UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill The UK government hopes to make it easier for folks to reuse and recycle electrical goods rather than consign old gear to the landfill. The move follows the country passing right-to-repair legislation [PDF], much of which came into force on July 1, 2021 – although manufacturers were given a two-year grace period to make spare …
Each throw-away vape contains a AA size Li-Ion battery, mostly discharged, connected directly to a resistive heating element. It's like throwing cigarette butts into the rubbish. Around here, it is the cause of a truck or dump smolder-event every day, and a live fire a couple of times a week.
Aus is on the way to making vapes prescription-only. They've started with an outright ban on disposable vapes.
I'd question the cigarette butt analogy. Cigarette buts are pure waste and really only fit for the bin, but as you point out the so-called disposable vapes still have a perfectly re-usable rechargeable battery and heating element.
Big Clive has made a number of videos about scavenging disposable vapes from the gutter and harvesting the batteries for use in other projects.
They're just crying out for recycling rather than discarding to landfill.
I feel like OP missed out the word lit cigarette butts, which would make a better analogy.
And while it is possible to reuse the batteries, that's not much practical use if the majority of them are thrown in with general rubbish (or just chucked on the street). At least specific 'electronics' collections might hopefully make it easier to find reusable components without digging through a mound of mixed rubbish, and also reduce the fire risk somewhat.
Sadly, with a lot of people, the will isn't there. Even if it is, where can they put the vape? Assuming the street they are in has a recycling bin (and not all do), will the council sort out the electronics from the generic recycling? If they won't, the vape will need to go into the nearest electronics bin, which is probably in a local recycling centre.
They may take the vape home. and recycle it properly, but how many people will bother with that? A lot don't even take their rubbish home..
That will be the local recycling centre which has number plate recognition and uses that to enforce the "maximum 6 visits in any 12 month period" rule.
My county have got canny and share the information between their sites, so if you want to make a 7th trip to a recycling centre you must go out of the county!
At my local recycling centre, if some other customer fancies the item that you intended to throw away and you give it to them to enjoy a second life instead of binning it, the attendants go absolutely mental and start a tug of war, and shouting match. I know because I was the one about to put the wooden stools in the receptacle. The argument that ensued was ridiculous. I would have assumed the attendant wanted it for himself to sell on (come on, we all know it’s one of their perks) but he hadn’t even seen them until that point, just saw us talking and handing over.
Since Covid started, you now have to pre-book an arrival slot on a website for our local recycling centre. It was obviously put in place to separate people, but the council’s snooping is obviously too good for them to resist and they have kept it in place. So no spontaneous garage or garden clearing now. And they now charge for green waste bin collection. And they are going to refuse collection of black bins (non-recycle) if a) the lid is not closed and b) there is no ‘side’ waste aka black bags sitting next to it. All bases covered.
Big Clive has also highlighted something I think needs to change.
A lot of new LED light fittings do NOT have replaceable bulbs, including a lot of those new LED streetlights. Apparently, if the light fails, you need to replace the entire unit. With the street lights, you have to replace the entire head of the light. That, to me, is wasteful.
The worst example of non-componentisation (is that a word? it should be) that I've seen was the electric fire that was fitted in my Dad's house. After a few years the LED do-dah that provided a warm orange glow decided to stop working. The landlord ended up replacing the whole fire as the LED do-dah was an integral unit and couldn't be replaced. Unbelievable...back in the day it was simply a case of changing a bulb.
"I’ve just bought (clearance) some LED spotlights for my summer house office, but each one is sealed, no replaceable bulbs element."
Not likely that useful anyway. When an LED bulb goes out, I find it's usually the cheapo power supply or the power supply AND the LED and I'm not sure which killed the other.
Many manufacturers drive the LEDs beyond their rating to save a few bob by not putting in another couple to meet the rated lumens on the packaging. They might also be buying the cheapest LED's on offer and not bothering to make any changes to the power supplies that they've also purchased based on price.
Yes that sort of thing is the only practical way to induce recycling, especially of that sort of item people will have on them and don't want to carry around when it is no longer useful so they'll drop it in the nearest trash bin. If it was worth real money they'd stick it back in their pocket until they got home and get the refund wherever they buy a new vape.
That worked great for ridding the roadsides of soda bottles and cans back when recycling fees were introduced in the US. The problem is almost no one has increased the fee (5 cents in the mid 70s when this came along versus today is a big difference) and all those water and sports drink bottles are excluded in most places. I guess the politicians who don't want to increase those fees either assume their constituents are litterbugs so it would cost them money, and/or don't want to give the homeless more money by having the stuff they collect be worth more (because I guess it will encourage homelessness?)
IMO it's cheaper to smoke cigarettes than vape (here in the UK at least). Legit refillable vapes cost around £25 and the cheap nasty ones are around £20. Rechargeable/refillables go for £40. Jury's still out on the long term effects, too. Still, at least they don't create that public toilet smell like they did in the olden days....
Why make (refillable) vapes prescription-only? It doesn't make sense for a harm reduction product to have barriers to entry or put a cost on the NHS when people can do it off their own backs. They should definitely be funded as part of harm reduction as requested but it seems wasteful and onerous to put the entire burden on the health service.
I'm not convinced of the harm-reduction angle; being non-prescription, some folks have only used vapes and not tobacco, which is an increase in harm. And there's still questions about how much safer (if any?) that a vape is than cigarettes. No tar, sure, but there's plenty of other stuff in both.
