[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.

[mattkrause]

I paid a $10 “core charge” when I bought a new car battery, which was refunded when I brought the old one back so that it could be recycled. I don’t see why this would be impractical for phone batteries too.

[notatoad]

how did this turn into a discussion on the merits of vending machines? you can recycle things without vending machines.

[avar]

Because that's how bottle return works in developed countries, which is a proxy for it being trivial to detect if a returned bottle is good.

Whereas the suggestions in this thread that I've been replying to are going to involve some combination of a massive ramp-up in customs inspections, as well as local recycling facilities where returned Li-ion batteries would need to be manually inspected. It just doesn't seem worth it.

[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.