I hate this. All the electronic waste, batteries and whatnot for a 15 day trial. I hope such a thing wouldn't be allowed in EU with the stricter waste laws
We better stop making many forms of new electronics then, to limit waste. Just imagine how many millions of USB sticks have been thrown in the trash in just the last year alone, as they become outdated by newer USB sticks that store twice as much at half the cost while wasting just as many physical resources!
Do you really need a new iPhone? No you do not. The iPhone 4 will do perfectly fine for now (according to some random bureaucrat), so the iPhone 5 should be illegal to sell until further notice.
This is a device that's designed to work for fifteen days and then instantly become garbage despite being perfectly functional.
Do you really have trouble understanding that part?
I'm a proponent of the idea that companies that sell you products should have to take them back at the end of their useful life. That is, Apple would take back your unwanted phone and be responsible for recycling or disposing of it, it would no longer be your problem. This would encourage companies to engineer products with longer useful lifespans, or to facilitate refurbishing instead of destruction.
Recycling isn't much of a solution. It's like smoking filtered cigarettes vs unfiltered - it's better than the alternative, but you'll still end up dead in the long term.
Short of glass, most materials recycle with very low efficiencies. Even aluminium, which is often touted as being "highly recyclable" usually only reclaims around 85% of the input.
Alright, but realistically, I don't see "no waste" economies coming up and staying up for good. So, better work hard on those filters than shrug it off.
Isn't aluminum particularly profitable to recycle, even with a low recovery, since it requires absurd amounts of power to smelt the stuff in the first place?
Aluminum is incredibly abundant in the earth's crust, but from what I understand it is the poster-boy for recycling because of the extreme difference in power costs between melting it down, and making it in the first place.
I was going to mention that much earlier...aluminum/aluminium wasn't easily separable from bauxite until electricity could be generated at industrial scale. It also forms a protective oxidized patina very quickly so needs very little in the way of post processing to "clean it up" for re-use.
No more hyperbole than pointing out that if you want to be that extreme, then the magazine shouldn't have been printed at all. After all, the least damage to environment would have been to only have it available online.
And if you insist that it should have been printed, then what about leaving out the few hundred pages of advertising or sponsored content. After all, if they only printed the "real" content the magazine delivers, that would be minimally damaging to the environment.
If there's anything to complain about here it's that I doubt they made it easy or obvious to users that they couldn't recycle the whole magazine as you would normally. Instead, you'd need to tear off the electronics part and take it to an e-waste recycle and put the rest in a "normal" recycling bin.
still waiting for some of your insight here, but, hey, this is just a guess but i think you're full of shit... if not, please share how the US funds the world's drug research. 18 days and nothing... guess all your other posts are crap too. this one hasn't really changed any opinions
I'd suspect it would. I've received things like USB flash drives on Microsoft promos. I could be wrong but I think EU law puts the onus on the person disposing electronic goods rather than the producer. (Not that most people listen with anything small, it just goes in the trash.)
> I think EU law puts the onus on the person disposing electronic goods rather than the producer.
Nope, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. At any point in time, if you want to dispose of some electronic gadget in the EU, you can send it to the manufacturer for disposal, and sue them if they refuse. If the manufacturer does not have a local branch, then the onus is on the importer/distributor down the chain.
Unfortunately, most people don't know or simply can't be bothered.
I used to just drop stuff at the local skip/recycling centre, where they keep electronics in a separate area, because I knew people would scavenge it for parts; a few months ago the skip changed their policy and now forbid people from picking up anything from the "electronics area", under some health&safety-touting rule. I bet it's actually because electronics disposal in the EU is now big business, thanks to the above-mentioned directive: producers are now under de-facto blackmail, so they pay specialised companies to deal with their waste, which in turn rely on local skips to pick up stuff. These companies need to get hold of waste to get paid, so they basically stop people from recycling at the source. Politically speaking it's mission accomplished (establishing a "green" economy etc etc), but in practice it's actually discouraging people from recycling among themselves, which is the most energy-efficient way to tackle waste; and recyclable electronics still show up in non-diversified skips across the African continent (or worse).
Retailers have to take the old gadget if you buy a new gadget from them.
Distributors need to provide centers to take stuff from consumers.
Consumers have a responsibility to look at the packaging to see if something can be thrown in the garbage or if it needs to be sent for special disposal.
For better or worse, your sentiments probably place you outside the target demographic for Forbes magazine. I will add that many of the resources consumed in online activity, including my comment here, are largely wasted.
This is indeed absolutely disgusting. We should strive to build things that last people 15 years not 15 days, high-quality intelligently-designed devices that provide use and value for years, not planned obsolence, laptops with glued batteries, disposable routers. This is too much.
Regular batteries (alkaline - non-rechargeable) in the US are not recycled. There are no recyclers that will even take them (except a few that will just end up throwing them away, and a lesser few that will store indefinitely them).
These batteries are supposed go into your regular trash, and into the regular landfill, as they only contain trace amounts of any metals (too little to spend any effort extracting them out). And are considered non-toxic as far as I know (but don't eat them).
The other types of batteries, the rechargeable types, are mostly recyclable and are not supposed to be thrown away.
What kind of batteries do you have that do not contain toxic chemicals or heavy metals? Just because some people (countries?) let you put them in the trash doesn't mean they should go in the trash.
I'm thinking if it says '15 days trial', then after the 15 days you could probably pay the service provider some $$ to continue using the service. hence it wouldn't be a total waste.
* I hope such a thing wouldn't be allowed in EU with the stricter waste laws*
And that's why I'm happy I don't live in the EU.....too many people with this nanny-state attitude, who want bureaucrats managing every little detail of their lives.