You can read the UK government evaluation and statistics here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nicotine-vaping-in-england-2022-evidence-update/nicotine-vaping-in-england-2022-evidence-update-main-findings
In short, the risks appear to be significantly smaller than smoking and the majority of vapers are ex-smokers (or those still currently smoking). They're also the most successful method for smoking cessation. The 'ooh it contains chemicals' line isn't particularly scientific.
The publication also mentions that there's little evidence of harm (when measured by biomarkers) for second hand electronic cigarette vapour exposure.
"Why make (refillable) vapes prescription-only? "
It's hard enough to get an appointment with the doctor to begin with.
I vaped to help ween me off ciggies and it worked great. I got a model with a rechargeable battery and would refill the cartridges myself even though they really wanted to sell me new ones every 5 minutes. The fluid put on a cotton swab and lodged under my tongue let me tamp down cravings without going outside for a puff. Getting the patches would need a doctor visit IIRC, or was it the gum? It's the same as having to spend $200 for a doctor visit to get my prescription renewed for migraine meds and they paying the outrageous patent pricing to get the prescription filled. All that happens is the doctor asks if I still get migraines and if they are any more frequent (yes and no) and sends the auth to the pharmacy (who then put it on hold as they can't get insurance to approve it not understanding I don't have insurance and will just pay cash).
So it will be financed by the customers.
We all know that companies pass along their costs. They really can't do otherwise. The only thing they can do is diminish their margins and I'm not sure a company making XMas lights has a lot of margin to squeeze.
Although that sounds unfortunate, what alternative is there ?
If government paid for it, that means taxpayers. So .. everybody, whether they frequently buy appliances or not.
The ideal solution would be to finance the collection and recycling costs using the recycled objects. I have no idea whether that's economically viable.
@Adrian 4
"Although that sounds unfortunate, what alternative is there ?"
One that is frequently overlooked is 'do nothing'. It can sound like a problem but is it a problem? I dont have the answer but given some of the scandals around recycling because its more expensive than worth doing I wonder.
So it will be financed by the customers.
Sure. But that is exactly what's needed. Reduce incentive to just buy (i.e. make) more stuff and encourage reducing consumption and increasing reuse. Re-use Uncle Fred's lights he isn't using any more. Buy lights with replaceable bulbs or better made ones which last longer. Take strings to the local primary school's repair cafe to see if someone can make them work again.
I wish I could give you more upvotes - @Pascal and several other commentards have missed the point that you are making, which is that making manufacturers pay means making consumers pay, as opposed to repairers, recyclers and do-withouters - or any other non-consuming taxpayers...
Old-style strings had lamps in series that usually failed short circuit so the string would continue although I suppose after enough failures without replacement the whole lot would eventually go all at once. The biggest problem was locating the one that had worked loose in storage (how???) or the one which really had failed O?C. But you had to source the correct replacements; they weren't marked as valves used to be (U.... vs P....).
LEDs being parallel a failed one won't take out the whole string & they should be longer lived anyway. The strings going to landfill now are likely to be the old incandescents being replaced by LED.
"Take strings to the local primary school's repair cafe to see if someone can make them work again."
That seems to be the take Austria has on it, sort of. The government will pay you, thus subsidising the cost of having your items repaired. I read this the other day, after having had a few drinks, so my memory may be hazy, but IIRC (I prob. don't), you take your item to the repair centre and pay up front for the repair and then claim a voucher which will pay you back half the repair cost up to €100 in "a few weeks". A "carrot" to get stuff repaired, but the "stick" is applied to all tax payers, even those who look after their kit and are less likely to need repairs.
I can see the point in encouraging repairs, but as we have all seen on all government subsidy schemes, it encourages the providers to put their prices up. A €50 repair suddenly costs €65 but the customer doesn't complain because they still get paid €32.50 back from the incentive scheme, so they still got it "cheaper" than before.
And, of course, there's the "fashion" trends. A lot of kitchen small electricals get binned because they don't match this years colour scheme :-(
"I'm not sure a company making XMas lights has a lot of margin to squeeze."
The "company" making the lights (in China, of course) will be formed in September and closed in December/January leaving any recycling assessments unpaid. The next year there will be a new company (same people/factory) trading under a different name for export. Just like the bargain tools with a lifetime guarantee and when you search for the company, the only mention of them online is from other people that have tried and failed to find them to get a replacement.
We've got council run mobile tips here in Catalunya. Think fancy rag and bone men. They park up in each village 1 day a week and you give them your crap (metal, wood, electronics, old cooking oil etc)... Mind you, no one is going to give away metal for free, you burn any old wood in your fire, old cooking oil you use to start bonfires to burn your clippings, so the only things they really collect is old tvs and stuff like that. No queues and no travelling.
I'd forgotten ours was doing that the last time I went down. Got refused entry. Turned around, parked up a few 100yds away, went to the website and found a slot available in 15 mins booked it and then joined the back of the queue again :-)
Maybe I was lucky, or maybe they aren't actually all that busy. I just checked, and the system is that you enter your vehicle details etc before you even get to see what, if any, slots are available, so I didn't bother. They record your car reg and postcode and limit you to 2 visits per month or something like that, so didn't want to take the chance a "failed" booking might take up a possible future visit I may need.
Where I live in the UK it's not hard to recycle white goods, but it's not free; my local council will pick up large goods for £20. Note that if you're binning something that still works (or is useable, like furniture) then charities like the British Heart Foundation will pick them up for nothing.
I'm not sure about that. We had a *major* clear out some years ago. We thought it would be easy to find willing recipients of items that were in a good, clean, state. But no!
