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Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can't believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

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The actual story was sourced entirely from this reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rilcj/as_a_person_...

Which was sourced entirely from "someone in the IRC channel".

Whether it's true or not is one thing, but if it is then the reddit source also says:

> He went to the "recycling centre" and they showed him around.

This makes some sense, I've 'recycled' before at places like this: http://www.hounslow.gov.uk/spacewaye

You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.

The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.

If the story is all true then the facility in question is this one: http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecy...

Which is advertised as a recycling centre.

Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.

All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.

Good points, thanks. That'll teach me to get worked up without looking at the sources.

    The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled

I had something similar happen when I went to my local recycling center a year after moving into a new town. I had carefully squirreled away a pile of batteries (AA, AAA, D-cells, etc), old smoke detectors (which contain trace amounts of radioactive elements), and some unused cans of latex paint. Saved it all for the big trip to the recycling center.

The guy told me that they'd accept it all, but next time I might as well toss everything but the paint into the trash, as that's what they were going to do with it. Pretty disappointing.

Smoke detectors should be properly disposed of but alkaline batteries can be thrown away. Long ago ordinary batteries used to contain some amount of hazardous heavy metals but that's no longer the case.

£4m penalty for discarding one hard drive is "not-unreasonable"?

boggle

You weren't on the Apple-Samsung or Newegg juries, were you?

£4m in bitcoin today might just be £40 tomorrow

1. I believe penalties for polluting our externalities should be greater, yes. As evidence I cite the fact that people keep polluting with existing penalties/enforcement. The tragedy of the commons is a very real thing.

2. I wasn't recommending that be the legal penalty. But if karma decides to be a bitch to this guy, hey I ain't complainin'.

3. I was exaggerating for effect. Seemed for a good cause: We human beings are total bastards towards the environment.

I wonder what the negative externalities of a 4 million pound fine for minor littering would be.

Penalties work best when they are large enough to hurt, but without causing irreversible harm. There's lots of research on what humans find pleasant and unpleasant (Thinking: Fast and Slow, etc.), which is often unrelated to any actual damage. This seems like an example of one such idea that I'll call unrealized opportunity cost. Seeing what might have been won't matter in the long run, but perhaps it'll rise up in people's psyche enough to alter their behavior.

> I believe penalties for polluting our externalities [sic] should be greater, yes. As evidence I cite the fact that people keep polluting with existing penalties/enforcement.

This is a neat example of contemporary use of the externalities concept in political discourse. First, although the word appears in your statement like a totem, you're not using it correctly. Second, your second sentence doesn't support your first, unless you assume that the harm from polluting the environment is infinite. If we priced pollution perfectly for everyone, people would keep polluting because society would rather have some pollution and some products than no pollution and no products. Raising the cost of polluting will lower the amount of pollution, but there is no reason to expect that it will lower the amount of pollution to zero, and the position "keep raising the cost until the activity disappears" is grounded in religion, not economics. It requires you to assume that the harm of the taboo activity is so great that no amount could ever be desirable.

Since this is in Europe, it's probably better to refer to the European legislation.

However, it looks like the UK implementation of the WEEE[1] is fairly narrow in scope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic...

Give me a break. Who doesn't throw hard drives into the trash? And are you really so sure hard drives are included in any of the state e-waste laws? I doubt very many if any.

I don't have anything to add to the conversation except for the fact that your comment made me literally laugh out loud at its absurdity and naivete. Thanks, I needed that.

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