Comment by cosmojg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cosmojg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If you think that's bad, consider that many companies go out of their way to wantonly destroy perfectly serviceable hardware that they produce and/or distribute every day as a matter of routine, all in an effort to mitigate storage costs and, in some cases, artificially prop up demand.

Amazon[1] is probably the most prominent example of this practice when it comes to hardware, but the routine destruction of unsold products remains common across industries, especially the food industry[2][3][4].

I, too, felt ill watching that video, and I felt ill reading these articles. But how do we fix this? How do we avoid letting so much production go to waste, especially when there are still so many people around the world who could really benefit from it? Is it the product of greed, or is it merely a hard-to-solve supply chain problem?

[1] https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millio...

[2] https://www.dailydot.com/irl/dunkin-employee-who-exposed-was...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/perspectives/cabot-dairy-farm...

[4] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf

Only a couple of months back I saw what seemed to be perfectly good solar panels (I'd estimate an 8kw system) having a backhoe rip through them (and the roof they were attached to) to make way for a future apartment block.

I'm sure someone would've been willing to salvage those at no cost to the developers, but time is money to those guys. Sad to see such waste.

In the Bay, I more than once saw developers spend months trying to get people to salvage old houses whole. Surely there was someone who would take them! How hard could it be?

Each time they wound up bulldozing them after zero takers were found.

Could they have tried to get rid of them piecemeal, as people came to salvage one useful thing at a time? Definitely possible! Though it likely would have meant managing a bunch of different people looking for specific things, after which they would have had to spend just as much time and money bulldozing the things anyway.

Delays in construction are also waste but not so visceral or visible. It might have turned out that it was cheaper to destroy them than have them salvaged, including the labor cost of managing the salvage.

"free solar panels on CraigsList. Must be gone in 1.5 days. Must sign a liability waiver before removing--via email."

Gone.

That requires someone to put in a conscious effort to manage and people are lazy when it's not their money.

Also (thanks in large part to internet commenters, many of whom on HN fit this archetype) people are afraid that a liability waver doesn't cover them when in reality unless there are aggravating circumstances a liability waver pretty much always caps your loss at the consult fee required to get your lawyer to tell the ambulance chaser to f off.

Hard (or impossible) to that as company... way way more paperwork.

I feel like there should be laws preventing anyone from destroying something someone else could use

We can't just throw everything away, no matter if it's cheaper, we will run out of resources if we don't recycle

What was the last thing you threw away that couldn't be used by someone else? Anyone at all?

Recycling can only slow the loss of raw materials, not prevent it. So we'll either run out eventually anyway or we won't run out anyway. Your argument doesn't work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com