Growth of E-Waste May Lead to National 'E-Fee'

jcatcw writes "A bill in Congress would add a recycling charge to the cost of laptop PCs, computer monitors, televisions and some other electronic devices, according to a story at Computerworld. The effort to control what's called e-waste could lead to a national 'e-fee' that would be paid just like a sales tax. Nationwide the cost could amount to $300 million per year. Already, California, Washington, Maryland and Maine have approved electronics recycling laws, and another 21 states plus Puerto Rico, are considering them."

'bout time

[Intron]

I'm all in favor of putting the real costs up front. It's almost impossible to enforce a fee at disposal time. People will just find some other way to hide these things in the trash or dump them.

Overpackaging goods with three layers of boxes and plastic should be taxed, too.

Don't lie to me, baby

[rubmytummy]

To say "Nationwide, that cost would amount to about $300 million per year," is disingenuous at best. The price is already being paid in the long-term destructive consequences of not recycling toxic electronic waste. Something like this fee (assuming it works) doesn't add cost, it makes the cost more visible and more constructive.

Hey, I'm a civil servant!

[Rob T Firefly]

As a longtime dumpster-diver/rescuer of unwanted computer parts, I look forward to drawing a salary from the taxpayers.

Like many other environmental policy...

[Spazntwich]

It's well-intentioned and poorly conceived. Now we'll get a new tax for the government to "just increase a little bit" at a time, so we don't notice how our total tax burden increases at absurd intervals every year. Just like wage withholding and social security actually costing you 15% of your paycheck, but only having us ever see 7.5% taken.

Windows

[electrosoccertux]

Considering how many of these e-waste PC's are perfectly functional computers with 1+ Ghz speed processors, which can be upgraded to 512MB-1GB of RAM and remain functional for another 5 years for Grandma Internets...yet they are thrown out because they are full of spyware and adware and molassesware, it would be fair to tax the source of the problem: poorly programmed operating systems, like Windows.

Rather than just recycle them...

[dyslexicbunny]

donate those machines to public schools and filter them throughout the school system and recycle the oldest machines. Work out a deal with Microsoft (or just use something else) and put whatever software needs to be on the machine for the school to use it properly.

So when I was in high school, we desperately needed better computers in various locations throughout the school. I imagine that both elementary and middle schools are in the same boat. Businesses are on what, a two or three year hardware upgrade cycle? Wouldn't this kill two birds with one stone?

Schools get new machines and their old (and likely least environmentally friendly) machines would be recycled. Keep the e-fee so that such a program would be funded but in theory it could work. But perhaps I'm just looking out the window of an ivory tower.

Now, now, don't forget . . .

[StefanJ]

. . . if you can sweep a problem under a rug -- or, in this case, bury it under some trash bags in a dumpster -- it doesn't show up on the Accounts Payable.

Or, put another way, externalities are for the next generation to deal with. Or ignore and pass along.

Make it (partially) refundable

[mi]

If the fee is high enough (say, $10 or even $50), you will want to bring the dead equipment for (partial) refund to a place, which will gladly process it (paid for by the rest of the fee).

Kind of like cans and bottles, except their meager 5c fee is not enough to encourage anyone to clean them up, not even the "poor" homeless...

Deposit Fee?

[Radon360]

For something like this to have any sliver of a chance of doing any good, they'd need to set it up in some form of deposited cash refund, like soda/pop bottles in some states. For example, a retailer charges $15 up front, must accept hardware for recycling, and gives you $10 back for each computer turned in for recycling.

Without any incentive to get stuff recycled, most people would simply prefer to hide it in the trash somehow. Yeah, I realize that a deposit fee system would be a royal PITA to administrate, but without it, you'd never even see 10 percent of computers come back for recycling.

Re:And that....

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

That would mean that we can just leave them anywhere, right?

We already pay for removal when it works.... Well, Ill just open my truckbed with all these computer junk parts and gun it. Thats what road crews are for, right?

- Well isn't that the point of these changes? Right now it costs you to choose to recycle it. Now you'll have to pay recycling fees up front so it's no longer financially beneficial to not recycle it.

Re:And that....

[dmacleod808]

I do what every self respecting geek does. Fill my basement with hardware going back 20 years... never know what you might need.

Re:Absolute Silliness

[Coryoth]

I don't care if the tax is no more than 10$ like the article says, it's an additional grievance that I certainly don't want to deal with. Either they have the means to recycle the sorts of material that are in electronics, in which case the fees I already pay for recycling can cover that, or they don't have the means to recycle this stuff.

Recycling electronics is more difficult than other recycling, thus it costs more, and isn't generally done. Therefore to pay for recycling of electronics more money is required. If you like this money could be levied by raising the fees you already pay for recycling, or by putting a tax directly on electronics. That is, the means to recycle electronics exist in theory, but aren't running in practice because there isn't enough money to pay to run them. Right now electronics waste is a negative externality that we happily sweep under the carpet by shipping it to towns [flickr.com] in China [flickr.com] and India [bbc.co.uk], where it degrades or is broken down in an unsafe manner [flickr.com], and the toxic materials leach into the water table. All the resulting suffering and human cost is in the back-blocks of China, however, which the Chinese government certainly doesn't care about and you can safely ignore. One way or another, however, those costs have to be paid. All this proposal is doing is making you pay the costs (or at least some of them) up front. So take your choice - higher recycling fees, a tax on electronics, or misery and suffering in far away countries. The easy option is clear; the right option on the other hand...

