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Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
- MichaelBurge 10y agoI would've expected people to throw their glasses into a recycling bin, where it's melted down and made into beer bottles.
- danieltillett 10y agoThis goes for most (almost all) recycling programs. Recycling programs are a worse than a waste of money since you are using up some of people’s limited support for environmental causes. This would not matter if we did not have some really huge, long term problems that we need to deal with that we are not doing enough about.
- cmsmith 10y agoYou could just as easily argue that environmental effort is not a zero-sum game, and that recycling gives people a sense of ownership over the environment and increases their appetite for more important efforts.
- Retric 10y agoOr makes environmental effort seem pointless and irrelevent. This is one of those case where there has been actual research, but the results mat be fairly complex.
- sliverstorm 10y agoWhat would you mark as the worthwhile ones? Personally I place high value on raw material recycling. Even if it's more expensive monetarily, so long as it uses less resources it seems worth it to me. Aluminum cans are currently recycled more than any other beverage container in the U.S, which is good for business and the environment, says the Aluminum Association, because making a can from recycled aluminum saves not only aluminum but 92 percent of the energy required to make a new can
- moptar 10y agoCosting more money is a measure of how many resources it's using. So more expensive is almost by definition more wasteful. The resource might be more human labor than natural resources but it's still something valuable that could better be used another way if there's a cheaper alternative.
- douche 10y agoAluminum (and steel) is one of the very few things that is in any way worthwhile to recycle. Most of the things that we are urged to recycle (glass, plastics, paper, cardboard, etc) are cheaper and easier to make new from the abundant raw materials.
- dmm 10y agoLead too because it keeps it out of the environment and reduces the need for lead mining.
- ams6110 10y agoCorrugated cardboard is a net benefit to recycle, I've heard. Otherwise you are correct. It's just feel-good. Most of what you drop off at recycling centers is just trucked to landfills after it's out of your sight.
- titzer 10y ago> Most of what you drop off at recycling centers is just trucked to landfills after it's out of your sight. This is definitely not true in Germany. And for glass bottle recycling, most bottles are washed and reused up to 50 times before being melted down.
- tamana 10y agoQuality Paper (not 5th generation cardboard) is energy-efficient to recycle
- josephpmay 10y ago
- rdtsc 10y agoGood point. Yeah was wondering it about the day. Here we are dutifully separating cans, paper, trash, looking at the little triangle and number on each plastic item. And then I had a vision of these trucks going to the same dump, and dumping it all in one big pile, or putting it on a ship and sending it off to another country to be burried there, away from EPA's reach. The answer I think is it makes us feel good, it makes us think we are doing this to help mother earth, that is important to many people. In the meantime maybe there is a coal plant across town that is dumping 1000x worse crap in the air, and putting a plastic bottle in the wrong bin is nothing compared to that. In a way it reminds me when adults would give kids mindless tasks to keep them busy so they don't get bothered. "Here separate the M&Ms by color, I'll be back to check on your progress" kind of a deal.
- RyJones 10y agoCoincidentally, I was watching a fleet of three garbage trucks going though my neighborhood this week, wondering if the impact of running 3x garbage trucks to pick up trash, compost, recycyling was completely offset by the end product. I suspect the answer is no.
- rjpower9000 10y ago3 trucks would only be wasteful if they didn't manage to complete a full load over their entire shift. I doubt that's the case. (The yard waste and recycling bins are more full in my neighbourhood than the garbage cans...)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tamana 10y agoPlastic recycling was a platic-industry PR campaign to make consimers more friendly to buying plastic by assuaging their feelings of guilt. Now it's embedded in our culture as a received truth.
