I still can't get over this one. I printed it and taped to the wall in my office. I'll ask folks to guess what it is. First guess is almost always some type of plant:
What will it take to help these people see how incredibly irresponsible, undefendably wasteful and doomed this approach to product-making is? 'If it doesn't work for us we don't care about that'?
Its akin to removing repairability from products designed to be inseparable from eternal profit-taking. What the much-touted 'free market' they talk up really wants is product that lasts and/or can be fixed or repurposed. I've never heard anyone say 'I love to buy crap' or 'I'm okay with buying a new one frequently'. What they mean by 'free' - of regulation - is unsustainable.
Some people are materialistic - that is they place a high value on material things. It's often older people who grew up when manufactured goods were valuable. I'm like this myself.
Other people aren't - they don't form an emotional bond with a used electric motor or an empty drink bottle. They just use whatever's available and focus on other aspects of their life besides material objects. I think this is more normal for young people who grew up with plentiful cheap products and all these renting and sharing services. For them, the value is in the use, not the possession.
Half of the US and almost all of the world can't afford to be wasteful for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with emotional attachments.
People react emotionally to waste not because of emotional attachments to things but because wasting feels shameful to people who worry about having enough. I wonder how many poor people could have been helped by a free electric bike. Unfortunately this would potentially compete with ubers services.
Even if they're sold, they're not going to go to poor people. If poor people could improve their lives with a scooter that requires money, skills and effort to charge and maintain it, they wouldn't be poor. The whole reason they're poor is they don't do useful things, not because they can't afford useful stuff. This is developed country poor people I'm talking about. If they were concerned about waste, they wouldn't spend so much of their little money on drugs, alcohol, and McDonalds.
I agree with the shameful thing. But a lot of older people do have enough yet they carry the emotional baggage of their poor younger selves. I know people who save old broken appliances with the aim of repairing or selling them oneday but eventually realized nobody wants a box of old electrical plugs or a broken washing machine from the 1970's when even the poorest people are given free money to buy a washing machine by social welfare and used electrical cables are practically free.
Your perspective is positively dystopian. You literally have no understanding of the issues that others face that are materially different than your own. The majority of the poor are all around you doing useful work not drinking and drugging their imaginary free money you think welfare gives them to buy washing machines away. The rich and the poor often face the same challenges. For example they do stupid things. They lose a job. They develop a medical condition. They fail some classes. Someone around them dies. The get divorced. Money means you have tools to get past roadblocks knowing that in the meanwhile your entire life wont disintegrate beneath you if you stall out for a short period of time. The poor instead watch their life fall apart trivially easily and fall between the cracks or more often soldier on leading lessor but still productive lives.
They are often poor because although they do a substantial degree of useful work society doesn't value the work they do very much because there is more than enough people available to do it instead of starving. This is how economics works. Let me reiterate, most poor people in America work! Your particular myopic world view is common enough it has a name. The just world hypothesis. I'm sorry you can't see the people around you very clearly. I'm poor. Nobody has ever offered me money to buy a washing machine. I don't do drugs. I don't like McDonald's. I don't get drunk. I have a job but my wife cant due to medical issues and receives no help of any kind because of it. Most of my money goes to buy food, shelter and medical care. If you walked by me you wouldn't notice that I looked especially poor. I dress decently but virtually my entire wardrobe is courtesy of better class thrift stores where I paid aprox $2 per item. Last year I probably spent about 30% of my earnings on medical insurance + care alone.
Exactly this. Sometimes when I recycle something like a glass jar, I have this vision of a parent 1000 years from now in a post-apocalypse society, trying to bring a little clean water to their village, and how much they might appreciate that clean glass jar.
Scrappers will get as much value as they can out of the things they take, whether that's selling something that works, breaking it down into parts that can be reused, or going all the way to raw materials.
VCs are willing to take risks, with some justification: people can only innovate if they're given permission to fail.
Nothing less innovative than yet another bike sharing app. I see so few people using these bikes. I can't understand the value proposition for VCs to invest in them.
As for the energy requirements and the associated CO2 output with all that production and recycling... burn baby burn. Or should that be "burn mother Earth burn"?
Covid-19 has made me forget that IMO we have about 20 years of comfortable life on this planet. Yeah yeah the human race will go on, but you and I will probably die of heat exhaustion some time in 204x...
Recycling aluminum is more energy efficient than making new aluminum. At this scale, I can imagine recycling this metal into new bicycles could be more efficient than fixing and distributing old bicycles.
Honestly I wish they had done proper market research before ordering bikes (that cost CO2 to make and distribute). Does any SV company do that any more? I'm guessing not; they see someone offering scooter rentals, they order a few thousand from China, they flood the market. Will it be profitable trying to compete with the others? "Who knows, but hey, we got VC money to burn!".
I think we will find someway to commit suicide as a species in the next century but I don't think any projection has many people dying of heat exhaustion anywhere rich enough to have AC.
That's a not a big problem for the farming mega corps. Some of their land will be fine, some of it will get worse and maybe with luck some of it will get better as you go further toward the north. It's a big deal for small farmers in developing countries where all of the land suddenly becomes unusable.
The word "liability" is something they don't want to risk.
