Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
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Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#2Wouldn't a high sales tax promote exactly that?
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#3Wouldn't a high sales tax promote exactly that?
Sales tax also applies to the services.
More over, as labor is highly taxed in Sweden, it makes local repairing disproportionally more expensive compared to the manufacturing in a country with smaller labor costs.
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#4I fail to understand why Scandinavian politics always manage to make sense.
Is that cultural, historical, economical, or does the tough climate force people to think a little bit more about how they manage their society?
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#5What we really need is financial penalties on companies that make stuff deliberately hard to repair. Set up a department of the Consumer Rights Bureau (or whatever it's called) where people can report devices the've been unable to fix due to deliberate obfuscation/etc., and that forces manufacturers to refund the consumer the entire purchase sum of that device no matter how old it is.
Anecdote: my washing machine recently broke the main bearing, and I was going to fix it. Even found a nice teardown/reassembly vid on Youtube of the exact same model (a bit older than mine). After 2 hours of work, I discover Bosch has gone from using screws on the outer drum to plastic welding it shut. So fixing it means replacing the entire assembly, costing 2/3 of a new machine and with a four week delivery time for the part. I learned this is only done to screw consumers over, and that all manufacturers do it now. The drum still has all the mounting tabs for being screwed together, so they're literally just saving $0.30 on screws.
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#6This idea seems so sensible it's a no-brainer. (I'm almost dreading the comments explaining why I'm wrong!) The human race is producing unprecedented quantities of non-recyclable "stuff".
It's pumped out of the ground as oil, converted into plastics, and after a short life, buried in the ground again. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if much of it didn't also end up floating in the ocean, being eaten by animals and contaminating the human food chain.
The only potential counter-argument I can see with this sort of policy is that the goals of minimising CO2 and minimising waste sometimes seem to be in competition with each other. Anecdotally I've heard of examples where (e.g.) washing china plates has a greater carbon cost than using disposable ones.
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#7This idea seems so sensible it's a no-brainer. (I'm almost dreading the comments explaining why I'm wrong!) The human race is producing unprecedented quantities of non-recyclable "stuff". It's pumped out of the ground as oil, converted into plastics, and after a short life, buried in the ground again. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if much of it didn't also end up floating in the ocean, being eaten by animals and cont…
Non-petroleum based plastics are a thing, but lag behind in many areas like strength, injection molding quality, UV resistance etc.
Recently Lego decided on moving to plant-based plastics, but they expect to need more than a decade of R&D by a team of 100 people, costing $150 million, before these materials are up to Lego's quality standards.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i26/Lego-Replace-Oil-Based-Pl...
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#8This has probably more to do with Sweden having so high taxes on labour that repairs becomes impossible without a tax break.
An average Swede gets ~ a third of the money the company pays for his wages. (30% tax, 30% in social charges etc.)
If he is going to rent an hour from someone with the same salary as himself/herself, that will be three times the hourly salary. (I'll ignore the other costs here.)
So, in sum, because of the taxes etc, a Swede have to work [at least] a full day to buy an hour of work time.
(Reservation for the exact numbers. It was a while since I lived in Sweden. People might keep 40% or so now, but I also ignored a lot of extra costs.)
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#9I fail to understand why Scandinavian politics always manage to make sense. Is that cultural, historical, economical, or does the tough climate force people to think a little bit more about how they manage their society?
I assure you we have stupidity here too, it's a global trait. While this one makes sense, there's also a proposed "Chemicals tax" for 2017, taxing electronics (phones/tablets/games consoles/etc) per weight, regardless of contents. So what we waste the most (phones/tablets) will barely pay for anything, while TV's which can last 5-10 years will get more expensive.
Re: Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
#10Heaps of old stuff is broken because of planned obsolescence. Is it not a waste trying to repair that rubbish that was originally designed to break soon and hard and expensive to repair? Lowering tax for companies that produce sustainable products seems more efficient to me.