← Back to context

Comment by hamdingers

20 hours ago

Every "urban" city has at least one bicycle co-op in it full of used bicycles for sale that are lighter, easier to repair, fit better, far cheaper, and best of all already exist and do not need to be manufactured.

Reduce and reuse come before recycle for a reason. This is greenwashing, not environmentalism.

3 comments

hamdingers

Reply
grues-dinner  10 hours ago

Any consumer trinket that is made from recycled plastic is more or less pointless. At most, you get one more cycle out of that little bit of plastic. Better than nothing, sure, I guess, as long as your thing actually needed to be plastic. Worth all the back-pats and preening website copy? No.

There are practical ways to use less plastic (or any material really):

* Don't sell disposable shit

* Don't sell fragile shit that breaks quickly in the first place

* This often means more things out of metal, or at least thicker plastic. It may mean you need to use a screw to close the case rather than welding it shut or using plastic tabs that snap

* Use materials and designs can can be repaired using standard parts and materials

* Provide spares for less than the cost of replacing the whole damn thing

* And on and on

If your aim is to sequestrate existing plastic to keep it out of the environment, burn it, landfill it or maybe make it into bulk building materials and hide safely it in a non-wearing building (i.e. not a road surface) for 100 years. Putting it back out into the world in a less recyclable form (a common example: cheap and shit fleece jackets proudly made from 50 bottles or whatever - now that's microplastic fibres and definitely will not be recycled ever again) just defers it a couple of years. Especially if the thing you made from plastic didn't even need to be plastic.