None of the charities would accept electrical goods. And as for furniture, they turned up their noses at everything that didn't have a fire-safety label on it. - you know, those little paper thingies attached to a piece of string around a chair leg or summat. The first thing you throw away, after the guarantee / assembly instructions.
British Heart Foundation refused Dining Room chairs (but accepted the table) that had been re-covered without a fire-safety label. Men collecting it said this was because BHF was selling - so surely the solution is to sell the table and throw in the chairs with a BIG disclaimer label? They were even less impressed when I suggested removing the seat inserts.
I tried to sell then give away a very nice sofa.com sofa after my mum passed away. Still had the tags, was basically immaculate, but ZERO interest. Even when we offered it for free.
I think part of this is the convenience of having something new delivered rather than having to go get it (admittedly this was a BIG sofa) and we've also become so accustomed to new due to easy credit deals that second hand stuff is of no interest.
My local council does 'small device' and battery collection as part of the green bin collection. You put the batteries or small devices in a bag and put them on the bin. Larger stuff still needs to be taken to the tip.
"I tried to sell then give away a very nice sofa.com sofa after my mum passed away. Still had the tags, was basically immaculate, but ZERO interest. Even when we offered it for free."
Sofas and beds are difficult to get rid of on a third party basis due to concerns about sanitation/allergies. If a mate offers you a sofa they're replacing, you may take them up on it, but a stranger?
Most things are flammable if you try hard enough, but it's quite hard to set fire to a wooden chair with a cigarette - foam-filled polyester-covered sofas on the other hand... hence the labels to show that it probably won't burst into flames at the least provocation.
"None of the charities would accept electrical goods."
Yep. Yet another result of laws having unintended consequences. Re-sale of electrical goods make the seller responsible for said safety of those second hand goods. Not one charity I know will touch anything electrical with a barge pole. They won't do PAT on them, primarily because their insurers won't let them, even when one of the volunteers in the shop is a fully qualified sparky and is legally competent to do PAT.
If you ever watch any of the US retro computing youtube channels, they get some amazing finds at the various "thrift", "goodwill" and charity shops while all our old IT kits goes to landfill/WEEE recycling. Even donating old but decent IT kit to a school involves jumping through hoops, at a cost to us, if you can find one that will take it. The mantra is supposed to be REDUCE, RE-USE, RE-CYCLE. Only the first and last are viable options for most electricals in the UK, unless you can re-use it internally.
Many charities will take second hand electrical goods, but many also don't. Easy way to check is to see if they are selling any. This is because smaller ones tend to need someone in house to do it, larger ones often get sent to sorting warehouses.
None will take furniture without fire safety labels.
Many think charity shops are a place to dump broken and useless items. My mum used to work in a charity shop for the local hospital and you'd get soiled clothes, including underwear, smashed crockery, toys with parts missing and other useless junk, all because people think they can somehow sell it, or can't be bothered to go to the tip and like to pretend they are doing good.
In some cases charities also have to pay disposal costs on their own waste streams - I overheard a conversation about second-hand books in a local shop. A donor had a lot of old paperbacks: one volunteer was reluctant to take them as the charity would have to pay a tip fee to get rid of unsaleable ones, but her colleague pointed out that (as they cover a wide-ish area) they could pass them on to another branch where there was no such charge...
We had that when we were house clearing after a bereavement, yes it was old but still perfectly usable wardrobes and other furniture but nobody wanted it. Yet you hear of people desperate for that stuff.
Some stress relief with a sledgehammer and a few trips to the council tip was the result.
"old but still perfectly usable wardrobes and other furniture but nobody wanted it. Yet you hear of people desperate for that stuff."
Timing can be an issue. I give away lots of things that take some time for the right person to spot the listing and phone up. Other times things will be claimed in an hour.
There's a second hand shop in my town that takes in items for free and sells them for very good prices. Their problem is space, especially with clothes. Kid's clothes go really fast since kids grow out of things quickly and parents are looking for bargains. A closet clear out of adult clothes that are decades old don't do so well. I keep an eye out now as I've gotten back into sewing and a plus size something can yield the material for a project. I just found a pair of jeans that were weathered at the same level as a pair of mine that needed some patching. I've also found almost new jeans a size or two bigger that I plan to cut down. I'm clean out of nans at this stage of my life, so I have to take over those chores.
turned up their noses at everything that didn't have a fire-safety label on it
They would have to, in the UK it is ILLEGAL to sell certain items without relevant safety labelling.
That also covers renting furnished property. If a tenant removes the fire safety label, then the landlord finds themselves having to replace the furniture. Needless to say, on some furniture, the fire safety label is positions so as to cause annoyance/irritation and thus encourage it's removal - clearly it's too hard for the manufacturer to put it somewhere out of the way.
"That also covers renting furnished property. If a tenant removes the fire safety label, then the landlord finds themselves having to replace the furniture. "
I'd love to see the figures on the hazards. Real, not theoretical. So much H&S is utter crap in the real world. Saving one life isn't justified by filling a landfill with perfectly serviceable manufactured goods.
The issue is that many people, not just one or two, have died in fires where smoke from furniture has been a significant factor. In fires, it's often not the fire that kills, it's the black smoke and/or toxic compounds from stuff burning that kills people. On that basis, I think the rules are reasonable - it's just that some manufacturer's aren't very clever at the labelling.
The spares for my xmas lights are long used up :) You can get replacement bulbs but they are not cheap. And I think most people just CBA to fix something when you can go on amazon and get a replacement that will be delivered the next day.
