It is well known that Americans consume far more natural resources and live much less sustainably than people from any other large country of the world. “A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil,” reports the Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford, adding that the average American will drain as many resources as 35 natives of India and consume 53 times more goods and services than someone from China.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt...
The difference is the burden of proof. For the initial 6 months, the manufacturer/store has to prove the item was not somehow defective from the beginning, due to manufacturing errors or similar mishaps, even if it broke 5 months and 29 days after the sale.
In the following 18 months, the burden of proof shifts to the buyer, to prove that the fault did not happen to due mistreatment during (ab)use of the item.
That's how it is in Denmark, at least.
The top 5% on the other hand are IMO within normal usage patterns.
The exceptions seem to focus on using consumer products like a coffee maker in an industrial setting. But, 2 years is rather short term to be replacing these devices not to mention the overhead of a regular breakdown > replacement process.
On the other hand, warranty here in the US can be annoying to deal with anyways--I've failed twice at getting replacements for Samsung flash memory cards that have been in production for less than their warranty period. There a some problems (microsd becoming read-only) that can't be caused by user misuse. That might be more reflective of Samsung as a company, however I've had similar issues with other companies as well.
We've finally cracked the nut with renewable resources. Its cost a great deal of environmental damage, but I see no good progression to go from hunter-gatherer to high tech. That's just entropy laws.
Now, it could certainly be argued that certain trajectories should be followed and aren't. But progress costs.
Sometimes it's even used in marketing ("bring your old TV, get new one 10% cheaper"), maybe because they need to meet some quotas so they have to actively convince people to bring their old stuff.
I'm not sure what happens with the items they collect, but hopefully it's shipped to some recycling center instead of getting dropped in a landfill, which would be the case when consumers didn't have this option.
Yep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni...
(The difference is marked in the case of the General Data Protection Regulation, which will become enforceable in a few months. There is no wiggleroom in interpreting it, compared to its predecessor, the Data Protection Directive, where each member state has implemented their own version, with varying levels of data protection.)
Heck, our power company will pay you $35 if you recycle a working fridge or freezer through them. With them coming out to pick it up for free. The idea being that a lot of people stick their old, inefficient fridge in the basement or garage when they get a new one and it sucks down a lot of power.
It's a pretty damn good example of the market solving a problem by itself.
This only really falls apart when the cost of new stuff is less than the cost of recycling. High wages are not good for recycling/repair businesses.
When you get new tires on your car most places will take the old ones for free. They get recycled into filler for lower quality rubbers (you can't re-vulcanize rubber, it's like un-baking a cake)
In Italy is the same. Keep in mind that the retail price includes a tax to cover the costs of recycling, so it is not really free :-). The amount depends on the type of appliance. This too should come from an EU directive.
They didn’t say they thought it was free. In fact they said
> so the cost is included in the retail price
And you quoted that!
Also, I also think we should have a carbon recapture tax added to gasoline, but no one I know really wants to pay an additional tax of 7-10$/gallon.
As always in the EU, the exact effect of these differs by country (EU directives describe goals, and leave the means to get there to member countries)
It seems like a better idea would be to just have Amazon give you a voucher for the recycling fees in your local community.
Edit: summary at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste_in_China
There's far more stuff coming from China to the west than vice-versa. A ship can't travel empty, but needs to be ballasted with an appropriate weight of cargo. If there isn't enough booked cargo on the return leg to China, they'll make up the weight with scrap metal or rubble.
Sure, send them back to China, I don't care, it just seems silly that we would all just mail our broken junk back one piece at a time to AMazon who then puts it in a container and sends it to China.
Better to take it to alocal recycling facility for them to send it en masse. Have Amazon give you a voucher to handle the recycling fee.
Still, Amazon just gifted me an item when I tried to return it since I ordered it by mistake (and I was honest on the form). I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to avoid recycling returns too.
That can't work for any country that has "country".
In the US, the vast majority of goods are delivered using trucks that burn diesel.
You can't have a gas tax without a diesel tax. Everyone would just switch over.
If you tax gas, you effectively tax everything, and that's not okay for any economy.
Why? The purpose of the carbon tax is to capture the negative externality of carbon pollution, and to encourage more energy-efficient industries. Not all parts of the economy use equal amounts of energy, and we should encourage the energy-efficient ones.
I burn carbon when I drive my car to work. I burn much less carbon when I take the bus to work. We want to encourage the latter - carbon taxes let the market do this encouragement. The alternative is doing so by government fiat.
I understand that. It's the obvious reasoning behind a gas tax.
My entire point is that there are also other effects.
If gas prices raise significantly, then the price of everything - groceries, medication, clothing, cleaning supplies, solar panels, everything - raises, meaning simple things that everyone relies on suddenly become unaffordable to low-wage workers, so their employers suddenly need to raise profits to accommodate the price hike, and raise wages for the bulk of their employees, or (more likely) simply fail, resulting in a significant unemployment increase.
You can't just magically fix climate change by putting the poor out of work, nor should you.
> encourage more energy-efficient industries.
This can be done with much more reasonable methods. Don't forget that transportation is not the only significant source of carbon emissions. The best legislative efforts we can make are to support clean energy (nuclear, wind, solar).
