[apacheCamel]

Back in my day, I worked at Bestbuy and if you have ever been in one, you may notice that we have a "recycle" area in the front of the store. It is a separated bin, labelled with "wires", "cds", "batteries", etc. The one that always confused me the most was "batteries" since almost EVERY time they would empty that bin into our recycle bin in the back, they would dump the batteries into the trash because almost all of them were non-lithium-ion. My manager said we couldn't recycle regular batteries so they needed thrown away and sorting through the absolute mound of batteries was too much to do.

I know we would receive laptop batteries, phone batteries, and other rechargeables but they never made it into the bin. I hear now, anything with a screen costs money to recycle at Bestbuy. They really seem to be taking a step in the wrong direction. Better labelled bins, and easier access to recycling areas will make it easier for the average person to recycle, which in my opinion, is a net gain for us all.

[ckocagil]

Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacing the battery. Then you need to glue everything back together and pray the device works.

There's a straightforward solution to this and the recycling problem:

1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery

2. Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents)

3. Pay the same amount back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant

There you go. This system has only one knob (the amount paid per battery) and by tweaking it you can adjust the incentive to recycle. You sit back and let the market sort out the details.

Not to mention that this would extend the lifetime of phones by making it easy to replace the battery.

[saxonww]

This is very similar to what's done today for car batteries in most of the US: you pay a deposit or core charge when buying a new battery, and it's refunded when you return the old one for recycling.

https://batterycouncil.org/page/State_Recycling_Laws

[MisterTea]

Good example because lead acid automotive battery manufacturing is close to being closed loop as 98% of battery material is recycled. Even the spent acid is converted to washing powder. The plastic and lead go right back into making new batteries.

This is certainly needed for lithium and other rechargeable battery tech going forward.

[mmrezaie]

In Europe when you buy a battery you are already paying the tax for recycling, and places where they sell these batteries have to accept the dead batteries and send them for recycling.

[Spare_account]

This is exactly what is described in Bestbuy three comments upthread, but in reality what is happening is the batteries are dumped in the trash.

What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket?

[Galanwe]

Is it legal to dump batteries in the trash in the US? In France you could get a significant fine for that.

If you throw other recyclables in regular bin, you would also get a warning the first time, and the workers would not pickup you trash after that if you continue. Not sure how they are incentivized to check the bins, but they do.

[saxonww]

That may happen here in some areas, but it doesn't happen anywhere I've lived.

Garbage collection in the US is increasingly mechanized, with trucks grabbing cans and dumping the bagged trash into a hopper vs. a person handling the trash can and its contents. People living in higher density areas would just put their bagged trash in a dumpster, with multiple homes or apartments sharing a cluster of dumpsters. So, I think it would require staffing or technology changes to inspect trash for proper recycling. I also think there would be a lot of resistance to this for cost and privacy reasons.

Some states in the US do use a deposit system for other things besides batteries. Glass and plastic bottles in particular have some sort of scheme where I think you pay extra up front and get it back when you recycle the bottle, but I've never lived in a state that had this so I am not sure exactly how that works. Generally speaking though, I think people would respond well to "cash for trash" and overall a positive incentive like this would be more popular and effective than having trash inspected.

[thatcat]

Environmental laws in US are loosely enforced by agencies with limited staff. Something like this is so small scale that it would be unlikely to create an issue for Bestbuy.

[pacamara619]

> What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket?

Whatever the manager wants to happen of course. Unless you actually check some places out, see how they handle recycling and hit them with a hefty fine if they don't do it properly.

[dehrmann]

> 1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery

Apple has argued that they can fit a bigger, harder to remove battery into devices, and the added capacity because it's bigger makes up for it being hard to remove. I've changed batteries on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and it's very straightforward; I'm not sure how much truth there isn't to that argument on laptops. Phones are so small that I find that explanation more plausible.

[no_wizard]

The sad reality with phones is whatever Apple doss most if not all other manufacturers follow one way or another.

Samsung used to allow you to remove your battery easily but they also stopped at least in their flagship phone, last time I looked at one anyway. I know they also offer phones that do allow for this but the flagship phones really set the tone I feel for the downstream expectations over time.

Rather unfortunately I don’t think Apple sees value in removable batteries, which while I understand the trade offs I think is a net negative in this case

[macromagnon]

Apple doesn't want you to easily extend the life of older models; they want you to buy the new one.

[QuixoticQuibit]

And yet they have the longest software support for smartphones in the industry by a large margin. Plus they offer consumers the ability to replace the battery for a fee.

[AnthonyMouse]

> And yet they have the longest software support for smartphones in the industry by a large margin.

No, that would be the various libre phones that have in-tree kernel drivers and correspondingly support updates to the latest system indefinitely.

The default in the industry prior to Apple was for software to be independent from hardware. You can install the latest Windows on hardware going back to the earliest x64 processors and Linux or BSD on hardware going back more than 20 years.

If random community-supported Linux distributions can support hardware from the previous millennium, Apple could support all the iPhone hardware ever made, but they don't. So that's just another instance of them doing something user-hostile so you have to buy a newer iPhone and Samsung et al following them.

Offering battery replacements in that context is just another way for them to stick it to you -- you have a four year old iPhone with a flat battery, they take your money to put in a new one and then stop issuing it software updates a year later so you have to buy a new one regardless.

