It's now illegal to throw out rechargeable batteries in New York State | Hacker News Reader

It's now illegal to throw out rechargeable batteries in New York State

syracuse.com

38 pointsnarad26 comments

I believe this is the wrong approach. The law is mostly unenforceable, and I imagine it won't lead to a significant reduction in disposed rechargeable batteries as most people won't encounter the law on a regular basis. A better approach would be to do something similar to what is done with recycled goods; apply a tax to the product when it is first purchased and refund that tax if the product is returned at an appropriate facility.

While I agree that this is the wrong approach and your solution is an improvement, I don't think it's much of an improvement. It shares the same flaw in thinking as the fine: you are attacking the problem from too many angles. Every single person has to alter their behavior for it to work.

I think a much easier to implement, less wasteful, and much more likely to work solution is single-source waste disposal and recycling. Charlottesville, VA has this: you throw away everything, and the city outsources sorting and recycling to a single-source waste disposal company. Their job is to recover as much money as possible from recyclables.

And the best part is that to improve the efficiency of single-source recycling, you only need to improve your sorting and recycling technologies. You don't need to improve the accuracy of every human who throws away recyclables, which the history of recycling tells us is highly costly while also highly ineffective.

You mean that people just don’t sort their garbage at all, the company does it for them? Is it technically plausible, with decent material recovery levels? Don’t the recyclable materials lose value by putting them together with regular garbage?

> You mean that people just don’t sort their garbage at all, the company does it for them?

Yes, precisely. The usual caveats apply: no hazardous waste (hazardous chemicals, biohazard waste).

> Is it technically plausible, with decent material recovery levels?

It seems to be, based on Charlottesville's experience. I don't know the recovery levels. That is a good topic for research.

> Don’t the recyclable materials lose value by putting them together with regular garbage?

They do, but my understanding is the lost value is much less than relying on residential pre-sorting of recyclable materials. The idea is not to compare the efficacy of single-stream with a hypothetically perfect human recycler, but with recycling rates in actual practice among residents after decades of attempted recycling education.

I was told by a reporter in Charlottesville that single-stream compares favorably, but I am having trouble finding actual rates for comparison in my quick Googling today. So if you're interested, take my comment as a basis for further research into the issue.

I don't think this works very well for soft-drink containers.

At my home in NJ, where there are no such deposits, I regularly recycle everything that is recyclable.

At my summer cabin in NY, where there is a $0.05 deposit on soft drink containers, there is also no convenient way for my to recycle containers other than soft drinks. So I do recycle the soft drinks, but juice bottles, soup cans, etc., go straight into the trash.

The action of making the one thing easier is interfering with the peripheral items.

In NYC, they hire people to do the sorting at the dump site. Or, at least that's what I've been lead to believe. It's unclear how or what to recycle (Living in Brooklyn for the last 13 years).

I've been in Vietnam for the last month, and the guys sort it on the back of the truck, at least in Ho Chi Minh City. Like they literally tear the bags open and sort all of it. Knowing what they pay developers here, I can't imagine what those guys are making.

It's very clear in NYC what to recycle and what not to recycle: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/recycle_...

In fact, a lot of building owners get a flyer they can post in a common area on the building that residents can see and read, although I'm not sure how owners get those flyers (probably by mail).

New York loves feel-good laws, but this may improve how businesses deal with batteries. Many workplaces will have policies now for how to deal with batteries, particularly unionized companies where the employees will rat the company out.

IMO, there should be deposits on noxious, easily recyclable substances like batteries, plastic bags, etc. Society spends tens of billions on waste disposal and manufacturing that could be recovered by recycling materials. Without fines, fees and deposits, how else to you make the consumers of a commodity take on that cost.

In Germany this is actually law for car batteries. You pay a 7,50 € fee when buying a new battery and get a refund once you return a used battery.

And just for the record: Throwing away batteries has been illegal in Germany since 1991. Since that law was necessitated by a EU directive, I assume that is also true for all other EU member states.

Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterieverordnung

The combination of the two would probably work even better. Carrot & stick. But if I had to choose one, I believe that the carrot would work better than the stick.

If the fee goes to pay for say a monthly home pickup of hazardous waste, I'm all for this.

Most people don't know about what they're throwing away, and often don't care - they just want it gone. I don't blame them - the right way to get people to do something is to make it easy to do.

I do like the idea of using fine money to benefit the perpetrators and/or mitigate the offense. Otherwise, for crimes that aren't serious enough to warrant jail time, the revenue can become a misincentive/conflict of interest for those who should be providing justice to engage in extortion.

Let those who receive the benefit of enforcement pay for it (i.e., taxes).

The specific case I usually think of is speeding tickets. In my opinion, those fines should be ear-marked for passing lanes, rumble strips, guard rails and other projects to reduce travel times while increasing safety for motorists.

I'm surprised. For as long as I can remember, disposing of any battery was only allowed in special places/bins. Batteries never belonged into the trash for me.

And .. quote:

"The act does not cover batteries or battery packs weighing 24 pounds or more; batteries used as the principal power source for cars, boats, trucks, tractors, golf carts, wheelchairs or other vehicles; batteries used to store electricity from solar or wind-driven generators; or batteries that provide backup power an an essential part of an electronic device."

Doesn't this basically make this one giant mess, defeating the good intention? So any normal battery, any rechargeable battery that you loaded from a solar panel, the real messy big ones etc. - are still unrestricted? Hilarious.

