201–210 of 336 posts
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If that's the goal, we might as well just pay people to dig a hole and then fill it back in again repeatedly, and it wouldn't produce as much CO2 in the end. Or, you know, pay them to wash reusable silverware.
Yeah, but nobody in the west wants to do that?
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A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Perhaps inevitable once sensors become pervasive and cheap enough. Too some extent this is already done and enforced for disposing of blatantly dangerous things. In some cases you could end up in prison in addition to fines, if caught. The more subtle things that add up to a big problem have been given a lot of leeway. Right now it is profitable for many parties to extr…
>A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Ok, how do you keep people from dumping their garbage in someone else's garbage bin, or in some public place in the middle of the night? This also doesn't really deal with the fact that different garbage has very different effects on the environment and society, and very different mass. "E-waste" frequently doesn't weigh that much, but has a lot of both valuable metals…
But taking stuff to the recycling centre is free, and there's usually one within five minutes walk of any given house.
The end result is that waste is basically self managed --- people are incentivised to recycle as much as possible and reduce waste. I remember hearing that disposal largely pays for itself, but I don't have a reference for that, so don't quote me.
(Fly tipping is basically unheard of.)
This 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…
a) figure out how to make washing plates more efficient
b) extend the lifetime of plates so their manufacture is amortized over more uses
(Or do you specifically call out china plates because they are known for seeing so little use?)
I 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?
The devil is in the details. For example the "chemical tax" is on the weight of the products, so when you buy consumer electronics you are supposed to be paying 120 kr/kg up to a maximum of 320 kr before VAT. This is blamed on environmnentally hazardous flame retardants on circuit boards. So the very design of this tax incentives less weighty electronic products, but I've learned that some electronic products longevi…
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Probably the least worst option unless you want to buy (very expensive) commercial/industrial models. The main downside to Miele that I'm aware of is that unlike other manufacturers they monopolise repairs, i.e. only Miele repairmen can repair Miele machines, AFAIK. Also while Miele machines are better built they still use short warranties. Here Miele claims to test their machines to 20 years equivalent use: http://w…
Actually, in Germany all better models come with 10 year warranties, and they allow most people to repair them. (We got a Miele washing machine in 2006, and after good experiences with that, we also switched our dishwasher in 2009 to Miele)
But I checked the (UK) Miele website just now and it seems like warranties there are 2 years by default, with extended warranties of 10 years available. So maybe this varies by region. Maybe German consumers are savvier than UK consumers and demand longer warranties?
So the opposite of Cash for Clunkers.[1] Would a Keynesian then expect these tax breaks to crash the economy? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System
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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...
If they can figure out how to make the stuff out of bamboo, then we have ourselves a carbon sequestration method. No more global warming.
Expensive, though, for disposable stuff.
The only problem with repairing devices is labour cost, nothing else. I've had a broken subwoofer that I took to a small electronics shop(in UK), and was quoted 60 pounds to even have it looked at. Not repaired - looked at. The subwoofer cost me 80 pounds on ebay. So predictably, it went straight to the bin. Same with washing machines, dryers, etc - I bought a Hotpoint washing machine for 220 pounds, but a standard c…
Shipping things around burns petroleum, but human labor costs mostly time (no climate impact) and calories, which are largely being burned anyway simply by existing. (Though this changes a little if we're talking hard manual labor instead of delicate work with the hands)
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A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Perhaps inevitable once sensors become pervasive and cheap enough. Too some extent this is already done and enforced for disposing of blatantly dangerous things. In some cases you could end up in prison in addition to fines, if caught. The more subtle things that add up to a big problem have been given a lot of leeway. Right now it is profitable for many parties to extr…
Currently companies externalize the cost of disposing their products. You and I having to pay a bigger garbage bill is not going to change the behavior of the companies making all of this trash. If it were possible to query everything that went into a landfill, and bill the entire value chain proportionally for its disposal cost, THEN we might start to have a fair system and see changes. Current incentives are to pro…
Of course, its main purpose is to pay for programs that safely manage the disposal of unused paint (i.e. you can take your extra unused paint to paint retailers for proper disposal.) But, this price hike should, at least in theory, reduce demand for paint a little overall.
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I am only aware of one brand of washing machine that explicitly claims to be designed to be repairable by the end-user--Staber. I have never actually owned or used one before, so I'm not sure how fit for purpose it may be otherwise. I have successfully repaired other brands of washing machine, dryer, and refrigerator, though. It isn't that difficult, but obtaining the replacement parts is absolutely ridiculous. The f…
I think this is a bad idea. Standards are nice, but companies shouldn't be coerced into using them because there can be legitimate reasons to not use a standard. It prevents innovation not envisioned by the standard. I really think the simplest way to make this sort of thing happen is to increase the minimum warranty period. If 8 year warranties become mandatory, companies will need to be able to stock replacement pa…
When PCI was introduced, motherboard manufacturers gradually increased the number of available PCI slots and reduced the number of ISA slots until the point where most of the market really didn't want that last ISA slot as much as they needed another PCI slot. ISA is still a standard. Nobody uses it because PCI was better. Likewise, AGP appeared, and then went away, because PCIe is better. Wi-fi standards have likewise evolved, from A, to B, to G, to N, to AC. Many devices are backward-compatible.
But an ATX motherboard manufactured last week will still fit in the ATX tower case I bought in 1999, with a power supply I bought in 2009. The original manufacturer of that case does not need to stock parts for it, or even still be in business, because if I want another 120mm case fan, 10 different companies can sell me a new one that will fit (and 20 more would be willing to buy a fan from one of the former 10, stencil a logo on it, and resell it to me at a markup).
Perhaps it would be better to enforce a mandatory standard for 10 years, to establish it in the market, then make it voluntary again, so that innovation could occur. Once a standard exists, there has to be a really good reason for deviating from it, otherwise the market quickly allows the non-standard thing to fail. If it succeeds, it becomes a new de facto standard, and the official standard is likely to either adopt it outright or make the next version compatible.
I think you absolutely do have to coerce a standard if one does not already exist. But after it exists, it is largely self-enforcing.
To buck off the standard entirely, you literally have to be the size of Apple. And even then, I know for certain that there is at least one person alive that refuses to buy Apple hardware in part because of their proprietary connector shenanigans in a world where USB is a standard.