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Comment by song | Hacker News Reader

People understand the purpose of it quite well. They just completely disagree with your analysis.

First, the most environmental form of recycling is for an object to be reused as is. So, if any item is given to a recycling center, if the recycling center can just sell it directly to someone else, then it's much more environmentally friendly.

Second, the credit doesn't encourage people to recycle them at all instead of throwing it in the trash, there's no verification that they've given it to a recycling center. The only thing is that after the recycling mode is enable, the device becomes a useless paperweight.

So it's an extremely environmentally unfriendly policy from a company who pretends they care about the environment.

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> So, if any item is given to a recycling center, if the recycling center can just sell it directly to someone else, then it's much more environmentally friendly.

I think OP's analysis did cover that. You don't have to put it in the recycle mode. You can sell it yourself or choose not to get the credit so someone else can "Recycle" it by reusing it.

I do agree with you that people could still put in the trash, but I also think that's where good recycling programs matter. It shouldn't be hard to recycle an electronic. It should be as simple as recycling paper or glass, especially in an age where almost everything is electronic.

The end result of all this is to say Sonos doesn’t give a whit about the environment though. If that was the case they would allow someone at the recycle center to buy their old equipment, and the original owner to buy a new one with a discount (for being a loyal customer, and presumably still making a profit).

Why would a recycling center want to buy anything? It's a recycling center, not a pawn/thrift shop. How does Sonos not care about the environment unless they do something completely and utterly nonsense?

My understanding was that a lot of times, say you go to a PC recycling center, they will take working, reusable parts and build machines out of them to sell/donate to others. They only recycle raw materials as a last resort.

What you and a few others are saying is that a recycling center shouldn't be able to resell parts wholesale if they find a buyer or a good use that the original owner did not. Seems legit to me and perfectly within their rights and my expectations of what they do. I think there is an argument here about the definition of a recycling center.

I think the whole point is that Sonos misleadingly calls the operation of permanent deactivation of a device as "recycling", when the true meaning of recycling is the exact opposite: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recycle

Sonos uses the word "recycling" as a marketing tool to increase their sales by giving naive customers discounts, who fall for this marketing stunt or don't care at all but like being associated with a (false) "environment-friendly" company. Yet another case of greenwashing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

No, I meant one person drops their working stuff off at the recycling center to get rid of it, and if the recycling center finds that it’s still functional and worth something, they can sell it to cover their costs.

This was what was described in the grandparent comment.

In the case of Sonos the only thing the recycling center receives are bricks.

If they really want to encourage reuse of their devices, why would they incentivize the users to turn their devices into unusable trash by giving them credits for doing that?

> but I also think that's where good recycling programs matter.

However good your recycling program is, it is still going to be _strictly more_ wasteful than simply reusing the device.

> If they really want to encourage reuse of their devices, why would they incentivize the users to turn their devices into unusable trash by giving them credits for doing that?

It's another alternative. Some people just won't bother trying to resell it.

This is covered in the Twitter thread. Individual consumers might not go through the hassle, but a recycling center totally will: they tend to have market connections to refurbish used equipment, and prefer that option because they know it's more sustainable than scrapping perfectly good hardware for raw materials.

If the device works, and someone else wants it, then it has been recycled very efficiently. Sonos policy here is backwards.

Recycling electronics is extremely difficult and non-trivial. See the Netflix series “broken” -> plastics for a deep-dive. If the company claims it’s super environmentally friendly, it should incentivize reuse of existing products. Instead it’s saying, “want a discount to spend more money with us? Great. Let’s get you a discount by creating an extremely difficult and mostly unrecyclable paperweight out of what you have, first.” They could have said “refer a friend and we’ll give you a discount” etc

There's a very nice graphic in the Twitter thread showing "reduce > re-use > recycle > trash". They are different things, so let's not make things extra confusing by saying "recycle by reusing".

Anyway, what Sonos is incentivizing through their credit is to make people choose the option "recycle or trash". They have no incentive to make people choose one over the other. And as already mentioned elsewhere in the thread, many recycling centres won't take a completely bricked device, so I think it's pretty fair to say that in practice what Sonos is incentivizing is for people to first brick, then TRASH the device in exchange for these credits.

Either way, Sonos is actively dis-incentivizing the "re-use" option, which is the most environmentally friendly one.

And the only reason they do this is their profit.

> the most environmental form of recycling is for an object to be reused as is

Just a nit: it’s useful to think of reusing as distinct from recycling. Recycling breaks the object into its raw material.

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