When I was a kid, there only seemed to be maybe 4 or 5 common "standard" bulb fittings in Xmas light strings. Many were still MES fittings. And every shop that sold lights sold packs of spares. By the time I had my own house, it seemed like every year the shops bought from a different supplier and every one had a different fitting or voltage and spares where nigh on impossible to get. We still put up the incandescent bulb strings that work, but once they lose more than a couple of bulbs and there's no equivalent strings to "steal" from, they get binned so I guess eventually the last string will be replaced with LEDs to match the newer ones. Although I'll be sad when the 20m 4 colour, 4 channel rope light fails. It does proper "chase" patterns, unlike the vast majority of modern ones which seem to be only two channel so all you get is alternate flashing, not a "chase" pattern. I suppose I should start shopping around for one this year or next. That good one must be at least 20 years old now!
"When I was a kid, there only seemed to be maybe 4 or 5 common "standard" bulb fittings in Xmas light strings. Many were still MES fittings. And every shop that sold lights sold packs of spares."
Yep, this is absolutely true. Woolies usually had all the spares you'd need.
I haven't actually exhumed the old incandescent lights from their resting place in the back bedroom for several years, LEDs being cheap, convenient and reliable (assuming there's actually a power brick in the box, thank you Home Bargains), but I always think the the old incandescent lights give a softer, more soothing light. Or am I just being nostalgic again.
Being a complete tragic person this year I hooked up our Christmas lights (living room and kitchen-diner) to some power monitoring (Shelly Plus Plugs, for control of the lighting via Home Assistant). The 15+ year-old string of incandescent lights uses about 35W and the 4 year-old string of LEDs 3W.
Needless to say after 15+ years of service those old lights will probably be replaced next year. Fortunately our recycling centre is a short drive away and has a bin for generic electrical stuff but the cost of trawling through that and getting anything usable out of most of the stuff chucked in there must be enormous.
> Needless to say after 15+ years of service those old lights will probably be replaced next year. Fortunately our recycling centre is a short drive away and has a bin for generic electrical stuff but the cost of trawling through that and getting anything usable out of most of the stuff chucked in there must be enormous.
Thought about this a bit more. The environmental cost of the old lights (and human cost, as I expect most of this electronic waste is exported to poor countries to be picked over for less than $1 per day) is probably much more than the financial cost to me of a string of new lights (£10). Since I am fortunate enough to not have to worry necessarily about the financial cost of the 35W of power these old lights draw for the ~12 hours per day over the ~30 day festive period, it probably makes more environmental sense for me to continue to subsidise these old lights, keeping them out of waste at least until they are genuinely kaput.
And let's not forget, those lights are typically used during a time of year when the heating is running. So that 35W isn't wasted, it's diverted from the heating system. So the extra cost is actually only the difference in energy costs between electricity and whatever runs the heating.
And I agree, the old incandescent lights gave off a much more pleasing light. What "irritates" me a bit is the difficulty of finding good "berry" lights - most places only seem to sell bare LED, or low fitting count "fancy" lights. As for anything to replace the ones I most liked that had teardrop shaped bulbs around an inch or more long, well never seen any of those in LED.
As an aside, we rarely had blown bulbs. Dad being all of electrical, practical, and a bit of a scrounger, dug a transformer (proper transformer, lots of iron and copper) out of his box of "stuff that people these days say we should throw away" and configured it as an auto-transformer to drop the voltage by 20-30V. By under-running the lamps, they very rarely blew. Mind you, this was in the era before "fail shorted" bulbs were the norm - so a single failed bulb meant the whole lot went out. Even as kids we knew how to test bulbs !
I have proven to my wife's satisfaction that we cannot 5hrow anything away as we'll need it within two weeks if we do. On multiple occasions this has happened and we have had to buy new so that she has grudgingly accepted that I can keep all the cables and mysterious widgets as long as they are not on display
My area's red recycling bins are marked that they accept household electronics, but then add, "no screens or batteries.'" How useful is that?
More generally, the recycling rules vary from place to place and the general population are expected to know and understand them. (Think which type of plastics are taken where.) The companies should be accepting any sort of recyclable waste and doing the sorting there. If they can't handle some type themselves pass it on to another firm that can.
Then it's important to encourage use of recycled materials. It there is no market for the product then it doesn't matter how much we send to be recycled.
Money. Household recycling costs a lot to be separated at the recycling plant. Especially different types of plastics which is incredibly difficult if not impossible to automate. This means the recycling centres won't take it, or will just landfill anything not immediately obvious, such as drinks bottles. If it's not economically viable for the recycler to sort, they will refuse it. UK Government has set binding targets on Local Authorities for recycling and large costs per ton on anything going to landfill. This leave the local authorities with very little choice other than to enforce sorting on the householders. We're not too badly off here, with a single recycling bin for glass, card, metals and plastic with an "insert" bin that sits in the top for paper. But I predict we'll be having more sorting forced on us eventually, especially the plastics.
The economies of scale in the recycling world have grown a lot in recent years, but there's still that expensive manual sorting by humans going on in the plants and that will never scale.
iPads/phones/tech toys are thrown out because it costs an arm and a leg to change the battery?
Look at my simple phone... takes a heat gunto melt the glue and several levers to remove screen, more glue holds the screen ribbon to the PCB, then its undo 12 small screws , then back with the heat gun to get the PCB out, finally more heat to remove said battery, then put it all back together with more glue.
