Comment by danShumway
6 years ago
> But because you don't send the speakers directly to Sonos (instead to a local recycler), they have to trust you're actually recycling it instead of keeping it or selling it.
And to be clear, either keeping it or reselling it would be better for the environment than recycling the device. It's completely backwards to design an environmental program around making sure that people don't secretly do the right thing behind your back.
The fact that there are multiple highly-rated comments on HN looking at resellers and saying, "well, obviously they shouldn't get Sonos credits" shows how poor of a job our society is doing educating people about how reduce-reuse-recycle actually works. You don't have to check for people abusing the system. The people abusing the system are the environmental success stories. If a bunch of people participate in the trade-up program and then secretly resell their devices, that is a good thing that should be celebrated.
If anything, Sonos should be offering more credit to those people, not less.
Please stop using word "recycling" in the wrong way. Sonos used this word purposefully to promote the deactivation of their devices, which has nothing to do with real recycling: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recycle
It's not clear to me from that link what my error is. Would you be willing to expand?
The commonly used definition of recycling I've heard is the first one listed on the linked page: "to process (something, such as liquid body waste, glass, or cans) in order to regain material for human use."
That's why the phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle", right? Yes, technically you could say reuse is a form of recycling, but we distinguish between reusing something outright, and breaking it down into component parts that can be partially recovered -- because we want to point out that the first option is better than the second.
Indeed. Note that you wrote "either keeping it or reselling it would be better for the environment than recycling the device". My point is that recycling means exactly "keeping it or reselling it", while you keep on using this word the way Sonos started to use it. Sonos misused this word on purpose to make it sound as if its policy of giving discounts for deactivating its devices was a good thing for the environment, when in reality it isn't. At its core, this is a marketing lie (stunt), aka greenwashing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing