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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

I once accidentally nicked the office fridge when cleaning it and let out all of the Freon. The local recycler refused to take it because they can't accept anything with Freon in it (it didn't matter that the Freon had leaked out). Same with the county dump. On the phone, I asked the guy at the dump what I was supposed to do with it and his official recommendation was to drop it off at Goodwill.

I still feel bad about that.

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If your county dump is not accepting household hazardous waste, they're encouraging people to dump their garbage on the side of the road.

Agree. The prices to trash the junk in my aunt's garbage when she passed made it a gross game of 'do you think Goodwill will take it?'

It would have cost thousands had we not sorted most of what ostensibly _was_ garbage into Goodwill acceptable piles.

Life pro tip: don't preserve stuff for your heirs. Odds are they'll take half of it to the dump and the other half to goodwill.

Used to go regularly. Could always tell when someone had died. Huge amounts of matching tacky decorations.

Yes. People who run antique stores usually run side businesses cleaning out deceased peoples houses. They charge a discounted rate to haul all the stuff away, then keep what they can sell in their store, donate most of what’s left for a tax deduction that they keep, and haul the rest to a landfill.

Dumping fines can be thousands of dollars.

But the countryside is more vast than police can monitor.

A lot of cities too.

Set it on the curb. Somebody with a truck will be along shortly. No need to call. They'll "know"

This is the way. If it looks to be in reasonable condition OR it is mainly made of metal it'll disappear relatively quickly.

Fridges are mostly plastic. In the UK the somebody with a truck will cut out the compressor motor (releasing all the gas) and leave the rest of the fridge. Now you have two problems.

That is wild to me. In the U.S hicks will still take the fridge.

Source: my uncle has five goddamn refrigerators in our garage.

How many cars that do not run are in the "back" and how many washer/dryers are in the front yard? Otherwise, I think you are doing a disservice to ther term hick

My coworker tried that. Didn't work, stood there for days.

So he wrote a sign: "Don't touch! Will be picked up tomorrow"

Thing was gone the same night.

Never seen that approach. Instead, I've seen the opposite of adding a sign that says "Free/gratis". Much more positive message to encourage someone to take it.

This is the reason people take their shit to Goodwill. Cities and counties make it too hard to dispose of broken stuff. My locality won't take anything with an electrical cord or a screen, won't take paint, oil, antifreeze, etc.

This just encourages people to dump it all at Goodwill and let them deal with it, or drive out along some country road and dump it in a ravine.

The cost of disposal should be taxed on purchase, and disposal made free.

Isn't that just sales tax?

Don't know how it works in the US, but in most European countries sales tax/VAT is mostly just a general tax, like income tax.

The problem with a lot of these things are that the costs of disposal aren't counted in the purchase; the company doesn't have to worry about it, the consumer doesn't have to worry about it (until they want to get rid of their fridge or whatnot), and for smaller stuff like Pringles tubes no one seems to pay for it.

This actually applies to most environmental costs.

At some point, someone's got to actually pay for all this. There are a few ways to do this; and an explicit "disposal surcharge" is one way. This could (should!) be higher for hard to dispose products/packages, like packaging that have the the infamous vaporized aluminium applied, and less for easier to dispose packaging. In short, it should reflect the actual costs of disposal and other environmental costs. Just as the costs of raw products, labour, etc. are factored in to a product's price, so should these kind of things.

Aside from the "disposable products" issue, a lot of packaging exists purely for reasons of marketing, to make the product "stand out" more. Makes sense economically right now as no one is paying for those costs, at least not directly. This would change the incentives and what made sense economically beforehand will now make a lot less sense.

I'm not dead-set on a tax as such, maybe there's a better way. The point is that the price of a product should account for all costs of manufacture, not just the costs of the manufacturer pays directly.

Bottle/can deposit-refund systems are the closest thing to this in place today in a handful of states in the US. California also charges an eWaste fee for a tiny subset of electronics. Ultimately this isn't feasible at a larger scale since sales taxes are levied at the state/local level, so there are literally thousands of tax jurisdictions involved which would all have to figure out how much every item ever sold would reasonably cost to dispose.

Those problems are somewhat unique to the US; most other countries just have a national tax.

But yeah, practically it's not necessarily easy. Still, we need to do something IMHO, and this is the best I've been able to come up with thus far which still respects free markets and consumer choices, but also doesn't just shrug off the many very real environmental costs (or leaves it for the government to clean up, maybe). Overall, it seems like a fairly nice balance to me.

Municipal waste disposal usually is funded through property tax.

Give the government money now for the promise they'll use it correctly tomorrow and not spend it on something else in the meantime. What could go wrong?

Do you think that accounting doesn't exist?

You've heard of social security, right?

Do you think that accounting is always correct, accurate and not rigged?

This could be said about every tax ever

Can I sign you up for "defund the police", or is that the kind of giving money to the government that people are always in favor of?

This is common in much of the EU. When my washing machine broke down¹ it was taken away with the delivery of the new one; the seller is required to offer that (free) option. This is the easiest way, but I can also schedule an appointment with the municipal garbage disposal hotline to come pick it up a few times a year.

The alternative is people dumping their stuff somewhere which will have to be cleaned up anyway, so this is cheaper.

1: I did repair it some years prior (broken cross piece), but this time the electronics failed, and with a toddler getting a working washing machine fast is kind of a priority.

> drive out along some country road and dump it in a ravine.

I have several acres of forested land. Anytime we clear out underbrush it's chock full of dumped garbage and drink containers. Ugh.

What are you supposed to do with it then? Find an organisation that do accept them I assume?

This is why when you buy a new fridge you get them to take the old one away.

The last time I got rid of something with refrigerant in it, I took it to the local recycler and they paid me for it.

It was a little office/dorm fridge and an old dehumidifier, both of which had a Freon charge attached. The person running the scale rang up the recycle value of the junk so that I got ~$5 instead of paying $30.

Of course at that time they were able to recover and sell the Freon, not sure that's the case anymore.

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