[thebruce87m]

This doesn’t ring true at all. The 5+ years of support you get for an iPhone model dwarfs the direct competitors.

If an android manufacturer guaranteed 5 years support and stock android available on the same day as google releases it then it be willing to give android another try.

Not even google themselves guarantee that. Some manufacturers are charging the same price as an iPhone with sometime less than 2 years with of OS upgrades.

[wongarsu]

On my Dell XPS replacing the battery also only involves unscrewing a few screws and unplugging one connector, then putting that back together with the new battery. It couldn't be simpler, and that's in the space constraints of an ultrabook.

On phones there's a better case for fixed batteries, but at least I don't mind another millimeter thickness if that means I can replace the battery.

[sushshshsh]

I miss the good ol days when my T410 just simply unclipped. Completely modular, no screwdriver required, almost like battery replacement was a feature!

[eropple]

For a while, up until the T480, you had both an external and the internal battery. So if you had a few batteries it was pretty trivial to swap them while on the go--and sometimes you really do need 18 hours of battery life on a laptop, even if you aren't pleased about it.

[shajznnckfke]

Maybe Apple could be given a choice here: user-replaceable battery with a refundable core charge, or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase.

The core charge would be returned if the user sells the phone to any legit business (funded by the core charge originally paid to Apple). If the user sells the phone on eBay, the buyer can recover the core charge later, so it’s part of the market value of any phone that has a battery in it.

The charge also could be recovered if the phone is given to a recycling center. It’s on Apple to figure out how to get the batteries out and pay whoever does that work. Apple can decide whether to do the engineering to make the battery replaceable up front, or fund the delicate labor of taking apart the phone later.

[chrisseaton]

> or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase

They will already recycle your battery for free. I think they will actually also recycle other manufacturers' batteries for free as well, and also any random loose batteries you hand them.

Seems pretty reasonable to me?

[shajznnckfke]

I think the missing piece here is the core charge, which makes the average user think of the battery as something of value that shouldn’t just be thrown in the trash. Currently, I think a lot of users with an obsolete phone with a smashed screen would just throw it in the garbage.

[totalZero]

It's not the core charge that makes you return a battery -- it's the core refund.

[sudosysgen]

All Apple would have to do is to have the back cover use screws instead of adhesives, using up about one tenth of a cc more volume, and use a more malleable adhesive for the battery (or none at all). It would take at most two more tenths of a cubic centimeter more volume.

[boogies]

> It would take at most two more tenths of a cubic centimeter more volume

I wonder how much empty space is in current gen iPhones, the 7 had so much that a YouTuber was able to squeeze the adapter Apple shipped with it convert analog audio to Lightning externally entirely into the phone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LORsgF-fhgQ).

[roenxi]

> All Apple would have to do...

This is hardware engineering, and high quality engineering at that. When Apple decided to use an adhesive rather than screws they could would have had excellent consideration of cost/quality/aesthetic issues.

It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out nearly nobody wants that.

So yeah, it is an "All Apple would have to do", but evidence is Apple is much better at deciding what it should and shouldn't do than back-seat designers. Sorry if that sounds a bit brusque, a nerve might have been hit here. But hardware isn't easy.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out nearly nobody wants that.

This fallacy seems to be common in discussions of Apple. Apple is very profitable, therefore everything they do is infallible and impossible to improve.

Look at a picture of an Openmoko device. Just look at it. Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

Compare this to various modern phones with a replaceable battery:

https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-phones-removab...

There are obvious reasons to expect the former to fail in the market but not the latter, even though they all have a replaceable battery.

Meanwhile the Apple devices further run iOS and are compatible with iMessage and the complete set of third party iOS apps, which are a large component of their success, but none of which would be any less true if they had a replaceable battery.

Doing a lot of things right can't prove that they're not doing a specific thing wrong.

[totalZero]

I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that Apple is infallible.

Rather, they are iterating upon the same few products with a zillion engineers in eensy weensy form factors where space is at a premium, so they probably think about why they do things a certain way.

[sudosysgen]

Apple built excellent phones that used screws and had easily replaceable batteries, and were smaller than their current phones. I'm writing "All Apple has to do", because they actually did it already.

There is an esthetic consideration in that they won't be able to use a glass back, but that's seriously minor. They can put paint and gloss on top of ceramic or tons of other solutions for just a bit more cost.

[sudosysgen]

Actually, thinking about it, if the glass wasn't completely flat, using the sides as clamps like in the iPhone 5 could work too.

[GordonS]

> When Apple decided to use an adhesive rather than screws they could would have had excellent consideration of cost/quality/aesthetic issues.

I'd bet a lot that the primary reason they did this was to make the device a fraction of a millimetre thinner; Apple seems to obsessed with thinness at the cost of everything else.

Personally, I'd much prefer an ever-so-slightly thicker phone with a removable battery, and I rather doubt I'm alone in that.

[hyperpallium2]

There's the story of Jobs throwing a prototype iphone in an aquarium, for bubbles to reveal excess space. They'd be nervous wasting 0.2 cm^3.

[sudosysgen]

Well, there is certainly is around 0.2cm^3 of dead space in say an iPhone 11. The iPhone 7 had enough dead space in it to install an entire dongle inside.