Donating 150 bicycles to a school, and due to bad maintenance 10 children have an accident. The bad publicity would be huge. "You donated killer bicycles to our children". Not an easy front page to recover from. Plus the lawsuits etc. The cost of scrapping is worth absorbing much more than risking the above scenario.
Selling: they don't want people to ride their own electric bicycles, they want people to rent for their rides. Selling e.g. 10k bicycles to 10k people, converts potential renters to no-renting-anymore-coz-I-got-my-sweet-ride, whoever bought the business will definitely have 10k less potential customers.
Selling them will also mean that they need to give "some" guarantees about spare parts, maintenance shops, etc.. In Europe when you buy something you automatically have (per EU law) 2 years guarantee. They want to drop that business, not be prisoners of such a deal for the next 2 years. When they sell to a business, the new owner takes up these responsibilities.
Edit: I understand in the USA the guarantee period is 1y. Still a long time, when you want to get rid of something "now" to have to stick with it for one more year. It makes for a bad breakup.
Why selling these is so hard? There is a huge market for second hand bikes. I would think you can always get a better price than scrap metal for a functional bike. Any non zero profit is better than zero.
I tried using one of the schemes in London (ofo I think). After 5mins I got off and walked because they somehow designed a bicycle less efficient than walking
In US liability is everywhere and in everything. With that logic it would be impossible to sell anything (imagine liability associated with a copy of Windows!). I'm not lawyer but I can imagine donating these bikes with clear legal contract with receiver in a state where this won't be issue.
> "Why not at least peel the decals [branding] off and sell the bikes to individuals?" Jon Orcutt of Bike New York, a non-profit group, told news site Motherboard.
> "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes," Uber said in a statement.
> "But given many significant issues - including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment - we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."
Translation: selling the bikes would remove those buyers from our pool of potential renters.
Not really, it'd remove them from the company that bought the newer ones. I suspect liability really is a concern, particularly for scooters full of lithium ion batteries and being charged by Joe Experimenter at home.
All it takes is one person who does something stupid and burns down their house with a used scooter to negate any benefit from selling them. Not because that person would automatically win, but because Uber would have to defend.
Weren't the scooter companies paying random people who signed up to go charge the scooters themselves at their homes? Surely that's far higher liability.
Plus, if this was a concern how on earth is the used car market able to survive? I just don't think liability factors in here at all. My guess is that scrapping them is easier and nets about the same amount of money as selling them. Selling that many scooters off piecemeal would take quite a bit of time & effort, plus costs to store them in the meanwhile.
Scooters yes, e-bikes no. The e-bikes have much bigger batteries. More energy = bigger boom. They also probably only had a fraction of chargers compared to the number of bikes, and sourcing more would probably take a lot of extra time and expense. It would have been better if they could find another bikeshare operator to sell to, but I can understand why they didn't sell to consumers.
As much as I would love a cheap e-bike to tinker with and restore (even if it's old), I can't say I'm surprised these are being recycled.
On one hand, how would it benefit their/Lime's business to have loads of people owning electric scooters and bikes? On the other hand, there really are logistical and liability issues involved with distributing old gear in varying states of repair.
It's a shame they don't do something like gov/edu institutions and auction off the stuff as-is. At least then someone could theoretically buy it up to do something with it.
Remember the old mantra of reduce > reuse > recycle? Environmental consumerism is supposed to be primarily focused on reducing when you can. If you cannot reduce consumption, then try to reuse as much as possible. And if you've exhausted reduce or reuse, then you try to recycle.
Everything can be reduced and reused if you're willing to spend enough money. But obviously you have to recycle if the other options are too expensive. Environmentalists seem to forget that spending money is itself a waste - a waste of human effort and natural resources even if it saves something tangible like a wheel or an electric motor.
I was walking in our electronics department's hallway when I stopped and walked a few steps back. My peripheral vision picked up a pile of yummy: a load of lab gear in an office. I went in and asked about it. The person said they were to be discarded. I asked if I could take some. They said they were to be sold by the kilogram to a company. I asked if I could buy a few kilograms of oscilloscopes, multimetres, stabilized power sources, etc. They said no. Regulations, auctions, etc.
Here I was, a broke electronics student, trying to procure electronics equipment, in an electronics department, with lunch money I was willing to part with, but unable to do so because someone needed to melt that thing down and make a horse shoe or some fork.
Somebody already bought the picking rights. I would have gone over the head of the person you asked, or call in a favor with someone at the same level of hierarchy. Ask them if you can have some of the stuff. If they say yes, tell the first person x said it's fine, and just take what you are allowed to take.
Their red tape is only your problem if you can't self-help. It's not your job to enforce their agreements with third parties who aren't you. It's also not your job to inform them of existing agreements with third parties which you are privy to.
Oh, the things I would have done in that situation if it took place somewhere where you don't get disappeared for a Facebook post, friend. I'll leave it at that.
The underlying context is that I was practically a persona non grata. Teachers would happily leave the class to me during labs but hated the fact I barely attended. I'm talking not even grading your exam sheet, or putting an arbitrary grade, and not displaying it until the recourse deadline has passed because "screw you" and I'm talking putting "0" on all your grades because you missed one exam. Nobody will take the side of a student who'll be there for a limited time against a colleague they've worked with for 20+ years. Even if the behavior is unjust, the rationale for them is that you'll live and learn and forget about it and leave, but they're staying and have to work with the other person.
