First, make the deposit a function of battery size not item size or cost (small battery $5 deposit, medium battery $10, large $50). This way the environmental cost of a specific battery is linked to the consumer's cost in a way that it isn't really now when the variation in battery cost is swallowed up in the cost of the item itself.
Second, peg this deposit to inflation. 20 years ago the 5c deposit on a beer can meant a lot more than it does today. I'm old enough to remember my fairly well off grandparents saving up their cans and returning them. Today, nobody I know bothers.
As in tax them at the time of purchase, on batteries that render a device unusable.
If you want to tax non-replaceable batteries that will just be factored into the price and the thing is that easily replaceable batteries are in conflict with other design goals consumers are willing to pay for (like water proofness).
I understand the frustration with non-replaceable batteries creating some kind of planned obsolescence, but there is no easy solution without sacrificing other things.
Where does the money come from that you are giving consumers for their batteries?
But it doesn't even have to be state run. It could simply be mandated that the manufacturers buy back their old batteries for a minimum price.
The state also loses money here, unless the cost of running this program is neligible.
>But it doesn't even have to be state run. It could simply be mandated that the manufacturers buy back their old batteries for a minimum price.
I'm not saying this is a bad program, but this still walks, talks, and quacks like a tax.
This is the same idea.
Buy a device with a battery, pay some small amount as a deposit, get your deposit back when you bring it back for recycling.
I'm not saying I don't like the idea, but this is a tax with a different name. And we haven't even gotten to how someone pays for the infrastructure for all this battery cleanup.
Nope, this is completely wrong. People want to help but they have limited bandwidth. When you give them someway they can feel like they are helping without meaningfully doing anything, you’ve reduced their attention/effort that will go into real solutions.
Doing minuscule shit is absolutely harmful to the cause. This is one of those areas where a compromise is as bad as doing nothing with the additional downside of patting yourself on the back thinking you made progress.
It's a shame that a couple of generations have been led to believe that the only real environmental disaster is climate change. It's certainly a big and pressing one, but it's like we've all but forgotten the many other issues that our lifestyle of ready massive consumption has caused.
Some examples of other environmental impacts that 'reduce, reuse and recycle' helps with: the impact of mining and oilfield operations on the natural environment; heavy metals and other toxins in waterways from mining and badly managed landfills; microplastics in the ocean; acid rain from Nox/Sox emissions; many other forms of air pollution from the mining industry.
Just to name a few.
Methane and Nitrous Oxide also play a massive role. We produce less of those mostly through gas leaks and shipping/diesel fuel but they are a lot worse than CO2 if we think of it in terms of per kilo impact.
I am wholely in agreement with you but there are some pretty big percentage wise holes that we need to plug.
Namely:
1. Getting ride of coal and Natural Gas power generation (which means replacing with renewables +storage, or fission, none of which are easily deployable)
2. Stopping methane leaks in Oil&Gas pipelines and active/decomissioned wells.
And of course we shouldn't just ban or tax disposable vapers. But all disposable electronics.
Carnival Cruise's line of ships (which contain about 50 ships) contribute the same amount of emissions as all the cars in Europe. We could make the hard descision to regulate cruise ships away or maybe everyone in Europe could stop driving altogther
Yeah, Cruise ships are pretty nuts!
No. Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies is stupid.
These are the classical mistakes people make when optimizing software.
This way you end up spending a lot of effort to make your code 0.0012% faster.
I have no doubt this mistake will keep being made throughout all of human history.
From Primary Microplastics in the Oceans: Boucher & Friot 2017
35% Clothing and textiles
28% Tyres
24% City dust
7% Road markings
3.7% Marine coatings
2% Beauty products
<1% Plastic nurdlesMy source is https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/08/Great-Pacific-Gar..., which in turn sources its data from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
The obvious issues are plastics breakdown at wildly different rates so the ratios of plastic pollution doesn’t match the ratios seen in the ocean. There are significant differences in where each type of plastic enters the ocean and where it ends up so sampling different parts of the ocean results in different observations. Finally sizes vary widely so measuring by volume, piece, or weight gives different results.
On top of this it’s not always easy to say the actual origin of a given piece was.
Seems like you'll only do things that make a significant contribution. Yes, with drinking straws it was a symbolic action, and yes you risk people thinking "ok, done it". But the current alternative is no action at all. We need to start, take the first small steps before chastising ourselves for not having gone any miles yet.
Most of the world is spending huge effort to decarbonize. May well not be enough, but it's very different from nothing.
I strongly recommend that, wherever you get your news from, try looking somewhere else!!
If you're talking about the sub-sub-set of that which is disposable electronics containing lithium cells, we were talking past each other.
Why is there a dichotomy of "fund low impact project that's relevant to this thread" and "do nothing at all"?
It doesnt matter if its 0.1% or 10% -> we should fix all of those cases with sensible laws.
The goal is to reach that 90% in total.
Politics are just corrupted and lazy old farts.
I know several people that vape but all of them use pretty nice reusable ones.
