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IT Technology

Hawaii is About To Launch One of the Nation's Most Ambitious Tech Waste Recycling Programs (hawaiinewsnow.com) 40

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Hawaii is implementing one of the most ambitious electronic waste recycling plans in the country, but some Hawaii retailers are afraid it will mean higher prices and less selection. From a report: Ironically, Hawaii has no ability to recycle electronic devices. Instead, the material has to be collected and shipped to processing centers elsewhere. The goal of the new law is to have manufacturers collect and ship out more and more of the used-up products. But industry lobbyist Walter Alcorn, with the Consumer Technology Association, said the law sets goals that cannot be met. "On the industry side, it's been a scramble." Alcorn said. "Particularly for the computer and printer manufacturers that previously did not have to have this type of a program."

State Rep. Nicole Lowen, chair of the Energy and Environmental Protection Committee, was among the lead advocates for the law. She said putting the full responsibility on the manufacturers will incentivize them to pay more attention to the waste their industry is generating. "We are pushing them to rethink the design packaging, distribution systems of their products and create more efficiency, for the reuse and recycling of those products or the materials that they contain," Lowen said. The law required 49 manufacturers, from Apple to Samsung, to report how much product has been shipped in by weight and how they would set up systems to collect discarded devices and ship them to recycling locations. There are none in Hawaii so all the products would have to be shipped out.
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Hawaii is About To Launch One of the Nation's Most Ambitious Tech Waste Recycling Programs More

Hawaii is About To Launch One of the Nation's Most Ambitious Tech Waste Recycling Programs

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  • Since this "She said putting the full responsibility on the manufacturers will incentivize them to pay more attention to the waste their industry is generating." actually puts the cost of recycling on the comsumers (those that buy the products?, why not BAN the products and go with products that they can recycle?

    Paper and pens instead of computers, keyboards, etc.
    Landline phones instead of cell phones.
    Why advance into the 21st Century and discover 21st solutions when they can retreat to the 20th Centur

    • Qiute a few years back Europe brought in some laws around respossability for recycling of consumer electronics (TVs, DVD players, etc) and placing that recycling (and therefore the cost) on the Manufacturer. It caused the manufacturers to immediately develop ways to make their products more easily recyclable.

      One example I remember is that name plates and serial number panels were often made of a different kind of plastic that had to be separated at recycling time. It was done that way because each plastic

      • In 2019, Europe recycled 42% of e-waste. North America recycled 9%.

        E-waste recycling by region [statista.com]

      • Excellent example.

        Lowen is right, and this is about the most market-driven solution available, for those so fearful of regulations. Of course it would be better nationally-implemented, or even internationally by treaty, but it needs to start somewhere.

        For those who prefer micro-management, not many consumers would mind if they never saw another hard-to-open plastic blister pack.

  • They have decided to use weight, like literal pounds and tons for incoming and outgoing products.

    However even the article mentions, things are getting lighter If you recently replaced your TV, you'll see the new one weigh less, (or is larger). If you replace your "release date" gaming console with a "slim" one it will be lighter. If you replace your larger desktop computer with a mini-PC it will be extremely lightweight.

    And it is not like all used stuff goes to waste. Will you throw away an older TV? Or giv

    • Re:Wow! They are measuring by weight! (Score:4, Informative)

      by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @05:43PM (#63020239)

      You are seriously behind the curve, here is some appropriate reading for you about what is actually occurring [nih.gov]

    • "And it is not like all used stuff goes to waste." No, but a huge percentage does. I used to dumpster dive several corporate dumpsters for parts. Computer after computer after computer is going straight to landfills. Why? Because figuring out how to wipe it down or accounting for it to sell it to someone, even to give it away, is more expensive than trashing it. Individuals are just as wasteful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        "Corporate" may be too descriptive. I work at a company of 100+ people and the IT idiots frequently throw out working stuff. I've eBayed and Craiglisted over $1500 so far. I don't care about the money but rather the waste. People just don't care. If the heat is killing them they'll blame the sun, not the decades of their wastefulness.

    • They're using weight because they have to ship the stuff out, so it's a concern to them how much is shipped in — they have to budget for that. It will fail eventually, even if you give it to your cousin's nephew's barber's uncle's roofer, and then it will have to go.

    • They have decided to use weight, like literal pounds and tons

      What's wrong with that? That seems like the most logical way to regulate waste. What do you suggest they measure instead?

      • Hipness quotient. Recycling an iGadget instantly costs about 3x as much as a technically equivalent off-brand.

  • Your days of slipping out the back door at the end of your shift with a pocketful of mutton are OVER!

  • How much has printer technology really changed in the last 20 years? Is there any technical reason that a printer that worked perfectly well on Windows 7 can't work just as well on Windows 10 or 11? Sure the manufacturers would need to spend a bit of time to make sure drivers ran on those versions of Windows but is that really that hard to do? The only reason I can see that HP and other printer manufacturers don't make drivers for new versions of Windows is to force people to buy a new printer. The printer

    • My LaserJet may live forever, but those darn toner cartridges keep piling up

    • If you pony up for a standards-based, network-connected printer, in the worst case you just can't use the USB.

      OTOH, since I run Linux, I just plug the Brother MFC in and it works. The only thing that doesn't work out of the box on a modern Linux is that the buttons on the unit don't scan to email and whatnot. I installed the software and haven't gotten it to work quite right get, only kinda. But SANE can scan, and the printer speaks PCL, so all one needs is the PPD.

