mentioned, it will also stifle the economic activity that could allow ordinary people to afford capital investments like at-home solar energy systems. And while one presumes that a "carbon tax" on gasoline fuel should be used to combat air pollution elsewhere, that is not necessarily how it will be spent.

> that is not necessarily how it will be spent.

Especially in the US, where we are likely to raise the defense budget from $500 billion to $700 billion per year.

Makes me think about how much carbon is released for "defense".

> that is not necessarily how it will be spent.

British Columbia has a revenue-neutral carbon tax [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax

> If you tax gas, you effectively tax everything, and that's not okay for any economy.

Why not, we already tax everything as it is right now? And lots of places have carbon taxes, it works fine.

Because everyone would have to suddenly react.

Businesses that rely on low wage workers suddenly have two major problems:

1. They have to find more profit to accommodate shipping expenses

2. They have to pay their workers more

Both of those problems are incredibly difficult to some, and both of them together are deadly to business.

A gas tax would significantly harm the livelihood of poor hard working people.

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

-Thirty Ninth President of the United States of America Ronald Reagan.

That already happens, but on a different scale. When Apple has to repair or replace an iPhone, they're giving you a remanufactured iPhone using reused internal parts like screws or shielding. This is factored into the costs of an iPhone which keeps them 'lower' / profit margins higher.

Unfortunately, what ends up happening in most cases is that people make products, give them a ridiculous 1y or 2y warranty, then claim that if there're any problems after that time period you'll have to pay to repair or replace.

In our country we have a law that states a product has to live up to it's reasonably expected life time. So while a manufacturer might give it a warranty and the retailer might give it some special warranty, ultimately, the retailer (which in some cases is the manufacturer if you buy directly) is responsible no matter what. That doesn't go for consumables or software, or if you break it yourself obviously, but a phone or computer for example is of course expected to work for at least 4 or 5 years or so. So if it breaks, you are entitled to support and/or repairs, which also has a limitation on any administrative fees that might apply. It pretty much applies to everything, from cars to washing machines to faucets to electric toothbrushes.

How is "reasonably expected life time" defined?

The same way 'reasonable' is defined everywhere in the law: it's up to the interpretation of the court.

What country? This sounds like a great way to poison a court system with bullshit lawsuits.

Non common law countries don't tend towards lawsuits as much. They tend towards legislation and then administrative enforcement.

The UK has this law, and I believe it's standardised across the EU.

In Europe I think it's 2 years, which is quite low.

i think I understand it different, they must give you 2 years warranty, but maybe he is saying they must help you with repair/support (with your own money) 4-5 years

kinda similar like car parts, warranty is like 3-5 years (or 100K km) but parts must be available like 10 years or something

The main EU rule is that you have to have a minimum 2 year warranty. A number of electronics vendors, famously including Apple, had to up their game as a result of this.

However, that is in addition to various other statutory consumer rights about fitness for purpose and being of appropriate quality, which EU member states might have in their national laws as well. Here in the UK, for example, those obligations can run for many years beyond the initial warranty, and can result in repair, replacement or (full or partial) refund for faulty products depending on the circumstances.

In most cases, it's the vendor who took your money who is on the hook legally for these kinds of responsibilities, though in practice of course manufacturers often offer their own warranties to the final customers and/or make supporting arrangements with vendors selling their products.

Unfortunately at present most of these rules only apply to private individuals, and with business purchases caveat emptor and expensive service contracts are often the norm even if a purchase is being made by a small business with no more real leverage against a vendor or manufacturer than a private individual. When it comes to electronic devices like phones and laptops, this is potentially quite a big stumbling block in terms of forcing up standards of maintainability and promoting a "right to repair" to reduce waste.

Sounds like New Zealand and the consumers guarantees act

Norway also has this law.

> they're giving you a remanufactured iPhone using reused internal parts like screws or shielding

And, unless something changed recently, batteries. My iPhone 5 had a faulty charging socket, which got worse. A month after unboxing, it would no longer charge at all, so I handed it in for repair. Got back a unit with half the battery life and a faulty charging socket.

I gave it to a good GSoC student across the world after a second unsuccessful trip to service

Consumable parts are and have never been reused. Just sounds like you had a faulty part, rather than a reused one.