I'd say it would take a pro phone repairer about 90 mins to do all that, plus the price of a new battery.150-200 quid . new phone costs 25/month and my old one goes in the landfill.
Mandate that the battery can be changed with 1 watchmaker's screwdriver and some patience, and you'd see less pads , tablets and phones in the landfill resulting in less destruction mining the materials needed for such devices.
except the manufacturers can buy opps lobby enough politicians to block that idea as it eats into their profits from selling new tat
Apple would soon introduce replaceable batteries and get rid of glue if their phones doubled in price
iPhone batteries are one of the easiest to replace and the “glue” is just double sided tape that sticks the battery to the inside of the case and just requires a firm pull to remove.
The requirement for a heat gun is another phone maker.
We really need to push them to make kit that is durable, repairable and practical to upgrade. The result will be much more expensive, if only because the producers will get paid less often. But those of us currently buying cheaper not cutting edge tat can spend the same on older and still perfectly good devices second hand instead. (My current phone is a 3 year old from Backmarket, practice what I preach.)
The whole planned obsolescence, linear consumption model must go. As you said getting the manufacturers in line will be a non-trivial problem.
"Place (unwanted) item out front with a “For Sale” sign"
Yes, we used to, but now in the UK that counts as 'fly tipping'. There's an apparent conflict of interest between recycling and anti-littering that's made the definition too narrow.
There is of course Feecycle and its various cousins. Also, for derelict white goods, quite a few local scrap merchants will collect for no charge as they can sell the metal.
"It will be gone toot sweet!"
You are Truly Scrumptious and ICM£5 :-)
I'm sure you meant the French phrase "tout suite". Or were you thinking of the film and truly meant Toot Sweet?
They will officially take 'anything with a plug'. There are also various historic links, and my own experience, that they'll take things such as laser toner and ink cartridges too.
It still amazes me, however, that there is minimal high level pushback or consequence to manufacturers who produce devices with a life time of a couple of years. Mobile phones, some perfectly functional computers for the Windows 11 CPU and TPM requirements. Of course that would impact on profits and likely make products more expensive, so no-one wants to address it.
I have repaired various items over the years, from a sub-woofer, to various pieces of Amateur Radio gear. That has only been possible as I can usually find the schematics and the parts list. If the parts are custom silicon and obsolete, it becomes a "boat-anchor". It is very hard, and in a lot of cases, completely impossible for a home electronics engineer to repair domestic kit due to the lack of information. There is also no money in it, when the cost of repair is more than the cost of replacement!
In the past, I have tried to be nice to the local tidy tip, by breaking down old kit so it can be put in the correct recycling skip. That is currently not the case. Central Bedfordshire Council have gone full Stasi and now want local residents to produce "Papers, Citizen!" to prove they live in the area and have a right to use the service. So now the WEEE will be going in the land-fill bin!
The documentation doesn't even exist for many of those companies themselves (many of which also probably no longer exist).
Companies don't keep things like that because repair service is basically "throw it away and we'll give you another" nowadays. Diagnosing, repairing and then certifying a product as only fit for "reconditioned" sale isn't worth the effort even for the company that makes them.
My MSI laptop is three years old. The mainboard firmware updated one day and it bricked itself. Great. Contacted MSI support, they came, picked it up, looked at it, etc. Then I basically had it posted back to me with an apology saying that they have no more mainboards for that model any more. All it needed was a firmware reflash, but they just don't do that any more, and were just going to replace the entire board, and couldn't do that because THEY didn't have any more of a 3-year-old board.
Ended up going on eBay and buying one of the same model that had a damaged screen. When it arrived, it was literally in the same MSI returns packaging as my one had been sent back in. Apparently that guy had broken his screen, sent it to MSI, and they sent it back saying they had none of those screens to replace it! His was only a year old! So I did some swapsies and ended up with a working laptop and a decent set of fully-working spares to boot. But even MSI themselves couldn't do that.
The only example I have of anything like that ever working out was with an electric kiln. Bought it second-hand, after decades of use, and tried to get it working. It wouldn't turn on so I opened it up and had a fiddle but couldn't see anything wrong. Contacted the manufacturer and they sent me the full circuit diagram. And it all tested out compliant to their diagram. Turned out that the professional electrician we'd paid to fit a commando connector on the outside of the house doesn't know how to join a wire properly - nothing was ever wrong with the kiln! Fixed that and the kiln is still working to this day but I was surprised that they still had the original circuit diagram for such an old model to hand!
Throwaway culture isn't just about consumers - it's the manufacturers too, and many cheap manufacturers would rather just go bust every few years than have to service your old laptops, keep churning out spares for it, retaining all the service manuals and technical personnel to repair things, etc.
I'm not sure where you are, but under UK consumer law, those MSI laptops were still under at least some level of warranty, as by law an item should last a "reasonable length of time" and yours, at least, was borked by a firmware upgrade, which MSI would be directly responsible for. The broken screen, maybe less so, depends what you meant by "broken", ie user damage, or failed electronics causing lines etc in the display. Once the two year warranty is up, manufactures are still obliged to repair, replace or refund some proportion of the original cost if it fails. With laptops, it's probably 5 years or so. Repairs may be charged at labour cost and/or you pay the carriage costs to return it (Parts should be free), but in practice, your complaint is with the supplier/seller, not the manufacturer, as that's who you entered into a contract with at the point of purchase. It's pretty much the same in the EU AFAIK, but could vary wildly in other jurisdictions.
