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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

We better stop making many forms of new electronics then, to limit waste. Just imagine how many millions of USB sticks have been thrown in the trash in just the last year alone, as they become outdated by newer USB sticks that store twice as much at half the cost while wasting just as many physical resources!

Do you really need a new iPhone? No you do not. The iPhone 4 will do perfectly fine for now (according to some random bureaucrat), so the iPhone 5 should be illegal to sell until further notice.

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While we're at it, we could also ban hyperbole.

The parent raises a valid point that shouldn't be dismissed simply by carrying an idea to a comical extreme.

Over and over, the comical extreme becomes the new normal. :(

This is a device that's designed to work for fifteen days and then instantly become garbage despite being perfectly functional.

Do you really have trouble understanding that part?

I'm a proponent of the idea that companies that sell you products should have to take them back at the end of their useful life. That is, Apple would take back your unwanted phone and be responsible for recycling or disposing of it, it would no longer be your problem. This would encourage companies to engineer products with longer useful lifespans, or to facilitate refurbishing instead of destruction.

Apple could just throw away the product you return. That would not suffice.

This would encourage companies to engineer products with longer useful lifespans, or to facilitate refurbishing instead of destruction.

Or just bake the cost of disposal into the sales price of the item.

Your arguments strike me as a good illustration of why we need more recyclable electronics and more recycling initiatives.

Recycling isn't much of a solution. It's like smoking filtered cigarettes vs unfiltered - it's better than the alternative, but you'll still end up dead in the long term.

Short of glass, most materials recycle with very low efficiencies. Even aluminium, which is often touted as being "highly recyclable" usually only reclaims around 85% of the input.

Alright, but realistically, I don't see "no waste" economies coming up and staying up for good. So, better work hard on those filters than shrug it off.

Isn't aluminum particularly profitable to recycle, even with a low recovery, since it requires absurd amounts of power to smelt the stuff in the first place?

Aluminum is incredibly abundant in the earth's crust, but from what I understand it is the poster-boy for recycling because of the extreme difference in power costs between melting it down, and making it in the first place.

I was going to mention that much earlier...aluminum/aluminium wasn't easily separable from bauxite until electricity could be generated at industrial scale. It also forms a protective oxidized patina very quickly so needs very little in the way of post processing to "clean it up" for re-use.

The difference is no one bought this electronic: it's advertising you have to swallow with your magazine.

Quit the hyperbole.

No more hyperbole than pointing out that if you want to be that extreme, then the magazine shouldn't have been printed at all. After all, the least damage to environment would have been to only have it available online.

And if you insist that it should have been printed, then what about leaving out the few hundred pages of advertising or sponsored content. After all, if they only printed the "real" content the magazine delivers, that would be minimally damaging to the environment.

If there's anything to complain about here it's that I doubt they made it easy or obvious to users that they couldn't recycle the whole magazine as you would normally. Instead, you'd need to tear off the electronics part and take it to an e-waste recycle and put the rest in a "normal" recycling bin.

Paper doesn't harm the environment. Most lumber from NA is carbon neutral at worst, carbon capturing at best

Paper may not, but what about all the machines to print the magazine, the vehicle to transport it, and the ink? The paper is just one tiny component.

still waiting for some of your insight here, but, hey, this is just a guess but i think you're full of shit... if not, please share how the US funds the world's drug research. 18 days and nothing... guess all your other posts are crap too. this one hasn't really changed any opinions

I also disagree with adventured here, but your response is not useful.

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