But of course, in the case of this article the OP is presenting just their side of the story. It doesn’t present the other side of the story where companies rushed dangerous products to market with no oversight which made the regulations necessary.
They find that $27 million in regulatory cost is a huge burden.
But I think if their product is successful it seems like it could be the kind of thing that a large percentage of semi trucks install.
If even 10% of semi trucks purchase the product, $27 million is a drop in the bucket.
Instead of bitching at the world over regulatory costs, OP should bitch as his investors for not being generous enough. Or maybe his investors should be firing him for failing to account for regulatory cost and time.
And all this bitching is happening despite the fact that he was successful in having the regulatory agent expedite the process. 14 months to get a brand new instrument of this sort approved doesn’t seem crazy to me. It seems quite in line with the estimated time needed for a company like Toyota to crash test and certify a new vehicle model with the various emissions and safety agencies.
If OP would like to move faster they need to get out of the sort of industry that makes products that can very easily kill people.
The parent comment is talking about outsourced lead battery recycling. What is the middle ground there? I think your very abstract argument about over regulation probably belongs in another thread.
The US can't do much about other countries. We can definitely control how and who we outsource to, but the past 30 years of US government doesn't make me confident that we'll do that anytime soon.
But that's a tiny bit tangential from regulations.
Is the suggestion here to remove environmental regulations that make outsourcing to countries without regulations appealing? I'm not sure what problem that solves. Of course without discussing specific regulations it is hard to argue about anything - maybe there are useless environmental regulations that make lead battery recycling impossible in first world countries? Or maybe your line of reasoning just doesn't make sense, at least in this case. I don't think I'd want to live near a polluting lead battery recycling operation.
A lead battery plant that we can oversee and regulate is better than a polluting one in another country, where we basically export the suffering and damage to them. So policy goals should try to keep it possible and economically viable (with subsidies, bureaucrats who are responsive to community needs, whatever you like) to do recycling in the first world in some way.
Whether any particular regulation is necessary or onerous needs more detailed examinations, and it's easy to say "just have the regulations be as simple as necessary to protect us", but I'm arguing we've gone a little far with zoning regs and studies so that we can't build things as well as we used to. You could also argue that bodies are using these environmental regulations for their own purposes, like keeping property values high or protecting their other investments instead of actual environmental impacts?
(We can also try and spread regulations down the outsourcing chain, but I think that's difficult for other reasons.)
“All outsourced, vendor, and subcontractor companies down the entire production/waste chain to the raw material must meet US environmental regulations.”
If they don’t want to do that they can save a lot of effort by onshoring rather than outsourcing to lowest bidder shady overseas companies.
But I think that overall the process is not anywhere near as hard as you say it is. Corporations use purposeful, tactical ignorance to avoid regulations.
That may keep it out of sight but if it's still happening it might have been better to do it in a managed way at home.