221–230 of 366 posts
My grandparents old laptop finally died, and they offered me it for parts but I had to straight out tell them that there was nothing on it that was worth anything.
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The amount of plastic and paper packaging/marketing that you are forced to accept and dispose of when you buy products is getting extreme. I recently bought a micro-sd card, and had to dispose of: 1. the large shipping package, 2. the enormous (in volume and mass) product plastic shell package, 3. the glossy paper marketing insert inside the package, 4. the user’s manual (!), 5. the unwanted microsd-to-sd adapter. Pr…
As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well. I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online. Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.
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As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well. I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online. Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.
I wonder how far you have to drive to offset the benefit in waste from shipping
Some sort of emergency? Sure, but that is hardly the norm.
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The amount of plastic and paper packaging/marketing that you are forced to accept and dispose of when you buy products is getting extreme. I recently bought a micro-sd card, and had to dispose of: 1. the large shipping package, 2. the enormous (in volume and mass) product plastic shell package, 3. the glossy paper marketing insert inside the package, 4. the user’s manual (!), 5. the unwanted microsd-to-sd adapter. Pr…
As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well. I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online. Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.
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Absolutely. Remember the "2014 Obama Unlocking Law" [1] ? It was supposed to not only not make it ilegal to carrier unlock a phone, but also forced all carriers to adopt a specific code of conduct to assist users with unlocking. Fast forward 6 years, and it is much harder to unlock a phone than it was then. The whole thing backfired for consumers. It was actually easier to unlock a phone in a "non-legal" way before t…
> This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status. I had no idea this was still a thing, it’s horrible. What mechanism is creating the current situation? Phones are all unlocked here in New Zealand.
Lack of general consumer protection regulation (or their enforcement), and specifically with regards to telecommunications the regulator who's supposed to oversee the field (the FCC in the US, or OFCOM in the UK for example) is often in bed with the companies it's supposed to regulate.
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As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well. I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online. Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.
Ordering 2 items from Amazon will almost certainly result in two separate packages being shipped to you. (At least that’s my experience here in Germany - YMMV.)
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As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well. I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online. Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.
I wonder how far you have to drive to offset the benefit in waste from shipping
I kind of wonder if we're looking at solving this the wrong way. Instead of mandating that manufacturers take specific steps to fix the waste problem, maybe it would be better to tag items at manufacture and charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream. Manufacturers could solve this by either: - Making their things easy to repair - Creating in house recycling programs - Makin…
It's feasible to enforce repairability conditions and documentation requirements before a device is sold, at the point of manufacture or import - if you're not compliant, you get excluded from the market.
It's not feasible to reliably and effectively enforce consequences for manufacturers years down the road, when it's plausible that the original overseas manufacturer and the importer/wholesale distributor both have shuttered their operations.
We can't wait and see how much waste will be generated from this device, we if we want to charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream, this needs to be based on an up-front guesstimate - which IMHO is a subjective metric can't be reliable and just invites corruption and abuse.
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> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Yes, with a bill for the cost of collection and at some point (after repeated failures?), a fine to motivate a course correction.
> after repeated failures? Failure to do what?
Eg near me is a nice park. Every single evening the car park gets a dump of McDonalds and Wendy’s rubbish.
Yes, it’s their customers and not them, but if those companies addressed their waste by creating less, making more efficient packaging or finding other ways to improve the situation, they would make way more difference than any customer could.
If you follow the laptop/smart-phone repair community [1], the problems they run into is lack of access to technical manuals, diagnostic tools and in cases, being prevented from buying replacement parts by suppliers under the direction of Apple (for example). To me, it seems that this is where government or industry regulation would be helpful and provide most value with minimal impact on innovation and market disrup…