[throwanem]

You've never been inside an iPhone.

[sudosysgen]

I absolutely have, multiple times. It is not difficult for Apple to find a way to get four screw holes in there.

[throwanem]

Sure. It just necessitates making the phone thicker and longer and wider and heavier, and massively complicating the moisture seals, and making it even more fragile so it's more likely to break when it's dropped, and entirely rearranging the internals to make space for the screws to fit - which probably means making the battery smaller, because that's the only thing in there whose volume is really fungible. All so end users can take their iPhones apart, which is something that end users have been clamoring for years to be able to do.

I don't expect most people to refurbish their own iPhones, the way I do mine. That seems like it would be a weird thing to expect most people to do. And what's wrong with the million small shops that do battery replacements, or with Apple stores' own such service, that requires the "not difficult" total redesign you're so anxious to see happen?

[hyperpallium2]

Probably similar story to them slowing down old iPhones: there's a legimate and an illegimate motivation. But honesty had to to be forced out of them.

[judge2020]

Are there any tradeoffs with easily replaceable batteries? Maybe water resistance, thinness, compactness, etc?

[avar]

One reason screens don't break as easily as they used to on modern phones is because they tend to have a sturdy metal frame that the screen and backside are glued onto under tension.

This is one of the main things to beware of when you need to open up a phone with a heat gun and repair it. I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.

I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.

Maybe Apple is different, but if you break something on a modern $300-500 Android phone such as the screen, motherboard, sub-board etc. you can easily order a replacement from China for $10-50.

You need to own a couple of things like a heat gun, and maybe a soldering iron, but you'd also need a torx screwdriver set etc. for a "repairable" phone. The cost difference isn't that great.

Phones are wildly more repairable than most other electronics you can buy nowadays or would have bought in the 70s-90s. I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.

[qes]

> I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.

It's much easier to find the replacement part for the phone - as long as it's not more than maybe 5 years old - then it is to find the replacement part for the washing machine.

That's been my experience, anyway. Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.. but I don't have much problem finding anything else I ever want to buy on the internet.

[dragonwriter]

> Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.

Usually the manufacturer has them, though they may optimize for selling to service professionals, and these days there tend to be third-party sellers more focussed on consumers, as well (and you can often get parts on Amazon.)

IME, getting the right part number is often the hardest thing, though usually docs available from the manufacturer (even for units no longer sold) can be downloaded that provide this, and lots of time searching by description and appliance model can find the part, too.

[avar]

> Usually the manufacturer has them

My experience with this has been terrible for e.g. circular saws & power drills, to name one example.

I had a part I needed for a Makita circular saw & Black & decker power drill. In both cases buying every replacement part would easily cost 10-20x of the retail price of a new saw or power drill, compared to maybe 1.5-2x in the case of a modern phone. The aftermarket for OEM car parts is similarly brutal for most manufacturers, but for some happy reason phones are the exception.

[avar]

Yes, that's what I'm saying. That you're not going to easily find replacement parts for your washing machine, but you will for your phone.

[obmelvin]

> I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.

Can I ask what phone(s) you are talking about? I replaced the battery of an iPhone 7 recently, and maybe it was just early in the evolution of these designs, but putting the screen back on with the sealant ring was the easiest part. Personally found it much harder to break the adhesive - definitely the longest step, but this was my first modern phone battery replacement.

[avar]

I repaired a Nokia 8.1 and a Xiaomi Mi A2 recently. I used the (commonly used) B-7000 glue for both. It takes up to 48hrs (or more) to fully dry, I didn't wait enough so I think it dried pretty loosely on the Nokia 8.1. As a result the screen broke soon thereafter. Went better on my second try.

[ses1984]

I think 70s-90s appliances are a lot easier to repair than phones, you usually can source the parts from a local electronics shop, and they don't require the dexterity of a surgeon to work on.

[avar]

How do you source those parts? Figure out which part of the main board of your TV amplifier burned itself out with an electric meter, oscilloscope etc., and know enough about electronic repair to source a replacement resistor, capacitor etc.?

Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone.

My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver.

Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.

[ses1984]

I had a phone with a broken part, I went through two $45 parts before giving up and writing off the phone as a total loss. The part had a ribbon cable that you needed to thread through a hole in the case and I ripped the cable on both parts.

Meanwhile I've repaired my old washing machine quite easily.

[fsflover]

> I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.

Do you also think that Fairphone is “a lot more bulky” and “missing the mark”?

https://fairphone.com

I think that Apple simply designs their devices with planned obsolescence for more profit.

[samatman]

I don't think that's true at all.

My mother inherited my late-2014 iPhone 6. It still gets security updates, although it won't run the current iOS.

The battery started to swell, so she took it in for a new one. They replaced it with a refurb, since they aren't authorized to do replacements of swollen batteries on-site. It cost her as much as a replacement battery would. Presumably, the original has been refurbished and someone else is using it.

If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.

[boogies]

> If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.

I don’t think that’s true at all. The Fairphone 2 came out the year after your mothers’s iPhone and got an OS update this year, and if she had it then she would be authorized and likely capable of replacing the battery herself.

