[fipar]

I think that's a good idea but then companies doing that wouldn't be able to sell their products as new, and we probably need a cultural shift before widespread adoption of refurbished and used products is doable.

Additionally, and not knowing much about the hardware side of things, if I put myself in the shoes of a manufacturer, it seems challenging to ship a product where the expected lifetime of some of its components is unknown. Support and warranties would be affected too.

[mysterydip]

Those are fair points. With the amount of e-waste currently in existence I'd think we would want to address those sooner rather than later, but it's easy for everyone to just kick the can down the road.

[galleywest200]

It may be more prudent for us to perfect our material extraction process to reuse these metals and plastics, as opposed to reusing the same piece of hardware. Once that is done, we could probably have e-cycling be picked up by trash collectors just like regular recycling.