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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (82888)	9/8/2008 10:02:31 AM
From: Stan J. Czernel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541744

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.

To: Lane3 who wrote (82888)	9/8/2008 10:14:56 AM
From: dvdw©	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541744

Because this threads product is information; your comment "Returning used products to the manufacturer seems incredibly contorted to me. If you want to motivate manufacturers to design for low impact disposal" this article fits the subject quite well. About Contact Archives RSS Columns Photos Michelle Malkin The bogus Sarah Palin Banned Books List By Michelle Malkin • September 6, 2008 12:01 AM Photoshop: David Lunde Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again. This time it’s hysterical librarians and their readers on the Internet disseminating a bogus list of books Gov. Sarah Palin supposedly banned in 1996. Looks like some of these library people failed reading comprehension. Take a look at the list below and you’ll find books Gov. Palin supposedly tried to ban…that hadn’t even been published yet. Example: The Harry Potter books, the first of which wasn’t published until 1998. The smear merchants who continue to circulate the list also failed to do a simple Google search, which would have showed them that the bogus Sarah Palin Banned Book List is almost an exact copy-and-paste reproduction of a generic list of “Books Banned at One Time or Another in the United States” that has been floating around the Internet for years. STACLU notes that the official Obama campaign website is also perpetuating the fraud. And it’s spread to craigslist, where some unhinged user is posting images likening Palin to Hitler. Here it is again. The person who first spread the Palin smear is identified as “Andrew Aucoin,” a commenter on the blog of librarian Jessamyn West. West has done the right thing in keeping the bogus comment up and pointing out in her main post that “there appears to be no truth to the claim made by the commenter, and no further documentation or support for this has turned up.” It’s a fake. Not true. Total B.S. A lie. If it gets sent to you by a moonbat friend or family member, set ‘em all straight. Fight the smears. They’ve only just begun. The bogus Sarah Palin Banned Books List: more here; michellemalkin.com