[ckocagil]

At a cursory glance there might be. However this restriction will force companies to experiment with other designs. Maybe they'll have to use proper gaskets. Maybe phones will end up being 1mm thicker. These _might_ be negative, but IMO it's still better than the status quo: right now we're not putting a price on the hidden costs of littering the earth and wasting lithium. Ignore these externalities long enough and they will come back to bite you, the prime example being carbon emissions and global warming.

[jimkleiber]

maybe in the future we'll see people mining lithium and other resources from landfills.

[Tossrock]

"Before its acquisition he had been the cofounder and technical director of a small company called Dumpmines, which was in the business of digging up and processing old landfills, recovering the valuable materials that had been thrown away in a more wasteful age." - Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, 1993.

[pdoege]

Yes, there are lots.

Largest of which is that the manufacturers have to balance onerous return penalties vs. weight and size.

The solution is to use a monocoque and glue everything down.

Thus, consumers buy the cheapest plans, carriers push the costs onto the manufacturers, manufacturers push the costs back to the consumer for repairs, ad infinitum.

There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. Until consumers vote with their wallets or regulations the dynamic will not change.

[toast0]

> There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers.

It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.

[chaosharmonic]

This. Mine are: display output, bootloader unlock, waterproofing. And that's maybe three good, current phones at any given time.

Also, while a headphone jack would be great, once kernel-level support for ADC v3 is smoothed out (4.19 is the first LTS to have this, and has only started showing up on Android devices this year) my real dream is two USB ports.

[jhasse]

LG G5 has all those things (4 GB RAM, USB-C, headphone jack, user-replaceable battery).

[toast0]

Hmmm, released in 2016 though? A good choice for then (that I missed), but a 4 year old Android seems like a poor choice for today.

[Reason077]

Batteries also seem to be getting better in recent years, which reduces the need for them to be easily replaceable.

With previous generations of iPhone, my battery was usually pretty much toast after 2 years of use. Greatly reduced battery life, random shutdowns at low battery charge, and in one case even swelling which pushed apart the phone's case.

But I've had my current phone, an iPhone X, for almost 3 years now (since November 2017). The battery hardly seems to have degraded at all despite intensive use and daily charging. Battery status reports it still has 91% of original capacity, and that hasn't changed for a while.

[pavlov]

Non-replaceable batteries is one of Apple’s saddest legacies. They invented this design for the iPod, and carried it over to the iPhone. Eventually it was copied across the industry.

Before June 2007 every mobile phone had an easily replaceable battery, except some extremely niche “design phones” like the Nokia 7280 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7280

[epistasis]

This is weird framing, because I have replaced about four batteries on iDevices. Two on my own, and two at a corner-store repair shop.

I'll gladly take the daily convenience of sturdier, more durable devices over the once-every-two-years convenience of a battery replacement with less labor. It's an excellent design trade off, IMHO.

[pantalaimon]

I never had durability issues with the phones that had replaceable batteries. It was only with those devices where the battery wasn’t meant to be replaced where they would not go together as nicely as they did before the battery change.

[epistasis]

I guess my point is that at least for iDevices, the batteries actually are replaceable. You just need to have a few extremely cheap tools, and a small amount of skill. Or just pay somebody else the $10 who already has the skills.

Calling them non-replaceable makes people think these devices are far less repairable than they actually are. And with the prevalence of phone repair shops, we really need to stop calling them "non-replaceable."

Certainly they can't be swapped out on a daily basis. But that's a very very different use case.

[samatman]

Cool, as long as we're doing anecdotes, I would constantly drop my flip phones and have the battery spring loose.

On one of those drops, the tiny plastic hinge holding the door on broke, and that was the end of that flip phone. It wasn't a popular enough model that I could find a replacement door online.

[asutekku]

You did not answer the question, but started an Apple rant.

[pbhjpbhj]

I think it's allowed to respond to someone else's post without answering their questions.

[asutekku]

Yes, but it should somehow relate to the original post.

[drrotmos]

You can still make a device with easily replaceable batteries water resistant (or even water proof), but it's easier (read: less bulky) to do it with a non-replaceable battery.

Compactness is definitely a major tradeoff though.

[guerrilla]

Yeah, my Galaxy Xcover is IP68 (dust/water resistant) and the battery is trivial to replace. I think the situation is the same for CAT and other rugged phones.

[sukilot]

For the tiny fraction of people who need to change battery, just do the labor. Everyone else can enjoy a better phone until the OS is obsolete and the device is physically degraded.

[on_and_off]

thinner maybe, better is subjective.

[cowsandmilk]

Removable batteries of the same size have less life and need to be replaced more frequently. For a given volume of battery, no removable gives you longer life for a single use and a longer usable life in general before it needs to be replaced.

[MAGZine]

They're the same battery. Maybe packaged slightly differently, but being able to remove it does not affect it's ability to supply power.

[samatman]

"packaged slightly differently" has to mean "packaged durably enough to protect the bare battery from damage".

By the very nature of the design constraint, a removable battery will take up more space inside a device than the same chemistry packaged without the protective case, springs to hold the contacts in place, and so on.

That means by eschewing it, you can take your pick among: a thinner phone, more components, or a larger battery. There's no way around this.

[ses1984]

You know what's faster than quick charging? Swapping a battery.