    • Domestic printers are just a hangover from the desktop publishing fad of the 1990s & should die in a fire. No individual needs a printer & no home should have one in 2022. We have other non-paper-&-ink-wasting ways to deal with tickets, bookings, lists, documents, etc.. I say ban the sale of printers to individuals & only allow companies to buy them. Also, only allow industrial quality printers, you know, the kind that you find in reprographics centres. If anyone really, really , really need
      • "Sorry grandma, I can't print that computer article out for you in large print because VeryFluffyBunny has demanded that no homes should have a printer, and I can't afford the reprographics cost and time to get it done. Yes, I know you can't operate that tablet, but that's your fault. Now just go sit in the corner and watch TV."
        • "Sorry starving little 5 year-old girl with big round sad eyes, dressed in rags. I can't print out that food voucher for you because FluffyBunny's a huge arsehole. Now go & rest in the corner so that you starve more slowly & maybe you can beg for food." - Your turn.

  • A lot of companies are supposedly "ESG" compliant and planting forests worth of trees but yet fail to make their products not disposable. The CEA representing the worse of them!

    Let's tax the h-ll out them if batteries are not consumer replaceable or at the least don't have standard screws to compartments. Or if not that then third party qualified technician repairable. Let's standardize display replacement while we're at it. Use the tax collected to fund the NIST to standardize and increase electronic repai

    • A lot of companies are supposedly "ESG" compliant and planting forests worth of trees but yet fail to make their products not disposable.

      Planting trees is far more beneficial to the environment than redesigning products for recycling just to see them tossed in the landfill anyway or shipped to Asia on fossil fuel-burning container ships with no auditing or accountability.

    • How about mandatory 10 year guarantees, temporary courtesy replacement phones, & compensation for customers whose phones they don't repair & return within a week?
  • Have consumers pay the projected eventual disposal costs of all products when they buy them; put that money in the bank, and then make disposal of those products free. Costs to ship the garbage back to the manufacturer for recycling should be included in the upfront cost.
    • So what do I do with the 2 TVs (from no-name manufacturers) that I have sitting in my closet right now? The county of Hawaii has closed down their old recycling program until next fiscal year (June) because they have no money left in the budget for it.
      • My "solution" doesn't have an obvious way of handling items that were purchased before the fees went into effect. We could try tacking on an extra percentage to the fee to handle older items, but the math gets pretty messy on that. I suspect ultimately the government would just have to subsidize disposal/recycling costs of older items. Why did I bring up the suggestion in first place? Because I'm tired of people dumping old furniture on the side of the rural road I live on to avoid paying $10 to the transfe
      • It makes sense to collect old electronics at point of sale. So, when you go to buy a new TV, you bring your old one(s) with you & get some money off the cost of recycling the new one. Or better still, the deliverers collect the old one(s) & any other electronics you've finished with so that they can be refurbished & reused or recycled. How does that sound?

        There's no shortage of good ideas for reducing e-waste. The main obstacle is objections & lobbying from manufacturers who want to keep
      • Several TV programs on recycling where they ended in shipping containers heading to 3rd world ports. (affix GPS trackers). Some products are uneconomical to recycle. Some need high value goods mixed in to make it work. The ONLY solution NOT tried is free disposal if you break it down to metals and motors, glass and plastics, electronics(like psu) and 'definitely not recyclable' like glass CRT and LCD panels. This is what they do in Vietnam. You can even pick up waste, and pay you X, plus pocket money for d

  • In related news (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @08:41PM (#63020695)

    Massachusetts just made it illegal to throw any shoes or textiles into the trash, no matter how chewed up.

    In order to be green, you're supposed to get into your car and drive 20 miles plus and back to donate your ratty old socks and house slippers to one of a handful of textile recycling collection boxes in the state, instead of chucking it in with the general waste stream.

    They won't enforce it on residential trash, they'll go around fining trash haulers who dump too many ratty old socks. Then the waste haulers will just pass along the fines to their customers and everyone is pissed off a little more and that's about it.

    It'll be the same with this bullshit in Hawaii.

    Democrats seem to live in the fantasy land they were promised in elementary and middle school earth science class in the 80s and 90s, where you can shutter heavy industry without consequences, decommission power plants and the lights magically stay on, and decree a recycling-based economy into existence despite the fact that harvesting anything useful from the little wad of plastics, adhesives, and synthetic fibers that were my worn out slippers is almost certainly going to cause more pollution than just dumping it in a landfill.

    • Proudly living up to your username as always I see!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      Democrats seem to live in the fantasy land they were promised in elementary and middle school earth science class in the 80s and 90s

      And most folks (not naming parties: this is a human failing, not a political one) think that it's possible to have a once-thru economy for everything, forever, even on a planet with finite resources. It's delusional to believe that one continually pull more resources out of the ground, use it for a short period of time, toss it in the trash, and expect that the problem just.

      • Some things are naturally finite, others are renewable resources. Paper literally grows on trees. Cotton, wool, and other natural fibers grow on plants and critters. It's perfectly reasonable to toss them, or even burn them, when they've reached the end of their useful life.

        Synthetic fibers are a bit less clear cut. If they come from "green methane" feedstock (if such a thing were to ever exist) then the same would be true for them too. Until then, dumping them in the ground is possibly a better bet from an

  • Until they actually have a proper way to dispose of single use batteries I have serious doubts that this will gain any traction. I had about 15kg of batteries to get rid of, and I was told by Opala (trash agency) to just throw them in with regular trash, the waste-to-energy plant will take care of them just fine. That is pretty much their answer for everything that will burn, although oil-based paints are much harder to dispose of.

  • Huawei is just trying to get in the good graces of The US government so that their technology is off the banned list.

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