- dredmorbius 10y agoSource? Not doubting -- see Annie Leonard's Worldwatch Institute (2013) piece on the fallacy of individual responsibility, particularly in disposable packaging littering. But I'd like to see specifics if you've got them.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThere's a counterargument that we have been collectively underpricing nonrenewable resources, to the point that the term itself "nonrenewable resource" points to a price which fails to account for the full-in total economic, natural-capital, time, and impact costs of sustainably sourcing the resource, and potentially by factors of thousands to millions. That's a concept I'm still working out, and is based on a re-reading of much foundational economic work (Smith, Mill, Jevons, Hotelling, among others). I'm not in the least presenting this as mainstream. But it would call into question the market-price basis of both resources and recycling. Food for thought, for now.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoI think this is a weird American political myth, like evolution not being real, or global warming being a Chinese conspiracy, or electric cars being worse than gas due to coal. You go online and you find the same talking point, the same urban myths (they just dump it in a landfill!), the same links to professional political pundit's think pieces rather than to actual expert opinion.
- maxerickson 10y agoRecycling here is actually on the chopping block because they can't sell the materials at a price that covers the costs. They've never taken glass for that reason. The economics are better for bigger population centers, but here the modest amount of material and trucking really put pressure on it. Of course there are several businesses paying for metal in the area.
- dahart 10y agoSo is recycling in your area expensive enough that recovering some of the recycling costs results in a larger loss than losing 100% of the costs of landfill operations? BTW, what area is this?
- maxerickson 10y agoThe recycling is funded by the county landfill. If they stopped accepting recycling from municipalities, they would get more fees at the landfill. They could also put in a tax to fund the recycling, or start charging for recycling drop offs. Let's go with "small town Midwest".
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoNormally, the reduction in landfill fees is counted as a saving in favor of recycling, interesting that in your case it's the opposite and seen as an income stream for the people deciding whether to recycle or not. Sounds like a political problem, though I accept that in theory there could be places where it makes neither economic, nor ecological sense to try to recycle. I'd only really trust a proper expert analysis on that though, as it's quite complex (e.g. if you profit from recycling A, but it costs you to recycle B, does it still make sense to recycle both if some of the cost are shared by both materials)
- 13of40 10y agoI think I read somewhere that it used to be standard practice to go to the eye doctor (or glasses-monger?) and just try on pairs until you found one that worked, rather than getting a laser-precise eye exam. At the time I thought it was a terrible, backwards idea, but it makes sense in this context. Getting an affordable, almost-fit pair of glasses is probably a lot better than no glasses at all.
- Rinum 10y agoThat's pretty much what I did. I bought a super cheap pair (0.5 SPH) at $5, split the lenses and placed them over each other until what I saw at a distance was clear enough to read. I added up the SPH (they were 0.5 lenses, I ended up overlaying 4 pieces - so 2.0 total) and bought the resulting glasses. That was about 2 or 3 years ago and those glasses are still perfect for me.
- 13of40 10y agoI could probably do the same, but I'm blessed with one eye that's twice as myopic as the other, so I'd have do some lens swapping.
- tamana 10y agoIn the USA, most people today try on lenses until they find one that fits. Where do you use a laser to measure the eye?
- schoen 10y agoThey do have a machine to estimate the necessary correction by physical analysis of the eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorefractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorefractor (But maybe "laser" was meant as a metaphor above?)
- Spooky23 10y agoI think these programs are a legacy of a past era where the costs of manufacturing glasses was relatively high. But the suggestion that cheap glasses should be just put in racks is simplistic. Getting people sort of okay glasses isn't acceptable. My vision is asymmetrical, and using the same power lenses would leave me with a debilitating headache. There should be a few standard cheap lens patterns so you can mix and match.
- jlg23 10y agoQuestions unfortunately not answered by the article: a) Who profits from this recycling program? How many people get a western salary to coordinate all this? b) Following from (a), how many optometrists and lens makers could make a living in Cambodia if people just put $1 in a collection box each time they'd dump their used glasses in a box? This suspiciously sounds like the "2nd hand clothes for Africa" scam that only profits the collectors of those in western countries and destroys local tailors' businesses in the target market.