You know what carries less risk of fire than quick charging? Swapping a battery.

[agumonkey]

Oh man, the other day I found a bunch of early 2000s phones. It was such an odd feeling, so utilitarian. Fits your hand, absolutely not fragile.. and popping the back cover then removing the battery block require as less time as neurons. I was left dumbfounded for a second thinking how is that not better.

[hyperpallium2]

There's a related problem: for most phones with removable batteries, you can't buy replacements. And each model is carefully designed for a unique battery and terminal geometry.

This doesn't prevent battery recycling, but it does junk the entire phone, which as you saynis harder to recycle.

Mandate standardized batteries. (Perhaps antitrusting battery manufacture would achieve this automatically, since they'd make more money.) California has led this kind of change before, with citizen bills. C'mon California!

[eli]

California already has an ewaste fee added to devices, no? Or maybe that doesn’t cover phones.

[dalbasal]

The operative part isn't the fee, it's the deposit.

If it isn't profitable to recycle, you can make it profitable by making the fee reclaimable when it's recycled.

[aeternum]

Should we make it artificially profitable to recycle? Recycling is often resource-intensive, we need to be careful we don't create a system in which we're using more energy and resources to recycle just to make ourselves feel good.

It's quite possible that throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved and raw resources become more scarce might be the best way to go. This cycle has already occurred with old electronics (companies are successfully mining garbage dumps for the gold connectors and traces).

[dalbasal]

"throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved"

The fact that there have been instances where this has occurred doesn't mean its a good plan. I agree that not all plans work out in retrospect, but neither does doing nothing. If we look at the balance of cases, we have done a lot more harm with a lack of environmental policies than we have with poor policies.

Overall the mechanism is solid enough. If a product has EOL issues, a recycling deposit builds the solution into the initial price. It doesn't even need to be recycling. Could be safe disposal.

[aeternum]

It builds a solution into the initial price. However it is often not the best solution especially as things change and once in-place, these are almost impossible to repeal due to the industries and special interests that build up around them. The ingrained solution can quickly become a net-negative.

A perfect example is ethanol. It's pretty clear especially by now that we would be better off investing in solar/wind and electric cars, but good luck getting rid of those ethanol subsidies and related legislation.

The recycling industry itself is another example. Now that China is no longer buying our recycling (due to the extreme air pollution generated when processing it), waste management companies don't know what to do with it and most are just dumping it in landfills. Of course we're still paying them to collect it and requiring everyone to continue sorting.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Yup. That's what they do with lead and batteries and their core charge.

[afrojack123]

Yep. I agree with this. I remember when cell phone batteries were easy to remove. Just take the cover off the back and put in a new one. However, this doesn't help the corporations sell more products.

[dehrmann]

An iPhone is 3x thinner than a Nokia 3310, but has a battery with 3x the capacity of the 3310.

[ThePadawan]

My Samsung Galaxy S3 had a thickness of of 8.6mm and a 2100mAh battery that was removable via the back cover [0].

My Samsung Galaxy S6 has a thickness of 6.8mm and a 2550mAh battery that requires unglueing to replace [1].

I'd much rather carry around the extra 1.8mm for the extra repairability.

[0] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s6-6849.php

[afrojack123]

True. I was unaware of this.

[lostlogin]

And some variants of the 3310 claim a month of battery life. It isn’t an particularly fair comparison as they are very different devices that both get called ‘phones’, but that is a great battery life. https://thinkmarketingmagazine.com/new-nokia-3310-battery-li...

[totalZero]

This sounds kind of reasonable if you're only optimizing for battery recycling, but in practice this kind of regulation would make the world worse. In other words, you want regulators to force phone companies to stop making thin, waterproof phones. It makes far more sense IMO to incentivize recycling/recovery for unwanted devices, and then harvest batteries in a professional facility rather than asking individuals to do it prior to recycling their devices.

> You sit back and let the market sort out the details.

You say this but you are suggesting the imposition of a very substantial regulation.

[brentonator]

It's kinda nice we don't have to worry about our phones dying if they get splashed or dropped in a pool though right?

That has definitely cut down on a lot of waste.

[grosswait]

Replaceable battery and waterproof are not mutually exclusive. Ref Samsung Galaxy Xcovee pro

[jariel]

Sounds like some regulations are needed around high-value substances that are recyclable -> needs to be 'extractable'.

[late2part]

You said:

1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery

How do you propose to mandate this?

[WalterSear]

You make the sale of non-replaceable battery devices too onerous in California.

[jedberg]

Create a law that says that if the battery is not user replaceable then the manufacturer must replace it for free when its charge capacity drops below 90% of its original capacity.

That would shift the market pretty quickly towards user replaceable batteries.

[doiwin]

You won't have to use hot air if you go with a phone with replaceable battery.

They are fewer these days, but they still exist:

https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/sets/3

[05]

Use isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol to soften the glue.

[jacobwilliamroy]

can we do this plan, except make the well-financed corporates take care of the cost of cleaning up the toxic waste that they made?

[mod]

No. The cost, of course, gets passed to the consumer, even if you want to call it something else.

[jacobwilliamroy]

I bet they have better resources for finding and recovering their toxic waste after EOL than their customers.