Personally I'd be comfortable seeing them banned - for the same reason we banned the sale of individual cigarettes. Their only role in the market is to make addiction accessible at the lowest barrier to entry.
I hope they are banned. There is no reason for something like this to be disposable.
Adjusted for inflation, 5¢ in 2002 would just be 8¢.
That would make the inflation value closer to $0.38 in today’s money. It’s not a lot, but when you’re getting almost 8x the amount for each can, it adds up.
5¢ in 1982 would be 15¢ now, so it's more, but not that much more?
I see the same behavior among many others. It's just anecdotal, but that 3x seems to make a huge difference.
That $0.04 doesn't sound like much, but say you were collecting enough cans to make $50/day in 1995 money (560 cans) - now you're making only $28 a day. That's the difference between having a home and being homeless.
It's also the difference between "worth saving up and taking a trip to the return center" and "meh, chuck em". Though at least the latter helps people trying to collect more than 500 cans a day.
$1-5 for vape devices would be similar.
It's fine to tinker around with it for your own experiments, but you don't want to ship it to anybody who's not going to be using it in a fireproof lab wearing eye protection.
A better idea would be to find a way to properly recycle the raw materials (i.e. extract the lithium from a dead cell), but that could be several orders of magnitude more challenging.
[0] https://www.batterypoweronline.com/news/a-look-inside-your-b...
Yeah exactly what I was thinking.. I'm sure the cells used in these disposable devices weren't exactly the cream of the crop in manufacturing either. Probably cells that didn't pass QC or something.
It's pretty risky messing around with them like that.
Lithium batteries are absurdly cheap, and it's not too expensive to buy essentially off the shelf, rated capacity and lifetime cells in order to be reasonably sure 99% of your products last for 99% of their rated puffs.
If your disposable vape doesn't produce as much as competitors because you cheaped out on your lithium cell procurement, your competitor will happily scoop up that business as word of mouth spreads.
This is already a thing in EU, and parts of US and Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee
I'm afraid this would have the opposite effect though. Instead of donating old phones or CD players, people would have them trashed to get their deposit back.
Plenty of places that take e-waste right now will refurb and resell a subset of the hardware they receive. This would be no different. It's true that this would place a floor of the money required to obtain these devices, but it's not like there would suddenly no longer be used devices for sale.
People are complaining about the current state of recycling, but I save up all my lithium batteries and pay to have them recycled every few years. You can't throw that shit away.
The result is that homeless people are often going around collecting bottles. On garbage day, I’ll often see at least two or three people walking down the alley collecting bottles out of everyone’s bins before the garbage truck shows up. And in parks you often see homeless people rummaging around the trash cans looking for bottles, or just walking around picking them up off the ground. For the people who are too lazy to handle it themselves, we’ve (unintentionally? Maybe?) incentivized homeless people to be trash collectors and get paid for it. If the deposits were larger, guaranteed this would ramp up.
The impact is significant, even if it's such a low amount of money. A €25 deposit would definitely keep people from throwing out these things en masse. There will always be people who will act selfishly and against their self interest, but you've got to be pretty damn rich to throw out €25 like it's nothing.
Only problem I've had sometimes is them calling back claiming that I left them hanging, which actually means a scrappie collected it before they arrived.
The reason what you said was dismissed/started an argument is the reason a lot of arguments start: using terms whose definitions have been overloaded. People can both be talking about "green" energy but mean entirely different things and get frustrated talking past one another, as happened here.
Specifically, for many people right now, the pressing reason for "green" energy is climate change. Ergo "green" energy is energy which does not release significant amounts of CO2 when used. Solar panels are "green" energy in that they help solve a chronic environmental problem.
At the same time, as was pointed out, solar panels require some incredibly toxic chemicals to be created, and to the extent they are recyclable, that recycling process also involves, creates, and produces as waste even more horrific chemicals. Therefore solar panels are not "green" energy in that they directly contribute to an acute environmental problem.
The root of the issue is picking some abstract label, "green energy", and then each person argues whether something meets their own personal definition of that abstract label.
A more useful question may be "in which ways are solar panels good for the environment, in which ways are they harmful, and does one obviously outweigh the other?"
A supporter of solar would probably say "solar panels breakeven for co2 in just 3 years, a fraction of their lifespan, so they spend most of their life replacing fossil fuels which is good. While toxic chemicals are a byproduct of their creation, and those toxic chemicals would be harmful if released into the environment, they can be contained, stored, and disposed of in a way that localizes all harm to the point that there is no widespread environmental impact from their manufacture".
At any rate- I think that it's likely far easier to deal with waste that can be put in a barrel and placed somewhere, rather than waste that diffuses into the atmosphere and stays there permanently.
An ideal waste disposal site would probably be a landfill in some unpopulated endorheic basin somewhere, so that there is no risk of contamination of waterways.
That means more materials and better future recycling process discoveries
> deposit of 25€ for small electrical
> devices and 50€ and more for bigger ones