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Comment by tyree732 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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