Sure, the obvious step is to go manoeuver or call out these practices, invovle lawyers, and the media, and what not. Which brings me to my first paragraph. What is obvious and possible somewhere isn't somewhere else, or is but the stakes are too high. If I wanted to manoeuver in a cesspool, I would have become a politician. If I wanted to go to war, I would have become a martyr. The former is frowned upon, the latter is admired in other people from a distance.
I had the opposite experience with one of my old electronics teachers. The place was was replacing a bunch (40-50 or so) of 100Mbps rackmount switches with gigabit versions (this was mid-2000s, so 100Mbps was still more than adequate for home use). I can't remember the exact scenario, but they were either selling the old ones as scrap or had to pay for them to be recycled. My teacher said I could skim whatever I wanted off the top, providing I didn't make it too public (I don't think he asked permission, just knew they wouldn't be missed).
A 48-port switch (Netgear FS750T or something very similar), as well as a couple of 16-port versions and a hub that had somehow still been in use, was probably overkill for home use, but I wasn't complaining.
I was luckier one time: I remember buying an oscilloscope for around 400NOK (about $40) back somewhere in 2002-2003.
Other times I was more persistent. Once I tried to get some PC parts so I said I could disassemble it and only take the exact parts at which point the bloke told me he'd rather want me to take the whole thing as lo g as I was quick so nobody saw it :-)
>I don't think most of their clientele (or the staff) even knew what it was.
I bought a pair of nice Roland studio-level reference monitor speakers from a pawn shop like that once. They cost me 90 dollars, they retailed for something like 1750.
When I paid the person behind the counter told me that many people had tried to get these to work and brought them back because they couldn't figure out the cable to use -- and due to that difficulty they had marked them down from 200 to 90.
Pawn shops are filled with audio gear from desperate, broke artists. XLR is a pretty standard in the audio community. I even have a 2.5mm-to-XLR adapter on my desk. This pawn shop must be really far from any place with performance venues.
Now on the other hand I had some old Bang and Olufsen speakers that used proprietary everything. Even the audio input was some kind of balanced 24V signaling 5-pin DIN connectors. Basically you could not plug into anything except another B&O.
I was in the same predicament when a student. They said they’d give me my pick of scope if I went through a checked out the other 20 that were to be sold. 30 years later I still have that 20 MHz Tek scope.
And with proper care and feeding, that Tek 20 MHz scope will be working in another 30 years. They were well built to put it mildly. I have a friend who's scope is a Tek 500 series, I think 30MHz, built around 50 years ago. Works fine once it warms up. He uses it for audio work, so 30Mhz is mostly overkill.
When a uni department replaced all their Macs, I got my hands on a power Mac G4 Cube (yes, one of those that sits in the MoMA). I haven't been able to fix it (something's fried) but I plan to keep the shell and most of the innards as well as the awesome take-out mechanism and add an RPi or something else inside. Passively cooled and beautiful enough to display in the living room...
>On one hand, how would it benefit their/Lime's business to have loads of people owning electric scooters and bikes
I see these as different use cases. I own an eBike which I use for commuting. I also use Lime bikes (before they shut down) to get around the city. The key difference is storage. If I take MY bike, I have to very securely lock it up, carry a heavy lock and chain around, and worry about whether my destination has storage. As such, it only gets me between work, home, and occasionally the store.
On the other hand, I use Lime bikes to get across the city anywhere. If I'm going to a brewery or a concert or whatever, I just get close to my destination, find an out of the way, and get off the bike. It's significantly easier.
Agreed, but unfortunately legal liabilities create huge wastes like this. It's why grocery stores go through extensive efforts to ensure you can't recover their thrown out good that has reached it's sell by date but is still good.
In the US, the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996 eliminates the liability of grocery stores from donating or allowing people to "glean" food that it no longer can sell. If you know of a store that is destroying this type of food, please let them know that they can donate it without worrying about getting sued.
It does underline the point though. A law had to be made almost 25 years ago to prevent this with food and people are still worried. Doesn't paint a rosy picture for everything else.
It depends on how things got there. If the law was made because of unjustified paranoia, to settle it, then you can't use the existence of that law as justification for the paranoia.
I don't believe that's the case for one second. People sell second hand cars/motorcycles/bicycles/rollerblades all the time without worrying about liability afterwards, otherwise you'd be saying that US has no market for second hand equipment.
If you own an e-bike you can reason that you don't need a car. You still need a car once in a while. That's the time to call an Uber. You may even ride an Uber every day, but you don't buy a car because you want to start riding your bike tomorrow because it is good for your health.
It appears these bikes were designed to not be user serviceable. Bespoke tools are needed to do any maintenance and there aren't off the shelf parts for anyone who would need anything replaced. This seems very different than selling a used car where the new owner would still have some expectation of being able to service and repair it. Presumably they also have bespoke chargers and not enough to sell with every bike so some people would be buying e-bikes that can't ever be charged.
That's not an argument for not making them available. But it does substantially decrease the value. It's possible it pushes the value below what they'd get from recycling. If that's the case, it's easy to see why they'd recycle them instead of spending more time/money to try to sell a non-servicable and non-chargeable used bike.
That's the thing: it should matter, by law.
The big problem with the actual model, is that it doesn't take into account externalities (pollution, rarefaction of ressources, ...).