[hhjj]

While i agree laws are very welcome to fight those problems i think you should let capitalism do it work and implement laws more like: 1. Define recycling cost of product 2. Apply tax on cost

Better recycling may not be equal to ease of replacement.

[spullara]

No thanks.

[fsflover]

> Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacing the battery.

Not if you choose a company that cares about the environment: https://fairphone.com

[avar]

> Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents) [and pay it] back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant.

We do this with the likes of glass bottles and beverage cans and lot of them just end up in the trash. It only makes sense economically because consumers can bring them back in large batches, but even then the money you get back often doesn't justify the extra hassle economically.

If you're going to raise the price until it does you've just recreated the cobra effect[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

[mikepurvis]

I don't think it's really comparable; no one is going to be breeding batteries like cobras, regardless of the reward.

Indeed, the comparison with bottle deposit programmes is apt— there are people in my city who rifle through blueboxes on the curb pulling out refundable items. Maybe this bothers some people, but it seems like a reasonable thing; you couldn't directly pay someone to do that work, but you can incentivize it to happen anyway, same as shopping carts get gathered up and returned by homeless people for a dollar a pop. If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return, that would be terrific!

[avar]

> no one is going to be breeding batteries like cobras, regardless of the reward.

Yes they are. You can buy Li-ion batteries of the mAh size commonly used in phones for $1-2 in bulk on AliExpress. Any price incentive to return them is going to either be too low for most people to bother, or so high that you'd have an incentive to produce batteries just to throw them away.

> If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return [..., it works for bottle deposit programmes!]

This works for bottles because e.g. on a Friday night in a major city trashcans downtown are going to be full of drink bottles. This works because there's a lot of them, they're big and obvious, and people consume them in large quantities.

A battery in a phone that you keep for months or years isn't worth digging through general trash for.

I recycle my own batteries because it's easy to do while I'm at it for some feel-good about reducing pollution. I'm not against recycling. I'm just saying that I don't see how a price incentive for this makes sense.

[notatoad]

>you'd have an incentive to produce batteries just to throw them away.

the point of a deposit is that it's charged on the production, and only refunded on the return. you're not just paying people to return batteries. If there was a $5 deposit on a phone-sized lithium-ion battery, it would no longer be possible to buy those batteries for $1-2 because the deposit would have to be charged on import.

[avar]

Right, so all of the incentives of evading cigarette taxation, except this time around there's a machine that'll accept the "cigarettes" you have for sale, and your "customer" won't be able to tell the difference between a cigarette and a tube of Styrofoam.

This sort of deposit scheme makes sense and works for e.g. glass beer bottles because in practice they're high-volume items (a consumer might return a 24 bottle crate/week), and the bottles/crates are actually still useful items in themselves and can be immediately returned to consumer circulation after some washing and gluing a new label on them.

The price/volume/weight of glass bottles & beer crates also makes any sort of return fraud impractical.

As opposed to Li-ion batteries which are going to be broken when they're returned. How is a vending machine that gives me money for a deposited phone battery going to know the difference between a battery and a piece of wood I covered in some duct-tape and wires?

And all for what? Reducing Li-ion pollution? It isn't some massive problem in developed countries, and people mostly do sort their batteries in recycling if given the chance.

So again, I'm not arguing that the recycling is a bad idea, but that this idea of giving it a price incentive in this case is a terrible idea.

[mikepurvis]

I should have clarified: for the lithium battery case, I'm not talking about people going through residential trash, but rather than the incentive would make it worthwhile for small operations to sort through e-waste bins from retailers and so-on.

[hansvm]

That seems like exactly the wrong thing to incentivize. If it's in a blue bin it's going to be recycled like it's supposed to anyway -- you've just transferred a bit of wealth from people who buy bottles to people who rifle through recyclables. If we want a wealth transfer, can't we think of a better way to accomplish it?

[mikepurvis]

Maybe for cans, but major brewers in Ontario use a small number of standard bottles, and when those come back through the return system, they are in fact pressure washed and refilled— a far more environmentally efficient process than sending them for general-stream glass recycling.

I worked briefly at the Molson plant in Etobicoke and they literally have machines which cut apart skids of 12-pack boxes, wash off the old labels, all of it.

[hansvm]

That's an interesting point. Supposing the goal is actually to maximize bottle returns and that getting people to not just throw them in blue bins is for some reason an impossible task, are bottles likely enough to be damaged in transit that fishing them out of blue bins is still preferred to, e.g., just hiring those same people to sort through recyclables searching for bottles at a central facility?

I ask because with the current system those individuals have basically zero protections -- they aren't guaranteed at least minimum wage, they have no compensation if they aren't working (e.g. if they were stabbed by something in the blue bin), they generally have no other benefits (more of an issue in the US with healthcare, but this isn't a peachy situation elsewhere either), and so on.

The fact that the current incentive structure makes rifling through refuse attractive points to some sort of deeper issue. While I'm spitballing a bit with ideas, do you agree that something seems off with the status quo?

[kbenson]

> It only makes sense economically because consumers can bring them back in large batches, but even then the money you get back often doesn't justify the extra hassle economically.