I took a coffee machine back to a retailer after just under two years, they entered my card details, found the sales record, apologised that they no longer sold that model and offered a full refund or to choose a similar model off the shelf up to 20% over the cost of the faulty one, no questions asked. Currys/PCWorld, if anyone is interested.
Was definitely still in warranty.
Was told they literally have no spare, replacement or equivalent parts for it.
However, it's over the 2 year statutory warranty period, but covered only under their own free warranty extension (for registering the device with them directly) and I doubt there's any recourse there.
Arguing a laptop should last 5 years would be a groundbreaking and uphill legal battle that would drag on for years.
They didn't charge for anything, and they had no parts or repairs available no matter what I was willing to cough up, and the original supplier wouldn't be liable at that point I would hazard.
A quick google search tells me "The Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that items must be of satisfactory quality, as described, fit for purpose and last a reasonable length of time. You have these rights for six years in England and Wales or five years in Scotland."
I searched on the terms
uk consumer law reasonable lifetime
...and take your pick from the reputable results on the first page :-) It's worth knowing and understanding your rights.
Even Apple agrees! :-)
Being pedantic, consumer rights law puts no limitation on "reasonable life" - for some items it could be 10 years or more.
The limitation is a generic legal one - in England you only have 6 years in which to start civil proceedings, in Scotland it's 5 years. After that, while you may have a claim for "not reasonably durable", it's not actually enforceable in a court.
"while you may have a claim for "not reasonably durable", it's not actually enforceable in a court."
You will also need to hire an attorney that specializes in that area of law, pay them up front and hope to win and get awarded at least what the attorney had billed. At £300/hour or more, the bill gets very big very quickly. In fact, it can be cheaper to get a law degree yourself.
I have a bunch of lead-acid batteries from old cars and UPS to go, but to be honest, it's just easier to call the guy I found on Nextdoor who just comes round and picks them up and any spare bits of metal that might be going (I have a hot water tank for him at the moment).
Trying to take them to the tip is a pain in the butt, appointments, travelling, queueing, arguing about where it should be put and what they say they accept, etc.
If the process by which I need to get rid of them is convoluted, then I would tend to prefer some other way. I get them not being collected instantly, but why can't I just leave them out with my rubbish with a clear indication that I want them to be taken and recycled? Why can't whoever does the normal rubbish collection just tap a few things and say "Number 27 wants an electronic pickup, number 42 has some old furniture" and then someone more specialised comes and deals with it? Why do I have to do the job for them?
If the guy on Nextdoor took armchairs, I'd have him take two of those two because they're a nightmare to transport on a car and my local council wants to charge nearly £100 to come get them.
If you have a pile of them, find your local scrap dealer(s). A quick look online suggests the current scrap value for LA batteries is around 45-50p/kg - I once weighed in 250kg in one go (I'd been stockpiling them when replacing UPS batteries) which was a nice bonus :-)
Obviously it's not worthwhile for small quantities, but once you get past "one or two batteries" it can be.
For anyone who's not been to a scrap dealer before: separate materials (including separating power cables from phone/network cable - the latter having a lower value due to less copper and more plastic), remove plugs/sockets from cable, remove fittings from pipe (clean copper pie has higher value than if there's soldered fittings), and take photographic ID with you. In order to deal with thieves, scrap dealers are required to record your identity and pay by cheque - making it possible to trace who brought stuff in rather than "some bloke, I gave him cash".
"If the guy on Nextdoor took armchairs, I'd have him take two of those two because they're a nightmare to transport on a car and my local council wants to charge nearly £100 to come get them."
Where I am the trash contractor will pick up large furniture items 2x/year (I think it's twice) for free. The city required that so people wouldn't be fly tipping old sofas and mattresses (mattressi?). The hazardous waste facility is only open one day a month now, but you can take anything you like with you when you leave. I always have small projects and will grab partial cans of paint. Even weird colors can be fine for a first coat. Often times there is a good selection of cleaning products too.
That seems like an enlightened local authority.
Here, once something goes onto the waste site, it's not allowed off - which really goes against the "reuse" part of the "reduce - reuse - recycle" mantra the local authority push. They used to, and even sold some bits the operators had put aside - but not now.
I live in Switzerland and here we have very high recycle rates for electrical goods. This comes from a mixture of government policies and culture.
Firstly recycling electrical goods is free, paid for when you buy the item. "Thanks to the advance recycling fee, you already paid for the disposal of your appliance when you bought it." This adds the cost of recycling to the cost of the goods, the correct way to assign the costs. As others have already pointed out, you don't want this financed by a government tax where careful consumers will subsidise extravagant ones. I thought this scheme was already in place in the UK, but it seems I was mistaken.
Small electrical items are collected by our postal service. You can pick up a small recycling bag at most shops that you put the items in and hang outside your letterbox. The postman will simply take this away when he delivers letters.
All 'large' shops selling electrical goods have to accept items for recycling, so you don't have to go to the tip to return items. I am not sure if you can do this for a fridge, but I have dropped off a large TV without problem. Edit : I found the rules here https://www.erecycling.ch/en/wissenswertes/wissensblog/fach73.html , "Retailers have a legal obligation to take back all the electrical and electronic equipment that they stock themselves. If, for example, you can buy a toaster in an electrical store, you can hand in your old appliance there for disposal – free of charge. You do not have to provide proof of purchase to show that you have already paid the advance recycling fee, nor are you obliged to buy a new device in the shop.", so it seems this would work for a fridge too :-)
The cultural difference seems to be that here recycling is seen as a civic responsibility, the government helps but it is an individuals responsibility. Everyone just thinks that way. For some archaic reason only paper and compost are collected from home addresses. All metal and plastic recycling requires a trip to the shops or the local recycle points. People make it part of their schedule to recycle stuff. Sometimes it's a bit of a pain in the arse, but you do it, because everyone does it.