> On one hand, how would it benefit their/Lime's business to have loads of people owning electric scooters and bikes?
It stimulates demand for cycling/scooting infrastructure. A few owners of scooters aren't competing with renters.
> auction off the stuff as-is
That's pretty close to what recycling does, for items that can't be practically used due to design issues. The metals and batteries are resold as scrap.
I've been sad about this sale for a few weeks -- was a pretty heavy Jump bike user in DC and they've just been sitting on the streets disabled -- vanished from the apps overnight. They were/are well built machines and I hope Lime or someone reactivates them. They also feel much more practical and safe than the cheap bird/etc scooters(having eaten shit on a bird before going over a curb) -- bigger tires for bump tolerance, more stable position, etc.
We have another dockless ebike entrant in town called Helbiz and they're pretty nice, plus have an unlimited subscription option -- hoping they get traction and stick around - I have already noticed some of the bikes being seemingly vandalized on purpose(pedals ripped off and strapped in the basket) which is sad.
It feels that the timing could be right with very limited Metro and Bus service(and widespread virus related public transit anxiety).
edit: I could also see this business model as being self cannibalizing -- I'd never ridden an ebike pre JUMP and now would consider buying one myself for 1-2k. How many people who really enjoy the JUMP experience would similarly leave the platform for a nicer model, long run cheaper experience. Introduces other tradeoffs like security, having to take the bike home(so you can't really ride it out if you're going to be drinking), etc.
The JUMP bikes were the best ride for sure. Much smoother than Lime. If Lime downgrade the bikes then I'm getting my own electric bike. Just sucks I have to think about locking it up, riding it home etc.
For me, the biggest value prop was that I could leave them anywhere and didn't have to maintain them. I could buy myself one, but then I'd need to take care of it and make sure it doesn't get stolen. I'm not sure I'm interested in that.
Yeah...that's kinda the problem. People who leave them anywhere. The scooter thing is a great example of how thoughtless people can be when offered convenience.
A few bucks a month is a lot of money. Try buying an annuity for a few bucks a month over the lifetime of the average bicycle and you're probably doubling the cost of the bike.
Same here! There was a brief golden time in Mt. Pleasant when it was starting to get nice out and there were Jump bikes everywhere. So convenient, so nice for doing socially-distanced wanderings of neighborhoods. What a waste! I hope something like them returns.
The biggest loss here for me personally is that Uber allowed you to pair AmEx Uber credits to scooters, which meant I could often do 5-10 free rides a month.
I will say - I was a very frequent Jump user in SF, and before you shout "waste!", if you haven't had the experience of riding on one of the older bikes past it's useful life, you should consider this:
Jump switched over to a new model within the last year or two. Their older bikes - while yes, built like tanks - also aged like tanks (after battle). They were BEAT UP. The frames were mangled & scratched, the drivetrains were barely functional, and the brakes barely worked.
My general strategy for riding a Jump was to find the closest bike with the highest serial # (assuming it would be a newer one), because getting an old one was just not fun.
Anyway, this is all to say: While yes, almost everything can technically be repurposed, I wouldn't want to spend much time on an older Jump bike either first or second hand.
For others, they may think it is fun to take three beat-up old bikes and turn them into one good one and a pile of recyclable parts.
One man's trash is another's treasure...
(& Yes, Uber has no excuse for this kind of nonsense. That is exactly what As-Is-Where-Is-Not-Fit-For-Any-Specific-Purpose warranty & law is all about. Repurpose before recycle...)
From the end of the article, Uber explains why they recycled the old bikes not transferred to Jump in the sale,
> But given many significant issues - including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment - we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them.
Unfortunately seems to most responsible way to handle these bikes. I see the charging issue being a major problem. Trek just switched their rentable bikes to electric in my city, I wonder if they face the same fate.
And settle down everyone, they are being recycled, not dumped in a hole.
Correct, and furthermore the environmental gap keeps decreasing with each step to the right: in terms of impact, recycling is much closer to landfilling than it is to reusing.
Why sell people a product when you can offer them a service and make even more money? Reduce and Reuse are bad for business, making Recycle the only economically viable option.
EDIT: @downvoter, can you tell me how our business climate doesn't suck this way?
Because they are a series connection of LiPol cells.
Fast LiPol chargers for series cells are not simple.
The best (read fastest) ones monitor the state of the individual cells in the stack and will shut down the primary charge and charge an individual cell if it gets imbalanced.
You need actual charge control logic for a modern rechargeable battery so that it doesn't overheat or malfunction, but you can get multi-amp Li-ion/LiPo chargers online for ~$25 if you're able to find and attach the right connectors.
This also seems like a situation where the maker community could easily open source replicate whatever the custom connector to the bike requires.
You can't just hook up any lipo charger. They need to be able to charge and balance the cells individually, which could be simple or extremely difficult depending on the arrangement and connector.
Charging batteries is usually a bit more complicated than pumping DC into them.
In this case one assumes the battery itself isn't odd, but it uses a different type of cable or similar (Don't know what the capacity is but I assume it would be high enough to need serial and sense lines on the charging cable)
LIPO chargers require logic because they have to switch from constant voltage to constant current. Also, while required, you probably want to monitor temperature as well both because charging when it's too cold will damage the battery and LIPOs have a tendency to thermally runaway when they start to fail.
