I don't hate the idea.

But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale.

Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle.

I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.

> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products... Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies

I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that stuff

Agreed. Companies could “outsource” their recycling obligations to local (national, regional, whatever) providers.

Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that the city should do so that we don’t have a dozen trucks collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.

That was tried, and what ultimately occured was disgusting.

The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.

We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)

Why past tense? That's describing exacty the world we are living in right now.

As far as i know a large portion of what i described shutdown after it came to light, although i would not be the least bit surprised if it was still happening in some capacity, or even in full under the disguise of something else

Consider that there are some things society can and should do that are independent of the profit motive, hm?

The full cost of product has externalised the waste bit, and made it the customer and societies problem.

> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products

As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.

It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.

Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans, destroying the basis of our future food production, etc, be tractable?

The amount of completely useless plastic garbage that we would be sending back east would be mind-numbing. They don’t have anywhere to put that trash either.

So maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is currently just externalized) then they might start disappearing by not being produced in the first place by lack of demand.

People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.

> People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.

This is an interesting thread to pull on. Why is it so inexpensive for the east to make plastic garbage and sell it to the world?

1. Plastic is cheap

2. Importers of cheap plastic crap are not on the hook of the eventual disposal. So the cost isn’t seen by the consumer at point of purchase but instead indirectly seen in increased taxes for garbage disposal

> Go further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life.

Well that Charmin bear will certainly have his work cut out for him

You're thinking disposable vapes, but this will apply to quality of life appliances like washing machines as well, right?

Do you want to live in a world where only the rich can afford washing machines?

Incidentally, I don't know what you do, but once in a while I throw (carefully, li-ion batteries) my broken electronics in the trunk and bring them to the local collection center.

The EU and UK already require sellers to recycle electronics, and we can still afford washing machines. Here is Amazon's page:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...

Heh. I am in the EU. For washing machines specifically, I get a tiny discount when I buy a new one for having them pick up the old one for recycling. Possibly for freezers too, but for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't.

Not all stores do that though, if I buy from one that doesn't I can call my local recycling center and they'll eventually get around to picking up the old appliance from your home.

However, this is not done by the manufacturer or importer, as the OP suggested. There are separate organizations and it's paid for via a tax on new device purchases.

Which means a new washing machine manufacturer doesn't need to worry about having their own recycling infrastructure. And I move that the recycling tax I pay for national level recycling adds less to the price than $NEW_COMPANY building their own, just for their models.

> for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't.

The properties of your running water and the presence of very much moving parts in the former?

Noo it can't be that! I definitely don't have to rebalance the washer regularly to stop it from dancing around my bathroom!

It's one of them new solid state washers designed by "AI". Very advanced technology!

Thinking for a moment what "recycling" a washing machine would look like and it's very obvious it would just mean paying a 3rd party to dump it in the 3rd world somewhere to be stripped if at all. Hard to imagine it's not causing more environmental damage by having this policy.

A washing machine has a decent amount of metal in it, that's definitely going to be recycled, as it has value. A policy like this could cause environmental damage, but saying that it's inevitable is just defeatist. In fact the manufacturer is the one with the knowledge to recycle stuff properly as they know what went into it. This is actually a way to work with the market. Any other option, other than just giving up, involves more government intervention.

There's also Stewart Brand style cradle-to-cradle design, where you build in features that allow recycling to be easy, that's really my goal when I say manufacturers should be responsible - change the design

The scrap metal yard near me definitely pays to take washing machines and dryers. There's a lot of steel scrap, some circuit boards, and a motor in there.