- WalterBright 10y ago> scam I'm glad someone makes money off of my old clothes rather than they go in the trash. > destroys local tailors' businesses That's a variation on the broken window fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- jlg23 10y ago> I'm glad someone makes money off of my old clothes rather than they go in the trash. I don't have a problem with that per se, only that it happens under the pretense of charity and that the model exploits economic inequality in a globalized world on the expense of those the "charity" claims to help. > That's a variation on the broken window fallacy. I fail to see the connection because the broken window fallacy is about a coherent economic system, not about a global economy where one can make a profit by exploiting inequalities. The proverb says: Give a man a fish and you feed him for the day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Following that idea, I am much more for transfer of knowledge than for transfer of goods. And in extension also for sourcing urgently required products locally (and if required donating to build the required industry) than just sending products. One does not have to see that in any ideological way: Just publish all numbers, show me that it's more cost-effective to send assembled products to a place and I won't object. But the article just showed that we again failed to run the numbers, thereby wasting money and potentially harming the local economy in the target country.
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- throwaway_exer 10y agoI read the complete article, and I'm kind of skeptical of the conclusions. Having travelled in Asia, for example, they have the skill and parts to repair eyeglasses and cut lenses to old frames. (In fact, I get my glasses repaired in Manila since the eyeglass cartel in the USA refuses to do major repairs. I've certainly tried in Silicon Valley multiple times.) Also, eyeglass cases are considered to be valuable and resold for $1 - $5 each. And finally, somebody with a suitcase could haul 100 - 200 frames on their next trip at no cost. I think if they were willing to do minor repairs and record the measurements in a database, donations could be a much more efficient charity.
- wvenable 10y agoAt a $1.88 to make a pair of glasses, I fail to see how your economics works. Minor repairs, databases, etc all cost more than that for a potentially inferior product.
- redthrow 10y agoRecycling is Garbage (1996) http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garb...
- tamana 10y agoThat 20-yr-old article packs in more opinions as facts then the best modern blogs. Impressive.
- dahart 10y agoWow, hard to believe this was actually linked to. That opinion article article was thoroughly debunked two decades ago, yet somehow it's still doing damage. Debunking the Myths of the “Anti-Recyclers” http://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/174_Sep96.pdf http://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/174_Sep96.pdf Recycling is not garbage - MIT technology review 1997 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400100/recycling-is-not-garbage/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400100/recycling-is-not-g...
- redthrow 10y agoThink Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling http://econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Mungerrecycling.html http://econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Mungerrecycling.htm... http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/07/munger_on_recyc.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/07/munger_on_recyc.htm...
- dahart 10y agoMunger makes the same mistake that Tierney does by focusing on something that's easy to attack, and sounds good on the face, but is in fact nearly irrelevant to the discussion. Tierney's argument that it takes energy to recycle is completely moot; the point isn't energy at all, the point is to recover materials & to slow production and consumption of wasteful single use containers. Combine that with our ability to use abundant and unending solar power, and you can see that Tierney's assumption that energy is part of the economy of recycling is a straw man and doesn't stand up to reason or reality. Munger's entire argument is that recycling is expensive, there's a cost to recycling. Like Tierney, this is a misdirection. Cost is not the point of recycling. He's right, there's a cost, but he doesn't compare it to anything. What's the alternative to recycling, and how much does that cost? There's a cost to landfills too -- how much does it cost to throw away? Munger ignores the long term costs of not recycling. Running out of resources is going to be a lot more expensive than recycling. The byproducts of plastic production are toxic, and historically there have been some plastic factories that made workers fatally sick. Munger didn't try to factor in the health care costs of people who work in or live near factories. He hasn't attempted to consider the heavy cost of pollution. He doesn't calculate the costs of transporting garbage. He hasn't attempted to calculate the environmental costs of not recycling at all -- and this is the entire point of recycling, the entire basis upon which the economics of recycling is evaluated. The recycling movement is not even remotely concerned about the transaction price of recycling a bottle, it's concerned with slowing our frivolous and wasteful use of this planet's finite and valuable resources on one time deliveries of 12 ounces of Coke. There's a lot of information on the many large costs of not recycling that Munger is deliberately ignoring, here's just one: http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/dangers-of-plastic http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/dangers-of-p... Thinking about cost alone is a persuasion strategy, it's a way to manipulate the argument and the audience, it's a way to put something seemingly tactile on the perceived downsides of recycling. It's a way to convince you that you're being cheated out of money -- but he's the one trying to trick you -- don't let it work on you so easily! If nothing else, if I haven't convinced you at all, at least Google all the articles you can on the critiques of Teirney and Munger, read them all and try to rebut them yourself.
