> Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.

It's a lot easier to hold few companies accountable, than to hold millions of consumers accountable.

> And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...

That's also a problem when you buy a product.

> but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features

I suppose the market will do its job. Cost of ownership is transparent (monthly fee plus power use), so consumers can easily choose, and they can easily switch.

> It sounds like a nightmare to me.

I'm already having nightmares about the environment right now.

Consumers largely dispose of waste through municipal pickup which is already well overlooked. Setting up oversight for industrial disposal by a bazillion corporate entities in this theoretical shareconomy of appliances would be an enormous burden on the already undercapable county and state EPA offices. It would probably all just get shipped out of the country anyway.

If you think modern refrigerators are wasteful I'd ask you to prove it. The design choices they make are manufacturing trade offs—not simply cutting corners to make it break. A refrigerator might only last 10 years, but its a net gain if it cost 1/10 the energy to build, uses 50% of the power, never leaks refrigerant and uses a small ammount.

It's not just disposal. It's also the choices that are made when building/buying the product. Consumers are easily persuaded to choose based on different qualities than environmental-friendliness. Also, the recycling facilities may be optimized specifically for the type of fridge that a service-provider uses.

A fridge service provider would care just as much about your power bill as a fridge vendor.

Yeah I was trying to parse this too, if my fridge SP was awful in all the ways mentioned, wouldn't I be looking at the competition, especially now that it's easy to cancel a contract and get a better one so easily - instead of paying $1k for a new fridge.

You can rent fridges right now, few people elect to do it...

I rent my apartment, and it comes with a fridge, so I guess I'm renting the fridge too. IS this not common? Do people usually bring their own fridge in when they rent?

I think you mean "Few people elect to do the thing they barely know exists."

The model being peddled on TV/radio/etc isn't "Rent a fridge." is it?

This is just another "language war". The airwaves and communications channels are monopolized by discourse that protects the known way of doing business. It's not a law of physics it be that way.

Because it's more expensive over a relatively short period, perhaps?

I suspect for long term goods that are below some cost, it's just cheaper for people to own them vs renting over the lifetime of the device. A corporation will tend to finance the capital cost of the good if it's renting, then needs to pass on the interest costs of those goods to the renters. On top of that a rental corp also need to maintain techs to install/remove appliances. It all adds up to higher cost to rent than own in this area.

A company will also pay for and pass on the cost of non-paying customers in terms of repossession or loss of rented units.

Cable, certainly, but the phones you rented from Ma Bell were nearly indestructable. My uncle has a lake house with several phones that were originally provided by the phone company. They still work and will no doubt continue to do so as long as pulse dialing is supported.

Right, but it doesn't seem like a fridge vendor would be a monopoly. It would be a competitive market where power consumption would be an attribute consumers consider.

Sounds like some great things for fridge service providers to compete on:

"Our fridges are more power efficient!"

"Ours have advanced health monitoring!"

"We have the greenest recycling program!"