There is also a very active, not for profit association that manufacturers can join, https://www.swico.ch/en/ , I'm not sure how effective this is but is is another option for increasing recycling rates.
It seems to work quiet well here, but maybe I am being naive, I usually am.
You can't somehow invoke civic responsibility when you have a government that's setting out to profit from everything you do, and which gives almost nothing back.
That's why that part doesn't work in the UK. If it was the case that I felt they did "enough" for me, and the drop-off points were free, easy-to-access and all over the place, then I'd do my "bit" of dropping stuff off.
But that's not the case here. Everything is chargeable, rural areas are completely neglected for coverage, and even waste disposal is seen as a profit to be made - and not even for the government itself, but for private companies OWNED by government ministers and local councillors who get to choose which service they use (guess which one they choose!). I've even got a local councillor into the papers for the dodgy dealings they had in that regard - they were the local councillor in charge of waste management, they owned a waste management company, the waste management company profited from being selected, and he got to own a profit-making company with a long guaranteed contract that he controlled on both ends. It's far more common than you think in the UK. I know because they tried to screw me over and not collect my rubbish - which they are legally bound to do - and used every excuse under the sun for repeatedly missing deliveries. All of which fell flat on their faces when I provided several months worth of CCTV and asked them to point out these magical-mystery collections they claimed they'd made that didn't happen, the times they "checked my bins" and didn't collect because I'd done something wrong (which hadn't happened even once, but they kept pretending it did! Nobody even APPROACHED my bins, let alone looked inside them!), and the times my bins weren't out on a notified collection day so they were missed (strange... that's not what the cameras showed: they showed my bins clearly out as they were supposed to be and NOBODY comes to collect the bins!). That lot annoyed me so much that I decided to look into things and expose them for the charlatans they were. Strangely, once his name was in the papers next to mine, I never once had a missed collection ever again. I still remember the quote they gave me once: "We must have collected your bins, because our manager lives in your road". To which I sent back a photo of my bin and a list of neighbours who all attested that their bins hadn't been collected either.
However, getting back to your post, having the cost of recycling paid up-front is NOT an individual civic duty but a central-government-imposed rule. And we don't have that (despite several promises of such). That, alone, would do far more than anything else in that regard, UK or not. It's that rule that makes it work. And I don't doubt there's some kind of tax/cost on goods that is going towards funding those recycling centres you're asked to go to either.
In the UK, everything is increasingly because profit-motivated, even in central government, but not to the benefit of the taxpayer - to the benefit of a company owner who is getting a backhander from a government official who has chosen them. That's basically the only way that places like Capita etc. can exist - by being utterly shite and expensive, but then also knowing the guy who renews the contracts and bribing him with a cut of the profit to keep using them. See also the recent British scandal about our Post Offices and Fujitsu systems... and then realise that even more than a decade later, we're STILL using Fujitsu systems for the Post Office.
"having the cost of recycling paid up-front is NOT an individual civic duty but a central-government-imposed rule"
TLDR; I agree, I think you have conflated two parts of my post.
The Swiss governmental bodies have created the rules, i.e. You pay for non recyclable waste, recyclable waste is disposed of for free (actually, not all recyclable waste is designated recyclable yet, so you do pay for some recyclable waste), shops that sell electronic goods have to provide recycling for them and the recycling charge is at sale.
The social aspect is that even though most people could pay for all waste to be taken away as 'non recyclable' and not even notice, this is considered shameful. This means even though LESS material is collected here than in the UK, the recycling rates are higher. Maybe this would work in the UK. I mean I would imagine there is less options for corruption if you are taking the recycling back yourself.
From your post it seems the corruption is mainly in the collection of waste not the actual recycling. It is also directly related to the UK's push to move everything to the private sector.
In the case of waste collection, either it is a government job covered by taxes and RUN by the government. Or it is private, and the collector only get paid for what they collect. In this case people living in the backend of beyond would be screwed as their collection charges would be sky high. This would lead to rubbish not being disposed of correctly and so lead to a social cost. Hence, waste disposal is something that needs to be run by the government. Privatisation is just not a good fit for this. Now I'm just waffling.
However, getting back to your post, having the cost of recycling paid up-front is NOT an individual civic duty but a central-government-imposed rule. And we don't have that (despite several promises of such).
I would suggest that, to a certain extent, we do actually have that. Anyone who sells electronic equipment to the general public is legally required to accept stuff back and have it properly recycled. Needless to say, the rules aren't simple ! I recall at a previous job, when this law came into force, the boss told us that "we only sell to businesses" - we only did a tiny amount of business with "consumers" so any lost sales were far outweighed by not opening ourselves up to costs of having old stuff recycled.
But there IS a system where people importing or making electrical/electronic equipment have to pay towards recycling services.
If you really want to know, try this Gov page for starters.
Where I live in the UK, any small electricals that fit in a carrier bag can be placed out for collection by the local council, kerbside.
Larger items you have to pay for the council collection, but you get one collection of three items free per year.
Batteries can be dropped off in several local stores.
Planned obsolescence is a particular problem these days. Perfectly good equipment goes to scrap simply because the manufacturer wants you to buy a new one.