- WalterBright 10y ago> The price of the physical glasses is minor -- only $1.88 for a new pair of ready-made spectacles. Sigh. Why is it I can't get a pair of prescription glasses for under $500?
- brianwawok 10y agoMonopolies. Why don't we have an eyeglass startup?
- jonlucc 10y agoI think that's Warby Parker. They're few years in now, but their low-cost acetate frames are pretty much the norm.
- incompatible 10y agoThe near-monopoly is Luxottica, specifically.
- rblatz 10y agoI'm not sure where you are looking but there are tons of options for $30-$100 glasses out there. In fact I got designer brand frames from my optometrist with upgraded lense material and anti scratch and anti glare coatings for less than $500. Check out places like America's Best, Warby Parker, or http://www.zennioptical.com http://www.zennioptical.com
- jrapdx3 10y agoCertain "extras" run up the cost of lenses. Options like self-darkening on UV exposure, low-reflection and anti-scratch coatings. UV coatings can add to the cost, but are probably unnecessary since most polymer lenses are inherently UV-absorbing. Also, "no-line" bifocal versions cost more, as well as high-refraction materials that reduce lens weight and thickness. Frames also vary in quality and durability. The glasses I'm wearing now are using frames > 20 years old. Of titanium construction they've outlasted other frames made of less robust materials or marginally engineered. Don't know if on-line suppliers offer these options at lower cost. I suppose there's some risk of lenses being off-spec with any optician, an experience I've had several times over the years. The last set of lenses made for me had to be redone twice. Getting lenses from a local shop likely costs more, but having someone to complain to directly face-to-face has a value of its own.
- Animats 10y agoThere are several competing efforts to produce low-cost eyeglasses. Focus On Vision has adjustable eyeglasses.[1] Project Congo has some kind of eyeglass-making kit.[2] Briefcase-sized eyeglass kits used to be popular in India. They contained round frames and several hundred round lenses. The idea is that glasses have three parameters - spherical curvature, elliptical curvature, and axis of the ellipse. The usual options for the first two are only about 100-200 lenses. With a round lens, you can set the axis in any direction. There's a little notching tool in the kit, and once you have the axis set, the plastic lens is notched, then snapped into the frame, where it locks. Not that they really cost much. The manufacturing cost of eyeglasses is about $2. The insane price of frames comes from a monopoly by Luxottica, which owns most of the retail outlets in malls in the US. [1] http://www.focus-on-vision.org/ http://www.focus-on-vision.org/ [2] http://projectcongo.org/photocollections/eyeglassmaking.html http://projectcongo.org/photocollections/eyeglassmaking.html
- gnicholas 10y agoThere's also One Dollar Glasses: http://www.onedollarglasses.org/ http://www.onedollarglasses.org/
- dkksfj 10y ago>The insane price of frames comes from a monopoly by Luxottica, which owns most of the retail outlets in malls in the US. How is owning most of the retail outlets in malls a monopoly?
- josephpmay 10y agoThey also manufacture almost all of the major glasses frame brands. They don't have a complete monopoly, but they do control a vast majority of the market.