Depending on how implemented, you can combat this. In CA, it's a deposit you pay on purchase. You get that deposit back on turning in the recyclable item. There are problems (it's illegal to bring items in from out of state for obvious reasons, and the bulk rate paid to the collection centers for the material needs to be closely kept track of (or just let them deal with it and require they accept all items in the program to be official, I dunno).

A Federal law would be easier, as then you wouldn't have to worry about transfer between states, and we already track goods at the border with customs. Better ability to control fraud would allow higher deposit rates, and I imagine you could charge based on mAh or something (maybe with a logarithmic scale so car batteries are enormously expensive, but still something you have to pay for and want to recycle). If every phone had a $10-$15 deposit for the battery, I think that's enough that people would definitely recycle, or other people would do it for them.

There's info on how well the program is working here.[1]

1: http://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/current-and-proposed-law...

[olejorgenb]

Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation it seems return rates range from low 70s to high 90s percent for deposit-refund schemes around the world - not perfect everywhere - but plenty of countries have 95% rates which is as good as one can expect.

I'm sure the rates would be a bit lower if poverty was eliminated. Plenty of people collection bottles from trash cans and parks. The high rates imply that most people recycle bottles consumed in their own house though.

[koheripbal]

In mine and many neighborhoods, there are folks who go through every bin on the street and collect them to bring them to the recycling booth in bulk. That is only possible because of the incentive.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Your story highlights a common issue with recycling: so much of it is virtue signalling bullshit. I get to feel good about separating my trash (and somehow like my consumerism wasn't a net negative anyway), but it still goes all to the same dump.

Of course not all recycling is BS as this article shows. But we should change the automatic narrative of "recycling=good, landfill=bad" because it encourages practices that are wasteful both for the economy and environment.

[Reedx]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Wish-cycling is a thing, and it's very wasteful. People consume more when they think it'll be recycled. Then it goes in the wrong bin, often shipped to a recycling center where it takes up resources to get sorted out. Ultimately just taking a longer path to landfill.

[ZeroGravitas]

The term "wish-cycling" is part of an attempt to put the blame on consumers.

As an alternative, charge corporations exactly what it costs to recycle anything found in the waste stream. Which puts the responsibility on someone who can actually change things to reduce this cost. The only way to avoid this charge entirely is to add a "This is not recyclable" logo that is big enough that no-one will miss it.

Only then can we can blame consumers that continue to buy those items, but not before.

[dd36]

Producer responsibility would solve a lot of problems.

[bhahn]

I don’t think this is virtue signaling at all. Virtue signaling implies, to me at least, a person that is trying to make himself/herself look better to others. In almost all cases that I see in Los Angeles and other large US cities, people just recycle because it’s in front of them (eg. city provides a recycling bin to all houses), and have no other specific intentions.

I do agree though that recycling does help feed the *vicious cycle of consumption by hiding or misrepresenting the negative externalities.

(Edited to fix virtuous typo. Meant vicious)

[buran77]

> people just recycle because it’s in front of them

People skip the reduce&reuse and go straight to recycle because it allows them to signal that virtue without actually doing all that much after all. It is still better than nothing but it's more signal than virtue. It's quite possibly the least anyone can do in terms of effort, throw the copious amounts of trash in 2-3 bins instead of one.

It's the same with EVs. Where the focus should be to reduce the use of cars (with many, many benefits that come as side effects), we actually encourage people to drive more by moving the costs upfront in the purchase price and making driving even cheaper. This means people will have to get their money's worth by driving more. It also allows people to have a massive carbon footprint while still virtue signaling via the fact that they drive an EV, or recycle the battery.

I don't have to look any further than my closest neighbor who buys a new SUV every 2 years, the latest being a Model X. Just a couple of months ago in casual conversation he pointed out the fact that I own a (admittedly old, decade+) gasoline car, even if with a tiny engine. It would be much cleaner to buy an EV he says. No consideration to the fact that recently I drive my car under 2000Km per year and ride a bicycle or public transport as much as I reasonably can.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I have seen multiple occurrences of someone in a home (a guest in mine, for one) or office generate some garbage and ask where the recycling is, and when the response (e.g. in my house) is "oh, we just recycle cans" or "sorry, we don't have a recycling bin", the response has been somewhere between "Are you planning on serving baby seal for lunch?" and "Are you skipping lunch and going straight to the Klan rally?"

I used to get into an argument about how recycling really only makes much sense when it's energetically cheaper (e.g. aluminum), but I was usually just wasting my breath so now my normal response is that baby seal is just the appetizer.

[lukifer]

> Virtue signaling implies, to me at least, a person that is trying to make himself/herself look better to others.

Is there a term for virtue signaling to one's self?

[sukilot]

Vicious cycle of consumption.

[_jal]

Weird to call this virtue signalling when it is something closer to municipal fraud. Many (most/all?) places have different pricing for waste vs 'recycling'.

Or maybe not; it just demonstrates 'virtue signalling' has about as much semantic payload as 'fake news' at this point. One consequence of internet-driven constant political engagement is that neologisms devolve into shibboleths really quickly.

[dmd]

For 4+ years when I lived in a Philadelphia suburb, we were required to separate recycling from trash, and further into 3 different categories... and then the truck would come and right in front of us dump the trash and all recycling into the same truck all together.

