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New UK plan "could spell end of throwaway culture" (BBC News)
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Zero999:
Obviously, cheap nasty signal use products such as torches with non-replaceable batteries and disposable phone chargers should be banned.

I don't see any problems with hygiene and children's toys, which should be designed to survive many wash cycles at 90oC and being sterilised in chlorine solution.

Food packaging isn't quite so clear cut. Sometimes using plastic packaging increases the shelf life, thus cutting waste, but it's often unnecessary. It depends on the product so isn't something which can be easily regulated.
https://www.letsrecycle.com/news/latest-news/plastic-reduction-wrap-food/
bd139:
Have you seen the state of children's toys these days?

Look at hatchimals. 20% of the packaging is plastic waste. Then once the toy has hatched, the shell goes in the bin (another 20% mass), then the damn thing fucks up after a month and goes in the bin. £40 down the shitter. I'm glad mine all like tech now which is mostly recyclable thanks to WEEE regulations. Oh and then there's shit like aquabeads which is basically a whole plastic wrapped in non recyclable films in a box made of plastic which goes in the fucking bin. And I haven't started on high value lines of collectable crap figures. Go watch a TV advert break on CITV or something to get an idea of the crap.

I got lego when I was a kid. That was durable, reusable, creative and educational and in fact 30 years after the fact I sold most of it to people who wanted to reuse it.
donotdespisethesnake:
I can't really see how to legislate for "repairable". Who is to judge that? And even if products are theoretical repairable, who is going to check that the spare parts actually are available and at reasonable cost from the manufacturers? Will companies have to commit to supporting all products made for X years, including those of businesses they acquire?

I guess that it happen like WEEE. Some fine words are printed, the net effect is to add a cost/red tape burden to manufacturers, a pain for the smaller ones and the larger ones will just absorb the cost by paying money to some third party. Consumers will then be told actually neither the shops nor manufacturers accept e-waster, you are supposed to take it the council site, promised kerbside collections never actually get done.

The council transfer to the waste to private companies who just ship it to the third world and dump it in a field, then just set fire to it.

The reason products became non-repairable, is because modern mass production techniques have heavily optimised for material cost and assembly time. Disassembly is no longer the reverse of assembly. Reversing that trend would make products more expensive, and reduce sales. Manufacturers will make the calculation that profits will be better if they continue selling cheap non-repairable stuff, and paying some sort of "repair tax".
Zero999:

--- Quote from: donotdespisethesnake on March 12, 2020, 02:40:08 pm ---Reversing that trend would make products more expensive, and reduce sales.
--- End quote ---
Perhaps that's what's required to protect the environment? More expensive products, less stuff being made and less waste.
bd139:
That's inevitable anyway with a growing population and a fixed quantity of resources which will increase in scarcity at some point. As a species we like to stick our fingers in our ears or point at the sky when that is mentioned but really it's just going to get pretty ugly pretty quickly one day. Recycling is really just a parachute fall instead of a free fall because it's not 100% efficient.

This is all propelled by the attitude of "who gives a fuck I'll be dead then" while filling their cars up with dead dinosaurs, driving home and switching on the air con powered by more dead dinosaurs :)
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