Read: catch on fire, sometimes leading to a pretty violent explosion if they are packed tightly into something like a bike frame.
Having worked with high amp LiPo cells I have developed a unique appreciation of both their peak current output and their ability to strike fear into the everyone around them if you accidentally short them or start to see them ballooning/bulging.
My only run in with said fire was thankfully fairly minor, I spotted the pack looking a little buldged and summarily ripped it off the charger and dipped it into a 44 gallon drum. After about 60-90s it started smoking and caught on fire.
Unclear if they are charged by battery swapping or being taken to a third location -- but either way in a world where they'd sell them would they not include a charger?
The motors likely use a relatively standard voltage/current & would very likely be amenable to a consumer e-bike battery— an expensive component, for sure, but much cheaper than a whole bike.
But it may be very expensive to design and manufacture a new charger, and they certainly don't want to sell the bikes to a bunch of techies who will stick random wires on them until 990 of them are happy and 10 generate news articles because they set their houses on fire with their hack.
I would suggest this forum is also supposed to be cordial and welcoming. I appreciate your "can-do" spirit, and would suggest a different way of portraying the sentiment --
"Wrenching on bikes is super fun and accessible to anyone with the systems inclination that would bring them to HN. Way easier to understand and fix bikes than, say, cars, and it is fun to have mastery of the machine -- or you can take it to your LBS for a fixup and support your local biking community in the process."
Jesus Christ that is madness. What kind of a world is it when an individual can try and sell some old stuff for cheap and end up in a law suit for 30K.
Yes, lawsuits can easily be abused as a form of asymmetric warfare, where they cost exceptionally little to initiate and exceptionally more to defend against even the most baseless and outrageous claim.
>Uber said it had decided to destroy thousands of its older-model vehicles due to maintenance, liability and safety concerns.
(At risk of sounding mean or bitter, I was originally planning to post that quote as a top-level comment, but I was like, "come on, that's so short and unhelpful and high in the article, that anyone wondering it would just click the link, right?")
Right, because all the people wanting this would do more than just go silent when the first bike explodes on someone it was donated to.
The reality is that it's a PR nightmare. One of them fails and all those advocating donations just instantly fall silent. It's like they were never there. And there'll be a massive furore over how these are being dumped on innocent people who were not properly informed, etc. etc.
Oh, I'm not saying you'll be part of the mob. Just that you'll walk away. That's why no one listens to the advocates who have no skin in the game. They are fair weather friends.
And then there'll be the lawsuits. And you either win those painfully or you settle (and everyone assumes you did because you're guilty).
over 1 million cars, in every condition including unsafe to drive and about to explode, get donated every year. 0 lawsuits. zero.
These stories of overly litigious malcontents ruining the do-gooders of the world, it's just that, a story.
Donating these electric bikes would have be fine. Uber destroyed them for the same reason that textbook manufacturers and high end fashion destroys their product instead of donating them, because the slightest imagined possibility of a risk to their ego, brand, or margins are more important than a clear and tangible benefit to society. Everything we've heard about uber tells us this is exactly what they'd do, they're assholes.
Look at the companies ex-uber people did, they're all asshole companies like Bird or that ex-uber guy that google successfully sued for $179 million for stealing their ip. I've met with uber at work, they strung us along, telling us literally anything, trying to get all the intel they can, but then got pissed off and start yelling at us when we asked for legal paperwork prior to disclosure of business IP. I've seen people played that way before and I always look out for these kind of spy ruses -- last company that I saw do it was GoDaddy.
Of course they'll crush the bikes and no, it has nothing to do with fear of lawsuits, they're just jerks like that.
For the record, absent some kind of serious negligence, there is no risk of any restaurant or grocer being sued for donating food. The US (and elsewhere I'm sure) has Good Samaritan laws to protect the donors.
It amazes me how prevalent this myth is.
(See my comment elsewhere in this thread for citations)
Exactly like when restaurants would rather throw away food instead of donating it. If they sell bikes to people that would otherwise use their service, they wouldn't have any customers.
But they're wrong, people that own bikes aren't the same people that want to use a bike ad-hoc.
That's not why restaurants throw away food. They do it because of liability laws. There is a super high risk of getting sued if you give away food and someone gets sick.
The article I cited says one organization alone "has 650 cafes nationwide and donated more than 286,000 pounds of food last year." It also mentions several other organizations who do similar work.
The root problem is people spreading this misinformation. Please don't.
> That's not why restaurants throw away food. They do it because of liability laws.
Here is an organization that collects excess food from restaurants, etc, and uses it to provide 20K meals a week to hungry people (in supposedly over-regulated San Francisco no less):
If restaurants are throwing away food, it's because they don't care about the waste because there is no financial loss to them - and there are no local organizations like Food Runners to facilitate the donation.
No they do not assume liability. From Public Law 104-210 - OCT. 1, 1996 (linked from that page):
"(2) LIABILITY OF NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION.—A nonprofit
organization shall not be subject to civil or criminal liability
arising from the nature, age, packaging, or condition of apparently wholesome food or an apparently fit grocery product that
the nonprofit organization received as a donation in good faith
from a person or gleaner for ultimate distribution to needy
individuals."
The protections for nonprofits doing this sort of work are pretty extensive, in part because many such organizations in the US are religiously affiliated nonprofits.