Manufacturers are increasingly putting time bombs in their devices so they fail shortly after the warranty runs out. It used to be grease that dries out and gums up the mechanism, or plastic bearings that wear out or rubber belts that snap or mild steel parts that rust. But now it's done in software.
I just had an issue with an inkjet printer giving trouble until I found a video showing a secret button combination to reset its internal counter, then suddenly it works like new again.
A few weeks ago I almost bought a new microwave until I read a load of reviews indicating that the control board fails after 2 to 3 years. On further reading, it seems that there is an EEPROM on the control board that serves no purpose except that it gets rewritten until its write cycles are exhausted and then the start button stops working.
And of course there are countless stories of internet-connected smart devices that only work until the manufacturer decides to stop supporting them.
Some other countries like France seem to be trying to take a stand against this kind of thing, but I don't see it ever happening here.
The partner of one of my clients religiously took stuff to the recycling containers outside her supermarket... Until one day the containers were all full and she left her stuff by the side of the appropriate container. She got a letter threatening to prosecute her for fly-tipping. The authorities had been through all the stuff she had left and found packaging with her address on it.
Seems like this just encourages people to stick it outside the front door and forget about it, very little responsibility required, therefore barrier to consuming the next round of useless tat is lowered.
Unless this is some new money making scheme for councils to offset their budget deficits...
As many have said their needs to be a complete change in our relationship with consumable goods. White goods should be genuinely durable, made to last and practical to repair. Keeping things going rather than splurging on the latest shiny new thing should be our default mindset. This includes nurturing the skills to diagnose and repair. The number of times I've had tradespeople come round and tell me something is beyond economic repair when all it needs is a cheap part and 30 mins of effort is beyond belief. Its broken in every way possible and this does nothing to change that.
The Law has charities over a barrel, with a very big stick to smack their arses with. I work at a charity, but many of our staff and volunteers are PAT testers, so we can take electrical goods and provide PAT testing as a service to other charities.
However, fire safety regulations are very very strict with furniture; if the labels aren't on, for example things with foam, them we *simply cannot* accept them as it would be totally illegal. In this case, recycling has to be available via the Government, as nobody else can do it.
"The Law has charities over a barrel, with a very big stick to smack their arses with. I work at a charity, but many of our staff and volunteers are PAT testers, so we can take electrical goods and provide PAT testing as a service to other charities."
I think you should name the charity, if in the UK. Please. I'd love to find one where I can not only donate unwanted electricals/electronics, but be able to buy them too.
Meanwhile, anyone know where I can dump a load of old VHS tapes, many bought ones with actual films on them? No one wants them any more. The best I can think of at the moment is the plastics recycling skip at the local tip "Recycling Village" :-)
I'm a volunteer at Oxfam Music. Anything electrical that comes in is properly PAT tested before it is even considered for resale. Because there is effectively zero cost of sale stuff rarely stays on the shelves for long particularly when it is a top brand. Nothing wrong with it - and the musical instruments get a workout from the in-house talent lol.
VHS we don't do, but we have DVD's, CD's and vinyl aplenty.
If I was called Tracy Emin or Damian Hurst, I could probably stack them up into a "Lego style" model of a house or garden shed, or better yet, a giant VHS player, come out with some bullshit about how it represents passive consumerism and make millions. But I'm not, so I can't :-(
"I think VHS is in that unfortunate gap between a second hand market and retro,"
I've got a stack of players and pick up movies I don't have at estate sales all of the time. There are still plenty of old movies that have never made it to DVD or streaming. I think tomorrow will be a movie day as the weather is shite. Once the slow cooker is loaded up and going, I'm free for the day.
"I'm a volunteer at Oxfam Music."
Good to know. Sadly, my nearest one is Edinburgh, over a 100 miles away from here. But that has encouraged me to do a bit more research into what others are doing, and hopefully I'll find something a littler more local that does electricals/electronics :-)
There are a limited number of people who collect VHS tapes, but largely speaking they're not pursued by retro fans simply because the quality is so awful.
For recorded broadcast TV there's also the Teletext Archive, where old Teletext is recovered off recordings of TV programmes - but that's something the people do, I'm not sure they'd be interested in taking a delivery of a load of old tapes.
If the VHS tape has no equivalent on streaming, DVD, Bluray (or Laserdisc as that's typically much higher quality than VHS and doesn't degrade) it might be worth actual money (check ebay), but the number of those is quite small.
Yeah, I figured someone might pick me up on that - I omitted it for simplicity's sake. I know HD-DVD is supposed to be even worse, it's widespread on those media.
As far as I'm aware whilst the issue does exist on laserdiscs it's not a widespread issue as it is with HD-DVD. Also, assuming a properly pressed laserdisc it should continue to work properly regardless of the number of times it is played. That's not the case with VHS (or sadly with laserdisc players themselves, which is one reason I always fight the temptation to ebay a player and some discs).
Manufacturers HIDE repair information. These may be like what chip level parts most commonly fail, or moisture ingress solutions. These secrets they give out to authorized repair dealers and dates back to before CRT TV sets. There is a site called Badcaps or the like that show how simple repairs can be. Once a product is obsoleted, the service manual should go public and bootloader codes or solutions made available. If not keyword search on Electrotanya may work. Loius Rossmann is pushing for this and other things.
One one dishwasher I know of, if the pump is blocked, then manually unblocked, the machine will NEVER work unless some secret serviceman button push combo is entered. Good trick , 100K dishwashers to landfill. Or make the door cable brittle so so many door operations - it breaks the contacts. Or a magnet sensor that fails over time (hot water de-magnifies).
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