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Comment by pawelk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.)

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)

> 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.

> 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?

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.

yes :(

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

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