- jamestnz 10y agoI'm not sure about the monopoly accusation, but Luxottica's influence extends far beyond the US, and is not just retail. The company owns over 7000 retail outlets across North and South America, Asia-Pacific, China, South Africa and the Middle East, under well-known retail brands such as Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, OPSM and others. Moreover, Luxottica are vertically-integrated, controlling design, manufacture and distribution of many major brands in both prescription and fashion eyewear. Their in-house brands include Arnette, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Ray-Ban, Vogue and others. Additionally they manufacture product under license for many more, like Brooks Brothers, Chanel, D&G, DKNY, Ralph Lauren, Prada, Tiffany and Versace. So, monopoly or not, it's fair to say that Luxottica exerts considerable control over the worldwide eyewear market!
- dingleberry 10y agolet's stop/reduce buying new glasses so there'll be no/less recycling. i wore -4 diopter and i'm six months in 'no glasses' experiment after reading 'getting stronger' blog on eyes homeostatis. Here's what i found: - i can read books without glasses at all. i used to wear my -4 for anything. no more. - for laptop, i can use reduced (-2) and texts come sharp. i opt for no glasses and increase the text font size instead. - for driving <motorbike>, daylight gives sharper vision (it's like wearing a -2, with no glasses). it's a bit blurry for driving, but i don't need eagle-sharp clarity, i just need to avoid collisions. so instead of donating your old glasses, you can use them to train your eyes, say for example: no glasses for books, -1 for tvs, -2 for laptop, -3 for driving, etc i chose cold turkey because i often forget where i put my glasses and it's frustrating. there is a plus lens therapy which i don't practice much because i keep losing my plus glasses.
- titzer 10y agoPlease don't drive without glasses. You're likely violating the law and you are putting others in danger.
- dingleberry 10y agofor motorbike, it's okay because the distance to front wheel is short and my vision is sharp up to the distance. i can't read number plates and stuffs clearly; however, i don't drive to see those things clearly. my mission is move from a to b without collisions.
- chillwaves 10y agoMotorbike without vision is so much safer than car without vision. I'm relieved to hear.
- dingleberry 10y agowhat a creative imagination for a spin
- holri 10y agoBut not a waste of resources and CO2.
- dahart 10y agoThis argument seems really weird to me. It's a "waste" compared to what? If the alternative is glasses going in the garbage or plastic recycling to recover nothing more than raw materials, then 7% of donations surviving the donation process seems like a massive win.
- wtbob 10y agoThat doesn't make sense: spending $24 to retrieve 75¢ of materials is a massive loss, not a win. Throwing stuff away isn't a problem (the world's huge; besides, today's landfills will be a future generation's mines); throwing recyclable stuff away isn't a problem (why, every day you excrete water which you could distil & drink — at a ridiculous cost); throwing away stuff which could be recycled or reused profitably is a problem.
- acoravos 10y agoThis study is old, but glad it's getting published on major media sources. The cost of distributing the glasses and reaching rural locations is often more challenging than the cost of the glasses itself. One of the leading companies distributing low-cost eye glasses is VisionSpring (www.visionspring.org), and they are also main partner for Warby Parker (https://www.warbyparker.com/buy-a-pair-give-a-pair https://www.warbyparker.com/buy-a-pair-give-a-pair). VS is making radically affordable quality glasses ubiquitous in frontier and emerging markets. Their customers earn less than $4 per day and are highly price sensitive. They sell to seed markets, are accountable for delivering on a value proposition, and gain consumer commitment for a product customers will need for the rest of their lifetime.
- throwaway6436 10y agoYou could have warned of an incoming message from our sponsors.
- Lagged2Death 10y agoEither way it's done, providing glasses to people who can't pay for them is a charitable act, and humans are not very rational about charitable acts. Given two choices: 1) Give $5 to a program that provides brand new custom prescribed eyeglasses to people who need them but cannot buy them 2) Give $10 to a program that provides shitty, old, out-of-date, recycled eyeglasses of questionable prescription to people who need them but cannot buy them Many people will respond more supportively to #2 and see #1 as fundamentally unfair ("I worked hard to earn the money for my glasses, why should a needy person have something just as good as mine? They should count themselves lucky to have anything at all!"). Many people see it as a moral imperative that the poor should suffer.