[stevep98]

The truck that collects my garbage has two sections. The driver selects which section the bin will dump into. It’s difficult to see from the curb what’s going on. Are you sure this wasn’t the case for you?

[dmd]

Yes, very sure. Even talked to them about it once- they said there were plans to have recycling facilities later but currently (in 2008) it all just went the same place.

[sukilot]

Required how?

[dmd]

Town ordinance, unless I misunderstand your question.

[jbay808]

Who is signalling virtue, and who are they signalling to?

When I take batteries to the recycling center, that's not something that my friends typically hear about.

[dd36]

OP is virtue signaling the virtue signaling police.

[agumonkey]

I wonder if micro recycling wouldn't help. At least for paper you could probably grind, mash things into smaller denser fiber blocks. This would avoid a lot of useless transportation since most of the bins are empty (or full of cardboard boxes taking up volume).

[CalChris]

It will cost me $49 to replace the battery on my iPhone SE. Moreover Apple will recycle the battery. This seems fair.

Doing it myself would require $34 in parts plus tools and skill I don’t have.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+SE+Battery+Replacement/6...

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

The issue isn't whether the marginal cost of replacing it is reasonable, the issue is why does it need tools and skills that people don't already have.

[chrisseaton]

> the issue is why does it need tools and skills that people don't already have

Because these are extremely lightweight, compact, water-resistant devices. There isn't room for old-style battery compartments. Every micrometer is squeezed here.

[pantalaimon]

We are talking about 1-2mm difference here. What’s the big deal?

[chrisseaton]

That sounds like an awful lot to me on a phone that's only a few millimetres thick.

[CalChris]

7.6 mm to be precise.

[dev_tty01]

Why? What evidence do you have that tools and skills are more important than marginal cost? It is less convenient, I agree with that, but the bulk of users live close to an Apple store. The other approach is overnight shipping service that Apple makes really easy to do. Call an 800 number, get an overnight box from Apple, send it off.

The other benefit is that Apple will make sure they all get recycled. I don't know this as a fact, but it seems that most of the folks who want to jump on this as evidence that Apple is evil are the same people who are willing to spend a bit more for greener solutions in general. Having Apple replace and recycle is greener than having millions of users tossing old batteries into trash cans. (Don't kid yourself, this will happen if iPhone batteries are easily replaceable.) Yes, there is some marginal cost for this ecological advantage. But it seems like a good tradeoff to me at least.

My 6s is 5 years old. Had the battery replaced once so far. Going strong running the latest OS. $49 for 5 years of use. Not too bad.

All in all, I just have a hard time understanding all the emotional anger over this issue. It is just not a big deal in practice (in my experience). I guess it has been a problem for others, although I wonder if the angry folks actually have iPhones. To each their own.

Battery replacement costs and recycling info: https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service/battery-powe... https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/

[schoolornot]

This only applies to New Yorkers but there is a law on the books that requires retailers to accept used batteries of the same type they sell for recycling. I bring mine to a local Apple store and they gladly take them every time. Often I have a PC battery or two in the bag too.

[est31]

The same rule exists in Germany as well: distributors, if they sell batteries, also have to accept them. Same goes for (fluorescent) light bulbs. I think this rule is quite nice as it saves cost for waste disposal, using existing distributor infrastructure.

[sukilot]

Are they required to recycle those batteries, or merely "accept" them?

[usrusr]

Speaking for Germany: accept, as in paying for proper disposal (which may or may not involve recycling). The main goal is keeping batteries out of regular refuse streams.

[MiroF]

This actually might be a sign of improvement... I think increasingly we are putting restrictions on recycling so that we actually do recycle them.

Until recently, I think quite a bit of recycling is a sham. I've spent a bit of time as a hobby tracking down recycling (in my high school growing up, etc) and effectively none of it made it to actually being recycled.

[ZeroGravitas]

This is one of those problems that the US can't solve because they keep electing people who don't want to solve it.

In other places they just mandate this stuff.

[iso1210]

So in Germany iphone batteries are user replaceable?

[novok]

You're not supposed to even throw alkaline batteries into normal trash AFAIK so giving it to someone who can throw it into the 'right kind of trash' is useful. Most people, including me, don't want to figure out whatever special place we are supposed to drive to drop off our batteries, so it's nicer to do it while your shopping.

[lazyant]

In Canada we have a recycling fee for computer stuff and tires for example. In some cases (tire "recycle" centre) it was found they were just dumping them. (Please somebody correct me if I remember this wrong).

Gentle reminder "recycle" is the last thing to do in the "reduce, reuse, recycle".

[pbhjpbhj]

Good bit of fraud by a major retailer there. That sort of thing needs serious punishment.

[myself248]

Does this mean that your manager was throwing NiCd batteries (many old power tools, in particular) into the trash?

[Consultant32452]

At some point it'll just become lucrative to mine old dumps. Until that point, it's probably not worth it.

[paulcole]

The truth nobody wants to hear is that you can recycle all the batteries you want but the planet is still fucked.

Live in a small home/apartment, don’t eat meat or dairy products, don’t drive or fly in planes, and don’t have kids. That’s how someone who lives in a modern developed nation can “do their part” for the planet. I live that way but almost nobody else is willing.

Wringing your hands that batteries get thrown out instead of recycled is like complaining the toilet is running when the house is on fire.