I think the difference with large batteries is that battery recycling is already fairly prevalent and covered by existing statutes (core charges, etc). I doubt many people would toss a Prius battery in the trash without thinking.

I still don't think this is a good law, though. I don't expect this to have a material impact on battery recycling.

My clock radio has an internal battery that lets the clock and alarm operate even when unplugged. Presumably it recharges. How are consumers going to even realize that such a battery exists, when throwing the device in the trash? Are they to be expected to disassemble the device and remove the battery?

Well.. You probably won't like my answer, but here it goes:

Don't throw that stuff in the trash in the first place. Really.

I understand that this is common in lots of places (here in Tel Aviv recycling seems to be a joke as well), but I think that stinks. I'm not a nutjob or a treehugger, but really, some things should be handled differently (and with care) if you want to dispose it. It's relatively easy to do it on your end (if the relevant education is in place. Talking about dos and don'ts - no offense or derogatory meaning implied) and a hard and messy job on the other side of the trash processing.

What would I do in Germany? Well, trash is already separated in special plastic things (the yoghurt you just ate? The container is not trash) and 'normal stuff' (think everything non-toxic that remains).

If you want to throw away big things (furniture, TV): Call the municipality, they'll come to your home and get it. For free, a couple of times per year (free is a lie: That service is already paid for by you anyway).

Want to throw away smaller things? Batteries? Shops that sell batteries have to take back old ones. Every now and then you'll have the opportunity to drop off small gadgets and related things, usually at a van/truck that goes around (and helps educating about recycling as well).

Last option: You can drive up to the (no idea how you'd name this correctly) garbage place and bring your stuff. They'll let you (free of course, with the same caveat from above) dispose everything and show you where to place wood, where you'd drop electrical devices, where metal should end up.

It works. Germany's not that small and I don't think it's too much effort for the individual (again: I'm lazy. And not a tree hugger in any way). I know that a lot more countries do comparable things.

This law that started the thread? It sounds weird if you have the background described above. It looks like a crappy half-baked idea - neither particularly helpful nor enforceable. And obviously, as you just proved with that question, going against the general public's idea of how to handle your garbage.

Reading the text of the law[1], I'm surprised battery manufacturers haven't already filed an interstate commerce lawsuit.

States can usually place all the restrictions and requirements they want on retailers and residents, but trying to force out-of-state manufacturers to perform in-state acts like this is sticky.

[1]http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/batterylaw...

The regulations for CAFE -- car emissions -- are far more onerous than this, and they've been completely litigated and found to be Constitutional.

IIRC, it was found that so long as there's a strict hierarchy of standards (i.e., non-disjoint), it's OK, because a manufacturer can aim for the most-strict regulation, and thereby be legal everywhere. The problem would be if the standards were such that two different products needed to be created in order to satisfy the requirements of different states.

Gasoline differs.

Specifically, the regional gasoline blends differ, and incompatibly.

Some papers on this topic:

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/emuehle/Research%20WP/Gasoline...

http://cbey.research.yale.edu/uploads/File/muehlegger_23.pdf

You're talking about a related but distinct legal issue. CAFE is an exercise of Congress's commerce clause power, and as part of that power, they have allowed states to set stricter standards. Had they not specifically done so, states would not have that authority, as federal law would preempt them in that area.

The issue here is that there are, in fact, certain federal laws regarding toxins in general, and batteries in particular, that might lead a court to conclude that federal law has preempted state law in this area. Congress's choice not to require battery manufacturers to take certain steps is not the same as Congress abdicating that authority to the states.

I'm not saying this is cut and dried, or that they'd likely win, I'm just saying it's sufficiently fuzzy that I'd expect the lawsuit to be filed.

Congress abdicating that authority to the states

That's an odd phrase, in the presence of the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Congress doesn't get to decide what power it will exercise, and leave the crumbs for the States (at least not in theory). The States and the People have decided what powers to grant to the Federal Gov't, and so Congress is limited to that scope.

(Yes, I'm aware of preemption in various matters, I'm objecting to the implication in your statement that Congress gets to decide what the States' rights are.)

Congress gets to decide which rights the states get when those rights are originally given to Congress, as is the case with interstate commerce. Nothing in that post implied that Congress can do this with everything.

Tenther claims are not going to get you far in front of the US Supreme Court.

Congress has extensive powers over interstate commerce, and when it chooses to regulate an aspect of interstate commerce, state regulation in that area is automatically preempted except to the extent specified by Congress. This rule is clear and longstanding, and does not simply cover "various matters", but virtually all matters directly connected to commerce amongst the states.

Further, look up the dormant commerce clause, which can kick in even without Congress stepping into an area.

Then look up Granholm v. Heald. Even the 21st Amendment couldn't save one attempt that tried to regulate interstate trade of alcohol.

CAFE is particularly interesting because the government recognizes that the standard results in lighter, deadlier cars, killing thousands of additional people on American roads.

lighter, deadlier cars

Lighter <> Deadlier

For one thing, lighter frequently means "more agile", i.e., better able to avoid a crash.

But even given a crash, modern engineering can yield great safety with light weight. See the results of a "Crash Test 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air VS. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu (Frontal Offset)" [1]. In it, the dummy driver of the big iron Bel Air is pretty thoroughly killed.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g

While I agree with the statement that lighter is not equivalent to deadlier, it's a straw man to compare a 50 year old car (That doesn't even have seatbelts!) against a modern car. The trivial come-back is "think of how safe a car we could make with modern engineering if it weighed as much as a '59 bel-air"

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