> Consumable parts are and have never been reused

Are phone parts "consumable"? I thought "consumable" meant refers to things that get "used up" like milk, ink, pens, etc., not storage media or LCD screens or the like...

Batteries can be consumable after a fashion, as they lose capacity with each charge cycle. The effect can be reduced via certain techniques (depending on the battery chemistry involved), but so far never completely eliminated. Just consider it entropy in action, really.

Is there any way to reclaim the resources in a "used up" battery to reintroduce them to the production chain?

You absolutely can, but it's currently not cost-effective. On the other hand it looks like it's cheap enough that making it mandatory or putting a recycling deposit on batteries would be viable.

Are battery recycling programs near you not feasible? Our local Home Depot and Best Buy stores will take back rechargeable batteries for recycling for free.

Do they recycle all of a lithium ion battery?

Very little of the physical (the lithium). However all of the precious materials (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...).

It's not worth it to extract the lithium, monetarily speaking.

> Consumable parts are and have never been reused

Can you substantiate that? It's clearly at odds with my experience, neither of my two replacement units had a battery life that even came close to unboxed unit.

I just don't buy that every serviced device gets a new battery.

(I am in Europe by the way)

I thought the iPhone 5 had a pretty good iFixit score. The Teardown was a 7 out of 10 [0], which is one of the highest scores they've given.

[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+5+Teardown/10525

A digression, but I doubt screws are one of the parts the retain for re-manufactured devices, is that really true? I thought those screws they use with the thread-lock coatings were only rated for one insertion.

This is exactly what the EU WEEE directive is. It makes only a very small difference, although it did result in action against anti-refill ink cartridges.

> All of this electronics churn is environmentally terrible, and it's frustrating that, as with carbon energy products, the entire world is forced to pay for the environmental externalities rather than the actual tech users.

Well, let’s see what a leading company is saying about that:

”We believe our goal should be a closed-loop supply chain, where products are built using only renewable resources or recycled material”[0]

It’s not quite the cyberpunk dream of being able to repair anything with a soldering iron in 30 minutes, but it’s a very critical step to reach. We’re slowly getting there.

[0]: https://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental... (page 16)

It's not just cypherpunks and hardware hackers. We in the occult communities also very much believe in the same ideals. In fact, this saying is what this discussion reminded me of:

Nidhogg's Rule: Recycling. There is no such place as Away, so be careful what you throw there. Recycle, give away, don't waste, find a place for it somewhere else. This includes people as well as things.

http://www.northernpaganism.org/rokkatru/rokkatru-ethics.htm...

You mean, like, recycling people and giving them away? :o.

(Also, nitpick, but cypherpunk != cyberpunk; the former won't care about repairability of the hardware, unless you put your private key on it.)

Can't you just chuck all your rubbish into Satan's bottomless pit of despair? ;-)

Current policy overemphasizes recycling. Recycling is the last resort. First reduce or reuse, which are far superior. Throwing away would normally not even be a serious option, but this world's people are kinda brain damaged.

Indeed. But I would set the blame at manufacturers at this view.

The last time I got a circuit schematic was with my Icom radio. And even with that, still received none of the firmware. "Proprietary".

Ideally, mechanical drawings, circuit schematics, and firmware would enable a great deal of repair and 3d party parts replacement. But the idea of allowing that isn't capitalist - in fact it goes directly against selling more to replace (planned obsolescence).

I would heartily like to have a library of parts I can refer to, designs I can 3d print parts as needed, firmware access to correct issues. But this all flies in direct opposition with "commercial" opportunities, save a very few.

It's also why I highly prefer free/open source hardware, with as much details how it works available. That's the only way to guarantee that your hardware doesn't get abandoned - there's always someone who has a similar problem.

In the Netherlands there is a extra cost for certain products because of the pollution / disassembly costs. Its called the disposal fee, https://www.milieucentraal.nl/energie-besparen/apparaten-en-...

Just require all manufacturers to charge a disposal deposit when selling any consumer electronics. Consumer gets the deposit back upon returning the device to an authorized center for disposal or recycling. A $15 deposit would probably give most people sufficient incentive to do the right thing.

Post-Moore, that argument of acceleratism is done for anyway.

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