http://www.greenmyapple.org/

makes sense that a company like Apple should be meeting the best environmental standards possible.

i found this bit pretty interesting:

"We get angry when our iPod breaks just after the one-year warranty expires. We get annoyed when Apple says it's cheaper to buy a new one than fix the old one. We hate it when we are reduced to selling our old PowerBook keyboard on eBay for five bucks. These are common consumer woes resulting from Apple designing products with short life spans. If Apple had to take back its old products, you can bet it would start designing longer lasting products that are easier to reuse and recycle."

Amen. Making manufacturers responsible for the disposal of their products would change the world. They'd have real incentive to make products that last. And, as a result, we'd see a huge reduction in waste generated, and a major increase in recycling.

anyone know if this has been done in Europe?

My Ipod works fine 10 months beyond the day that its 1 year warranty expired. My wife's works fine, too. So does my friend's, whose is the same age, and at least five of my coworkers. I don't know anyone in the real world who has an Ipod that has failed in the ways that I read about online.


I don't get this - why should Apple have to take anything back? By this thinking, shouldn't Amana have to take back old microwaves and GE have to take back old refrigerators and Sony have to take back old stereos? Why? Aren't these OUR items once we bought them? Aren't they ours to dispose of once we're done with them? Why is it the manufacturers responsibility to get rid of our garbage? When I finish my dinner, can I take my scraps back to the store and ask them to get rid of it?

Don't forget, once you start asking them to dispose of this stuff, you automatically ask them to roll into the original price the cost of disposing of this stuff. Do you want to pay more to get rid of what you could have gotten rid of yourself for free - or even made some money off of?

By the way, these aren't "short life span" items - these are items that people want rid of simply because they want the latest and greatest. There's a difference between an item becoming obsolete and an item no longer working. That is not Apple's fault. That is called buyer's remorse.

You're right, manufacturers don't have an obligation to take things back, but this would arguably the most efficient way to reduce the amount of waste we generate, by giving manufacturers an incentive to produce things that will have longer useful lives.

And, when tax dollars pay for garbage collection or landfill expansion, we're already paying to dispose of everything we buy. Not to mention cleaning up contaminated landfills. Requing manufacturers to take back their products when they're useful lives are over would shift that money from one pile to another. And at least you'd be paying more proportionally for what you actually bought.

Planned obsolescence is the bread and butter of every tech, appliance, and automotive company. If that shit lasted forever, they'd all be broke.

And if they were forced to take things back, you can bet prices would skyrocket. But do you think our taxes would suddenly go way down as a result? It would take years of this sort of thing on a really large scale coupled with a drastic decrease in disposable packaging materials to have any kind of significant effect on the amount of waste we generate and thus affect how much of our taxes go towards waste disposal.

It is a very valid point that there needs to be some kind of recycling program for old tech stuff. There may already be one, but I've never heard about it.

http://www.computertakeback.com/

I found this while looking up computer recycling, it seems there are several states and several cities that do it already and there is a list of companies that do too.

This is always your response to complaints about apple products. It is an ideal illustration of anecdotal v. statistical evidence. You can always find a jackass on the internet who has observed a 0% failure rate in company X's product from his sample size of 10. In order to infer from your "evidence" that you're right, you have to be dumb enough to believe that 1.3 million people are lying, or that your co-workers counter-intuitively are more representative of Apple's user base than 1.3 million people. Are you that dumb?

Did that strike a nerve, Haq? That seemed pretty harsh, but accurate.

Dell just started doing it. And though of course someone is going to have to bear the cost of these programs, I guess I'd rather that be the people buying them, rather than everyone in the world, including those who can't afford them. In Dell's case, they're probably not going to raise prices (since they're the only ones doing this, they can't really afford to) , but are likely hoping that their initiative will switch enough people to Dell to make up in volume what they've lost in margin.

Just responding to the always-condescending tone of the Mayor's posts on the topic.

Yeah, according to that site Promethium linked to, Apple and HP are doing it, too, but Apple is somehow limiting it to stuff bought at the Apple store or directly online. I don't know what limitations the others have.

I haven't really looked into options for recycling old computers, but seeing as how I probably won't be able to sell my old G4, I may have to look into it soon.

I'm simply saying that I know of no one that has suffered any of these catastrophic problems that everyone claims are so rampant among Ipods. It's such a tired topic, but everyone has to jump in and rip on Apple because it's fun to do or something. According to this article from January of this year, 42 million Ipods have been sold. A roughly 1 problem in every 42 items isn't that bad when we're talking about batteries. I wouldn't consider a dead battery "catastrophic," either. Catastrophic means dead harddrive, etc. - most of those issues that I've seen talked about online result from people misusing and abusing Ipods. Batteries are $30 and take about 5 minutes to change.

By the way, Apple has been offering trade-ins on old equipment for a while, beginning in Germany 1994: http://www.apple.com/environment/recycling/

No "tone," Haq, seriously. As with all things on the internet, it's impossible to guess the tone of things. Am I sick of the anti-Ipod bandwagon-jumping? Yes, it's stupid. Had the Rio Karmas sold like the Ipod had, you'd be seeing a far higher number of people - astronomical, actually - complaining about dead harddrives because those players actually had a legitimate problem with harddrive failures and Rio stopped producing them about two years ago (shortly before I got my Ipod - I was considering one until I read about the issue.) But even then it was hard to find anti-Rio people - they were all still pro-Rio simply because it wasn't Apple, regardless of the faulty players. You're making it sound like I'm some die-hard pro-Apple guy or something and I'm not - I'm just tired of the dumb bandwagon mentality from people who are having problems with products they themselves may be at fault for damaging. If there's a legitimate problem, I'll complain too - Itunes 7 is a good example. How that actually was allowed out, I can't imagine, especially when Zune is about to be released. I can barely run anything else while Itunes 7 is running on my computer. Granted, this is an old, old computer, but still - Itunes 6 wasn't this bad, and it didn't crash every time I closed the program. I just hope they get this shit turned around by Christmas when I get an 80gb Ipod.

In answer to the "whattabout Europe" query....

With cars, yes. If, in europe proper, you cannot sell your used car, and can prove it (ads run for x amt of weeks, etc), then the manufacturer HAS TO dispose of it.

What this makes them do, for the most part, is engineer in a lot of materials that recycle easily, interestingly enough. They all try to make things that last as it is, so the only real difference post-law is that they use materials that can be easily extracted, melted, reused, etc.