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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Lane3 who wrote (82888)9/8/2008 10:02:31 AM
From: Stan J. Czernel  Read Replies (1) of 541674
 
Returning used products to the manufacturer seems incredibly contorted to me. If you want to motivate manufacturers to design for low impact disposal, how about putting a label on the project like the EPA did with EnergyStar? You could rate the disposal impact and charge the buyer for disposal. Then the buyer would choose a product with a low disposal cost, which would motivate manufactures to compete on this factor. It sure beats hauling my old dishwasher to Maytag.

You are missing most of my point. These take-back laws have other benefits: they increase employment (for repairers and disassemblers); and reduce the burden on landfills. They also drastically reduce raw material needs thru recycling. They extend the life of landfills. Smart companies will become more competitive by redesigning products to make them more durable, and/or facilitate disassembley and reduce waste. They will redesign the materials that they cannot avoid trashing so that they are non-toxic to the environment (oh. I forgot to mention that the cost of waste disposal would be fine tuned - so that toxic, non-biodegradable products ate taxed most heavily) .

As for unintended consequences - this is being done in other countries already - Germany, most notably. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can learn from their experience what works and what does not.

Regarding Energy Star: it works - sometimes - but only where energy prices are high, and energy use is the prime consideration in the purchase. This applies only to a few types of products with high energy consumption - aNd it does not have the synergistic benefits of a take-back plan.

(By the way, somewhere (I forget where) people wanted eneergy start appliances but could not easily find them. It turns out that the local appliance stores were not stocking adequate numbers of them. The local utility started offering a fee to these stores for each energy star appliance it stocked. Availability improved). See what can happen when innovative minds are applied to a problem?

I am not religious (much) about the way problems are solved - as long as the solution is reasonable. I am keen on changes that solve more than one problem. If their are negative side effects, we recognize them and work to minimize them. We learn iteratively - making improvements and corrections as the consequences appear.
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