I don't get it. Everything you said applicable to the parent's suggestion as well. What exactly are is your point here?

A deposit means you get it back when you return the material to a recycling facility. The Recycling levy in Canada is just charged on the sale, and that’s the end of it. If you choose to throw the battery in the ocean instead of the appropriate recycle bin, you get just as much money back.

I thought the parents suggestion was that the consumer pays 25 Euro and receive them back when recycling the electronic device. Like... a deposit on bottles.

I'm afraid this would have the opposite effect though. Instead of donating old phones or CD players, people would have them trashed to get their deposit back.

> Instead of donating old phones or CD players, people would have them trashed to get their deposit back.

Plenty of places that take e-waste right now will refurb and resell a subset of the hardware they receive. This would be no different. It's true that this would place a floor of the money required to obtain these devices, but it's not like there would suddenly no longer be used devices for sale.

Is it even profitable to run recycling centres?

I think as soon as you add a monetary value, people think something like "I don't need the $25, I'll just put it in the trash."

People are complaining about the current state of recycling, but I save up all my lithium batteries and pay to have them recycled every few years. You can't throw that shit away.

There’s a slightly odd slightly perverse incentive at play with this though that’s particularly relevant to the article. In Canada, we have a deposit on drink cans and bottles that varies between 5 and 10 cents. Many people collect their bottles and make a quarterly or annual or whatever trip to Sarcan (recycling depot) and walk out with a cheque for $30 or so. Businesses generally have recycling bins as well and cash out on their bottles every few weeks. But there’s still a bunch of people who throw them in the trash or just litter…

The result is that homeless people are often going around collecting bottles. On garbage day, I’ll often see at least two or three people walking down the alley collecting bottles out of everyone’s bins before the garbage truck shows up. And in parks you often see homeless people rummaging around the trash cans looking for bottles, or just walking around picking them up off the ground. For the people who are too lazy to handle it themselves, we’ve (unintentionally? Maybe?) incentivized homeless people to be trash collectors and get paid for it. If the deposits were larger, guaranteed this would ramp up.

In some European countries this type of deposit is normal for plastic and glass bottles and other drinks containers, though the deposit is usually much lower (25 to 50 cents).

The impact is significant, even if it's such a low amount of money. A €25 deposit would definitely keep people from throwing out these things en masse. There will always be people who will act selfishly and against their self interest, but you've got to be pretty damn rich to throw out €25 like it's nothing.

I wouldn't call it make-pretend when you can drop electronics in any supermarket and they'll take care of recycling. I don't have statistics but anecdotally people here in Finland seem to recycle electronics as intended.

That's still more work than dropping them in the trash bin at home, or on the street. And at least here in the US where I live, while many areas have residential recycling pick-up, you can't put electronics in with that.

Where I live in Spain I just call the local solid-waste service and leave it right next to my closest recycling bin in the time frame we arrange. They collect nearly anything large, including electronics.

Only problem I've had sometimes is them calling back claiming that I left them hanging, which actually means a scrappie collected it before they arrived.

Isn't the "recycling" in those cases just "ship it to a third world country who claims they have recycling but really it's just extremely poor people taking apart electronic goods with minimal tools in what is effectively a landfill"?

I do use those options. Though I don't bring old devices to the shop but to the local government recycling center (which I trust more to actually recycle it).