If they really want to encourage reuse of their devices, why would they incentivize the users to turn their devices into unusable trash by giving them credits for doing that?

> but I also think that's where good recycling programs matter.

However good your recycling program is, it is still going to be _strictly more_ wasteful than simply reusing the device.

Recycling electronics is extremely difficult and non-trivial. See the Netflix series “broken” -> plastics for a deep-dive. If the company claims it’s super environmentally friendly, it should incentivize reuse of existing products. Instead it’s saying, “want a discount to spend more money with us? Great. Let’s get you a discount by creating an extremely difficult and mostly unrecyclable paperweight out of what you have, first.” They could have said “refer a friend and we’ll give you a discount” etc

There's a very nice graphic in the Twitter thread showing "reduce > re-use > recycle > trash". They are different things, so let's not make things extra confusing by saying "recycle by reusing".

Anyway, what Sonos is incentivizing through their credit is to make people choose the option "recycle or trash". They have no incentive to make people choose one over the other. And as already mentioned elsewhere in the thread, many recycling centres won't take a completely bricked device, so I think it's pretty fair to say that in practice what Sonos is incentivizing is for people to first brick, then TRASH the device in exchange for these credits.

Either way, Sonos is actively dis-incentivizing the "re-use" option, which is the most environmentally friendly one.

And the only reason they do this is their profit.

The end result of all this is to say Sonos doesn’t give a whit about the environment though. If that was the case they would allow someone at the recycle center to buy their old equipment, and the original owner to buy a new one with a discount (for being a loyal customer, and presumably still making a profit).