If I can get that 17% function to run in 94% of the time, that is a greater gain from less effort than making any of those <1% functions run in 50% of the time.
The same principle applies to air pollution. Focus on the container ships burning bunker oil and the power plants burning coal first. Personal transportation using internal combustion engines is one of those 1% things, and even then, just taxing the gasoline won't help all that much.
As parent mentioned, it will also stifle the economic activity that could allow ordinary people to afford capital investments like at-home solar energy systems. And while one presumes that a "carbon tax" on gasoline fuel should be used to combat air pollution elsewhere, that is not necessarily how it will be spent.
British Columbia has a revenue-neutral carbon tax [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax
Especially in the US, where we are likely to raise the defense budget from $500 billion to $700 billion per year.
Makes me think about how much carbon is released for "defense".
-Thirty Ninth President of the United States of America Ronald Reagan.
Why not, we already tax everything as it is right now? And lots of places have carbon taxes, it works fine.
Businesses that rely on low wage workers suddenly have two major problems:
1. They have to find more profit to accommodate shipping expenses
2. They have to pay their workers more
Both of those problems are incredibly difficult to some, and both of them together are deadly to business.
A gas tax would significantly harm the livelihood of poor hard working people.
The poor just take transit or bike.
Even some of the big cities (like LA) have woefully lacking transit and everyone just sits in gridlocked traffic for multiple hours every day.
While running a car may be cheap in financial terms in the US, environmentally and in terms of scarce natural resources it is anything but, and at some point the US is going to have to deal with the social acceptability of one person driving an enormous vehicle for long distances many times per week or within our lifetimes there are going to be serious problems.
A metro's most car-dependent are its working poor, who need to live the furthest away from the downtown core to afford housing.
They live outside the cities where housing is more affordable but there's no public transport
And, unless something changed recently, batteries. My iPhone 5 had a faulty charging socket, which got worse. A month after unboxing, it would no longer charge at all, so I handed it in for repair. Got back a unit with half the battery life and a faulty charging socket.
I gave it to a good GSoC student across the world after a second unsuccessful trip to service
Are phone parts "consumable"? I thought "consumable" meant refers to things that get "used up" like milk, ink, pens, etc., not storage media or LCD screens or the like...
It's not worth it to extract the lithium, monetarily speaking.
Can you substantiate that? It's clearly at odds with my experience, neither of my two replacement units had a battery life that even came close to unboxed unit.
I just don't buy that every serviced device gets a new battery.
(I am in Europe by the way)
[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+5+Teardown/10525
However, that is in addition to various other statutory consumer rights about fitness for purpose and being of appropriate quality, which EU member states might have in their national laws as well. Here in the UK, for example, those obligations can run for many years beyond the initial warranty, and can result in repair, replacement or (full or partial) refund for faulty products depending on the circumstances.
In most cases, it's the vendor who took your money who is on the hook legally for these kinds of responsibilities, though in practice of course manufacturers often offer their own warranties to the final customers and/or make supporting arrangements with vendors selling their products.
Unfortunately at present most of these rules only apply to private individuals, and with business purchases caveat emptor and expensive service contracts are often the norm even if a purchase is being made by a small business with no more real leverage against a vendor or manufacturer than a private individual. When it comes to electronic devices like phones and laptops, this is potentially quite a big stumbling block in terms of forcing up standards of maintainability and promoting a "right to repair" to reduce waste.
kinda similar like car parts, warranty is like 3-5 years (or 100K km) but parts must be available like 10 years or something
Well, let’s see what a leading company is saying about that:
”We believe our goal should be a closed-loop supply chain, where products are built using only renewable resources or recycled material”[0]
It’s not quite the cyberpunk dream of being able to repair anything with a soldering iron in 30 minutes, but it’s a very critical step to reach. We’re slowly getting there.
[0]: https://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental... (page 16)
Nidhogg's Rule: Recycling. There is no such place as Away, so be careful what you throw there. Recycle, give away, don't waste, find a place for it somewhere else. This includes people as well as things.
http://www.northernpaganism.org/rokkatru/rokkatru-ethics.htm...
The last time I got a circuit schematic was with my Icom radio. And even with that, still received none of the firmware. "Proprietary".
Ideally, mechanical drawings, circuit schematics, and firmware would enable a great deal of repair and 3d party parts replacement. But the idea of allowing that isn't capitalist - in fact it goes directly against selling more to replace (planned obsolescence).
I would heartily like to have a library of parts I can refer to, designs I can 3d print parts as needed, firmware access to correct issues. But this all flies in direct opposition with "commercial" opportunities, save a very few.
It's also why I highly prefer free/open source hardware, with as much details how it works available. That's the only way to guarantee that your hardware doesn't get abandoned - there's always someone who has a similar problem.
(Also, nitpick, but cypherpunk != cyberpunk; the former won't care about repairability of the hardware, unless you put your private key on it.)
All of this electronics churn is environmentally terrible, and it's frustrating that, as with carbon energy products, the entire world is forced to pay for the environmental externalities rather than the actual tech users.
You can make an accelerationist argument about not discouraging tech development and dealing with the problems using more efficient tech in the future, I guess. But I'd honestly rather have electronics cost a bit more and know that manufacturers had a financial interest in maintaining rather than replacing.