Re:Make it (partially) refundable

[m0rph3us0]

Yes, but it doesn't because its cheaper to get new stuff. Once resources cost enough to reprocess them, we will do that, which is why I advocate putting all our precious resources in the same place so that they are easy to retrieve in the future. I call this place a "garbage dump".

Not another stupid law

[boyfaceddog]

It sounds good on the news. Money chages hands. No one can vote against it with being smeared as "anti-environment". And yet it will do absolutly nothing.

Its the perfect law!

Just to clear things up, I like the environment and want recycling, but guys, this is just stupid.

Re:And that....

[PFI_Optix]

When you buy a car battery, you pay a core fee. You get that fee back by returning your old battery (or avoid it by bringing it in) for recycling or proper disposal.

Why not do the same with electronics? Whenever you buy new electronics, if you bring in old ones for recycling you don't have to pay the fee.

Re:It's not around me, so what happens?

[russotto]

No matter what, the money vanishes. The connection between an "earmarked" tax and the actual program it is supposed to sponsor is typically tenuous to nonexistent. This is just a way to get another tax in while sounding "green".

Sure, I could pay a few dollars a year

[roystgnr]

But the real tragic cost of this program would be the resulting mercury-deficiency and lead-deficiency in our ecosystem. Let's face it: stupid people are hilarious. And although the USA has backup plans for creating new generations of stupid people, even "reality shows" on our televisions and "intelligent design" supporters on our schoolboards just can't compete with the degenerative effects of heavy-metal poisoning in our bloodstreams.

Why, if we ever run out of the national supply of stupid people, future Slashdot readers might never get to enjoy comments like these:

Creepy Crawler: That would mean that we can just leave them anywhere, right?

No, it would mean that you can just leave them at any recycling center, knowing that the cost of recycling them has already been paid for.

Overzeetop: If I pay the tax, then drop the stuff in the trahscan to get picked up by the muni wate trucks, does that money vanish?

No - like the "trahs" those "wate" trucks will be taking to the landfills, the money would be out of your hands but wouldn't have vanished entirely. Because no recycling center would be able to redeem your old electronics, the money would remain in government hands. Ironically, instead of keeping heavy metals out of US groundwater supplies it might just end up putting heavy metals into Middle Eastern groundwater instead.

Needs Food Badly: Of all the things that they can and do tax, now they want to put a tax on recycling?

No, they want to put a tax on buying things that will have to be recycled, then pay that tax back when the recycling actually happens. The goal here is to make it cheaper to reclaim toxic chemicals than to send them to landfills.

And this is what I get just browsing at Score: 3. I can only shudder to imagine what's getting modded *down*.

Re:How do the poor pay for computers now?

[CosmicLaxative]

I'm not saying paying up front is any better or worse than paying later. Either way it charges people, granted people are much less likely to think of an after affect so that wouldn't decrease sales as much.

Adding $15 to the price of a $500 dollar computer may not deter you or most people, but for a lot of people spending that extra $15 will make a difference.

Re:And that....

[roc97007]

> Actually we have already implemented that here in Ireland and I have to say as a consumer it's something I'm happy with. I pay an extra couple of cent or maybe a couple of euro on the big electric/electronic items and I get to have my old items disposed of correctly in a manner that is better for the environment.

It's a nice idea, but this is the US, and the way these thing usually work is that the tax is imposed, the money goes into the general fund, and that's it. No funds go towards the purported purpose of the tax, which in this case means there will still be no place to take my old computer gear except for the dump or that place over on the other side of the city where they refurbish stuff and give it to the poor.

To be honest, I fully expect a double whammy -- an e-fee on new purchases, and either a penalty or complete prohibition of disposal, which will be sold as the politicians "doing something about the problem". Computer stuff will just collect up in back yards like refrigerators do now.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this article is that I need to pull all the old stuff out of the attic and make a dump run while I still can.

Ron

Re:'bout time

[Russ Nelson]

In what way is waste disposal a commons? If you just throw your stuff on somebody else's property, that's trespass. If you pay someone to take your waste, that's a private property transfer between you and them. What makes "E-Waste" any concern of a third party?

Glad you enjoyed packet drivers. Doesn't make an E-Waste tax any less stupid, though.

Re:financially responsibility and recycling

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Well unfortunately the idea of paying us to recycle just isn't economically viable, especially when we're talking about hazardous materials like those found in electronics. The issue of course is that expecting people to do the right right thing simply for the sake of doing it is a stretch at best, expecting them to pay extra to do the right thing is bordering on the insane. The only clear solution to that is to force people to pay the recycling fees upfront so that at the very least there's a reasonable chance they'll do what's right.

TFA also mentions another recycling scheme in Maine in which the manufacturers are forced to pay the cost of recycling. I think both manufacturers and users should pay towards the cost of recycling, that way it encourages manufacturers to try and find recycling-friendly methods of production and for the users I guess there's a chance they'll recycle if only to feel they got their money's worth. After all, even if the manufacturer paid the whole bill it would in all likelihood be passed on to the consumer in higher prices anyway.

You've never disposed of any electrical goods? Never had a faulty HDD, blown PSU, bad DIMM, fscked CRT monitor? I've still got every computer I've owned too since they all work, but I'm only 22 and I've already gone through enough broken parts and appliances to see that I'll get my money's worth if they ever introduce a recycling tax here. Even if by some fluke you never personally had to recycle a single electrical item ever it'd still be nice to know that this kind of thing could encourage others to recycle their old crap which might otherwise end up in a landfill or just get dumped - hazardous chemcicals and all.