> That's not why restaurants throw away food. They do it because of liability laws.
Regarding the food distribution nonprofits:
> They assume the liability
> Right exactly. They are not liable
I'm not sure how to reconcile those comments of yours, but regardless, I think we agree that donations of food to non-profits for distribution to the needy incurs no liability for any of the parties involved, and haven't since 1996. It is a persistent myth that liability is a major disincentive to food donation, motivated by who-knows-what.
The USDA has even clearer guidance on this subject here:
That's not true, and it is frustrating to read such a pointless falsehood. I worked in a soup kitchen for years. The Bill Emerson's Good Samaritan Act of 1996 codified in federal law what states had started implementing in the 70s, that good faith donations won't hold people/corporations liable to food injury.
That doesn't stop you from getting sued. That law still says you can sue for "gross negligence". You still have to go to court to prove you weren't grossly negligent.
General liability. There are some laws that specifically exempt food donations, but they still have "gross negligence" clauses, and it's easier to just not donate than worry about getting sued for gross negligence.
Why are you all over this topic trying to support this misinformation? You've already been corrected (with citations) and yet you continue. Is it just a matter of being seen as "wrong", because it's okay. Really, it is. It's a very common myth.
You claimed "There is a super high risk of getting sued if you give away food and someone gets sick". Now if you want to continue this claim, you need to provide citations. Who, exactly says that such "high risk" exists?
I worked with restaurants in a previous business. We tried to get them to donate food. Not a single one would because they were afraid of even the chance of being sued, because their liability insurance would not cover donations.
Their insurers and lawyers all advised against donating unused food because of the risk of a lawsuit that wasn't covered by insurance.
So people can post all the "facts" they want to but the crux of the matter is that most restaurants are very risk averse and donating food is a risk.
I referenced a legal organization which specializes in the area. The other citation quoted two additional lawyers plus organizations which do this regularly. If you want to dispute what they said, provide your own rebuttal with citations. Don't be childish by suggesting I've made misrepresentations.
> the crux of the matter is that most restaurants are very risk averse and donating food is a risk.
The risk is so infinitesimally small that's it has never happened in the 25 or so years since the relevant legislation was introduced! I mean, if you want to describe that as "super high risk" like you did, I don't know what to tell you. I really don't.
> I worked with restaurants in a previous business. We tried to get them to donate food. Not a single one would because they were afraid of even the chance of being sued, because their liability insurance would not cover donations. Their insurers and lawyers all advised against donating unused food because of the risk of a lawsuit that wasn't covered by insurance.
Based on your cavalier attitude in spreading false information around the topic (while millions of Americans starve) I find it really, really hard to believe that this is something you would champion. Like, impossibly hard. Never mind that I'd expect someone intelligent like yourself to know what the law actually says if you were lobbying donations.
I'm frankly, very surprised you're so cavalier in spreading this misinformation. Stop spreading this lie and maybe less people will go hungry.
Frankly, I expected better from such a prominent HN'er.
Food waste is a terrible problem in this country. It is driven by a poor regulatory and legal environment that introduces unnecessary risk for restaurant owners to donate their food.
With the way things are now, it is too risky for a restaurant to donate. They haven’t been sued because they don’t typically do it.
I think major changes need to be made.
I think restaurants should be required to donate all extra viable food.
I think insurance should be required to cover those donations so they absorb the liability and therefore enforce safety.
But the way things stand now, you can’t in good conscience tell a restaurant to donate food without an intermediary organization in the area, and even then it’s risky.
No it isn't. It's perceived as too risky but that perception is demonstrably false. I've provided solid proof of this and you've provided nothing.
>They haven’t been sued because they don’t typically do it.
You can keep repeating the same things over and over all you want. But until you back it up with supporting citations it appears you're just making things up. Statistically speaking, if X00,000 restaurants and stores are doing it today without being sued, it's pretty safe to say it will be similar for X,000,000.
>But the way things stand now, you can’t in good conscience tell a restaurant to donate food without an intermediary organization in the area, and even then it’s risky.
Show me anything (tweet, blog post, whatever) from an actual lawyer or legal organization supporting this opinion and I'll donate $25 to the Food Bank of your choice (I'm serious).
I've provided legal support for my side of the argument already. It's your turn.
The thing that's so infuriating here is that that you're exasperating the problem you claim to want to solve. People scan threads and see this myth repeated so it reinforces their misconception about the matter.
Not only are you not helping, you're actively making it worse. Shame on you.
> So people can post all the "facts" they want to but the crux of the matter is that most restaurants are very risk averse and donating food is a risk.
Very. I resorted to creating a cycle count in the walk in after every shift (off the clock) and giving it away pre-packaged 'meal prep' to employees, as most were just college kids, as so much high quality Salmon, chicken breast and other proteins that otherwise just ended up wasted.
Its ironic because this restaurant got a James Beard Award for sustainability and low waste practices.
In other places I just made family meal with the 'scraps' leftover for BOH/FOH family meals as we normally got off at ~2am and choices for food sucked. Its just something I had adapted to after my apprenticeship in Biodynamic Ag, and wished I saw more of it in the Industry.
I'm not sure what to make of the bike thing, as the Lime scooters I rode were already pretty beat up and I used them not long after the deployed. I can't imagine what it must of have been for these bikes, the Google bikes around the Boulder campus look decent from afar (they're non EV, I think), but I never rode one so can't speak to its life-time.
Waste in all transportation looks like this, I wish I could show the amount of recall parts I threw out on a daily basis at BMW but I signed an NDA. Its often cheaper to just discard the parts as-is at a minor loss than it is to pay for a much bigger loss for shipping back to a factory and then pay staff to sort through it and only to do the same at their local facility.
I'm talking about pallet loads of differentials, driveshafts, and engine blocks as well as crate loads of ECUs etc... Although to be fair we did sell those for metal for their junk PM prices if/when I had down time.
I actually re-learned how to solder, barely only ok at it now, because I was taking wiring harnesses and LED taillights home and tearing them apart and putting them back together.
This is how a lot of VWs sat for a little over 2 years after the buyback [1]. Some made it back into the market, many didn't and I was just glad I wasn't in the Industry by then as it made me physically ill to see the waste a SOFTWARE issue ended up costing in an Environmental level.
In the US it's often tax-neutral for corporations, which is kind of unfortunate. If they donate it to a nonprofit the cost is deductible, but if they throw it away as spoiled food then it still is as a write off (cost of doing business). It basically means businesses can't get the deduction for donating their old stuff because they'd lose an equivalent deduction they were already getting.
What would fix it is to let them deduct the value of the donated food/whatever instead of its cost, because then the deduction would be bigger from donating something than throwing it away.
The result would be a huge reduction in taxes on businesses, because then everybody would do it and get a ton of tax deductions, but it could be well worth it for the enormous reduction in waste and increase in charitable donations.
And it might not even cost that much in tax revenue, because it would be an alternative to a lot of the shell games corporations already play to reduce their tax burden, but in this case it would actually be helping somebody.
> It basically means businesses can't get the deduction for donating their old stuff because they'd lose an equivalent deduction they were already getting.
That's because according to the tax code, businesses can claim depreciation of all capital property. They can't claim their cost of the donated property because they are already claiming the depreciation.
> What would fix it is to let them deduct the value of the donated food/whatever instead of its cost
The IRS already bases deductions for donations on Fair-market-value (FMV) of the donation. They have an entire guide for assessing FMV for the purposes of donation:
The guide explicitly addresses the question of cost vs value and how time between the initial purchase and sale might affect the value.
This is even easier for businesses, since for things like bikes that strictly decrease in value, the donation value is probably just the purchased price - accrued depreciation (which itself was modeled using methods similar to FMV).
> That's because according to the tax code, businesses can claim depreciation of all capital property.
Food isn't "capital property" in general, so it's a different deduction, but in the end it comes out much the same. Which is what I said. The price they paid for it is already a deduction, so there is generally no further deduction from donating it vs. throwing it away and writing it off.
> This is even easier for businesses, since for things like bikes that strictly decrease in value, the donation value is probably just the purchased price - accrued depreciation (which itself was modeled using methods similar to FMV).
But that's the problem. They buy something, use it (or intend to use it but don't), and then throw it away. One way or another that allows them to write off the entire cost.
Which means there isn't any additional deduction available for donating it to a charity instead of wasting it at the end, so there is nothing there to offset their cost/risk of making a donation instead of throwing it in a dumpster, and that causes tons more stuff to end up in the dumpster.
This is not at all like when restaurants throw away food. The key distinction here is is that the bikes are getting recycled. They will be broken down and sold as scrap materials.
In the UK, Jump bikes were a far superior option over Lime. My experience with both was that Lime bike maintenance was very poor; with two-thirds of all rides requiring a refund due to the bike not functioning or having physical damage.
Getting support and refunds from Lime was exceptionally painful. Uber also supported bike drop off in the East, where as Lime would silently fine you.
The Jump bikes were just a different league. Smooth ride. Lime bikes for me were a last resort when I was doing the bike share thing. Half of them were broken, more physical effort than riding a decent road bike and no refund when the bike is broken. I'd rather get a Boris bike than a Lime.
This whole thread is full of people expressing lament over the glaring waste, but I suggested a concrete cause to consider and it was met with silent downvotes. Individuals don't generally destroy perfectly good bikes. It's the economy, stupid. ZIRP pushes capital to make far-off bets, in hopes that some might turn into recurring income streams.
The e-rental industry is a glaring example of this in action, where "investors" are buying fleets of easily-affordable consumer goods, hoping to put enough on the sidewalk that people will trip over them and their credit cards will fall in. I know everyone in Silly Valley has been benefiting from this deluge of make-work, but eventually we're going to have to reconcile our goal of technology making us more productive with this regressive policy of "full employment". And sorry, I doubt the answer is obtuse "basic income".
Why isn't reuse mandated or incentivised in the same way that recycle is?
This is such a colossal waste of energy. I can't believe that offering these without warranty and a stipulation that they be debranded before use wouldn't have got Uber more cash, and the planet a better outcome.
If they're still running this business in the UK... why not ship them there? It's unbelievable that there isn't a better use of these than recycling them (but I do think that's mostly their mistake to make).
A lot of people are screaming about re-use... but man, these were never designed to be consumer bikes. You likely don't have a one-at-a-time charger, they probably have some sort of rack that charges 100 batteries at once. Similar issues around components... likely hard to get a replacement wheel, or what have you. And no way Americans wouldn't sue if they got a defective one. Totally understand, and impressed these didn't just go into a hole. Glad Uber is trying to recycle.
Multiple US municipalities have convened conferences and created sort of joint task forces to investigate the use of micromobility to supplement public transit.
The scooters and bikes could have been donated to local governments who could then figure out how to support them, and used them for programs to help disadvantaged citizens get around easier. But that wouldn't really help Uber's bottom line I guess, and might involve extra work.
I see a lot of people commenting on how good the Jump bike design is. I almost missed this excerpt, but it looks like that design might be here to stay:
> Lime's chief executive Wayne Ting has said he prefers the design of Uber's bikes and will deploy more of them in the future.
> However, there were also "tens of thousands" of older-model bikes that Lime did not inherit as part of the deal.
Typically it's liability. If they sold a defective scooter and someone got hurt, they could be in a world of trouble.
Reminds me of that article about the ship transporting new Toyotas that tipped over. Half of the cars didn't even get wet, but they pulled all the cars off the ship and destroyed them. It wasn't worth the hassle of inspecting and repairing and still being at risk for liability.
>Typically it's liability. If they sold a defective scooter and someone got hurt, they could be in a world of trouble.
This is/was something traditionally handled with a document signed by the buyer stating the sale is as-is. Tons of broken stuff gets sold all the time.
Waivers cannot always override laws that protect consumers, and these laws vary widely by locale.
For one example: Where I'm at, if you sell some things "as-is" and don't disclose all known defects, you can be held liable for those defects regardless of your "as-is" agreement.
Toyota has said "don't worry we've fixed the frames on the new ones" for ~40yr now and the Tacoma still sells. If anyone can get away with it they can. Still probably not smart to risk it though.
There'd be significant costs to make sure all the bikes are safe and in good working order, and it sounds like they decided those costs exceeded what they'd get from selling them.
Those bikes have been depreciated to a specific value and selling or giving them away might contradict that.
I'm sure Uber tried to sell the whole passle off to companies who do this kind of liquidation thing. The fact that Uber had to destroy them tells me that either A) Uber is making a lot more money by pulling the batteries and motors and selling those while cruching the rest or B) nobody wanted to touch them and Uber got stuck doing this themselves.
I suspect Uber got stuck. LiPol batteries are a liability and probably nobody wanted to deal with them.
Heavy Jump user here. They're perfect for commuting for me, dealing with hills and getting to and from the office, and then not having to worry about the bike once I got to the office. This news makes me sad.
Wow, what a waste. Here in the UK at the moment it's difficult to get hold of "cheap" bikes, and even worse for ebikes. They could be selling those on rather than destroying them
I take it that for security purposes to prevent theft, they probably used proprietary charging devices and some version of DRM to prevent opening the things up and self-servicing them if stolen.
Environmental costs should be included in everything, air pollution, water usage and clear lifecycle of the product including where and if it can be recycled. Mindless production is unsustainable.
Uber no longer owns the bikes. Lime does. The title should read "Lime is destroying thousands of electric Jump bikes and scooters after buying them from Uber"
Other important details:
- these bikes and scooters intentionally use custom parts to deter theft and make it so it isn't viable to strip them for parts. It will be impossible for the purchaser of a used bike to buy replacement parts or charging equipment.
- the software used on these bikes is now owned by Lime
- there is a liability and regulatory issues with selling devices with rechargable batteries. None of the battery parts involved in the bikes are certified for legal sale.
Yeah, someone would accidentally puncture a battery and it'll burn them and then the headlines will say "Uber is dumping exploding bikes on Third World people".
This should honestly be illegal, or at least there should be a massive financial penalty for destroying anything that can be useful to others instead of giving it away. There should be a legal framework for zero liability if the alternative is trashing.
Large quantities of used lithum-ion batteries that have been in heavy street use are not a great thing to acquire. There are recycling companies; if you have more than 500lbs you can get a free pickup. When the HAZMAT truck leaves, you can breathe a sigh of relief.
Given how bad their riders behave on the sidewalk, how they try to block the sidewalk, and how they ignore boundries. I love the fact that scooters are being destroyed.
With cars those problems are easier to fix. (You need a license to operate a vehicle, but not a scooter).
Scooters do produce pollution (someone has to dive more than the distance of the scooter traveled to recharge, plus the environmental cost of the batteries, and the shorter lifespan), traffic and accidents as well.
The lower energy due to lower speeds and vehicle masses make ebike crashes far less severe than motor vehicle crashes. We have 40,000 dead a year in the US in car crashes, plus three million nonfatal injuries. I'm sure someone among your friends & family has been killed by a car crash.
This can be improved with lighter cars, lower speeds, and pedestrian safety standards, but it can also be improved by fewer VMTs by getting more road users on intrinsically-safer vehicles.
Uber should not exist. If it's still alive after the pandemic, it will only be because of governments all around the world forcing the hand of people, with interest rates near zero or even negative, to pour money on unsustainable businesses like this. No company should exist that wastes as much money as Uber, with no path to profit shown till today. Americans 401ks are going to be devastated when this crazy easy money startup frenzy comes to an end on a (increasingly) near future.
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Vtmg6k-JNp0wpEtDo_RvOcoT...