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As a counterpoint: Sterilite has been going strong for decades (while still manufacturing in the US), and I think I paid $3.99 for my laundry basket in 2021. It

As a counterpoint: Sterilite has been going strong for decades (while still manufacturing in the US), and I think I paid $3.99 for my laundry basket in 2021. It looks like it can be had online (from Target) for about $5. Plastic manufacturing is shockingly cheap, especially when the design never changes. Maybe it shouldn’t be that cheap (since it’s probably being externalized somewhere), but lots of companies are surviving (and thriving) at these price points.

mjhay 4y ago
Items that actually get reused a lot (e.g., not reusable shopping bags) aren't as bad waste-wise, for the simple reason less of them need to get made. Personally, I'd like to see plastics restricted to areas where they have major advantages over wood, steel, etc. Many consumer items like this would hold up well enough using bioplastics.
- PopAlongKid 4y ago
  > I'd like to see plastics restricted to areas where they have major advantages over wood, steel, etc. I suppose you could make a cheap laundry basket out of chicken wire, but there would have to be some way to protect from rust caused by damp clothes.
  - mjhay 4y ago
    Like I alluded to, some low-cost consumer products that aren't really meant to last forever (like a laundry basket) would be good candidates for bioplastics (some of which do fine with water).
    - pvillano 4y ago
      Alternatively, make a laundry basket that is meant to last forever.
      - mjhay 4y ago
        That would be ideal, but a lot more difficult to market. Most people just don't care enough when they buy items like this, and/or they don't want to pay a premium because they'll probably be moving soon/etc. Crap, if people just spotaneously started buying qualty, durable things, and companies actually made them, that would go an enormous way to help the global environmental collapse.
  - 13of40 4y ago
    You can actually just look to what people were using before plastic became ubiquitous: wicker, cotton, burlap Unfortunately if you live in the US you're starting out at about $50 instead of $5. I think that's a little bit of a HCOL price point, though. I picked up a burlap shopping bag in India earlier this year for about the equivalent of five cents, that any store here would have charged a couple of bucks for.
    - convolvatron 4y ago
      I'm still using the reed clothes baskets I bought 30 years ago...then they were around $10-20 ea
  - pvillano 4y ago
    A plastic laundry basket can be made to last forever. That's the point of this post.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      But they aren't. This guy got very lucky. Mine never last more than a few years. Most of them inevitably crack somewhere in less than a year. They are made so that you need to keep buying them. I probably buy 3 a year just to replace the ones that break.
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        You are failing to drill out the ends of the cracks, as the author did, failing to glue, and failing to buy a better quality product, slightly more expensive, that would not demand you return to the dollar store so frequently. You have anyway lots of company. That should not be reassuring. (I use "you", here, to denote all readers in the same boat, not any particular individual.)
      - teg4n_ 4y ago
        what the heck are you doing to your laundry baskets that you break 3 a year??? I don’t think i’ve _ever_ broken a laundry basket.
      - quesera 4y ago
        Avoid hard plastics and square edges/sharp corners. Notice that the basket from the article has rounded edges, and rounded cutouts. The plastic appears to be thickish and should be very slightly flexible/rubbery (bending because the material is flexible, not merely because it is thin). These products should (and definitely can) last decades.
  - jessaustin 4y ago
    Reed/grass baskets are really old technology. Like, prehistoric. There's no need for newfangled materials developed only in the last several thousand years.
tonyarkles 4y ago
> Maybe it shouldn’t be that cheap (since it’s probably being externalized somewhere) I mean, there's four main pieces to this: - Injection moulding machine - Mould itself - Raw materials - Disposal The moulding machine is quite expensive until you amortize across the number of produced pieces. Most of the time these aren't custom-built and can be used to make multiple patterns. The mould is also quite expensive and is made for one specific part. To your point, this is why things get cheap when the design doesn't change. They will eventually wear out, but from a high quality mould you should be able to get roughly a bazillion of these consumer plastic parts. The materials are ridiculously cheap. Polyethylene, as an example, is $1200/metric ton: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171074/price-high-density-polyethylene-forecast-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171074/price-high-densi.... I don't know exactly what a laundry basket weighs, but I'd guess somewhere in the 500-1000g range, so somewhere between $0.60-$1.20 worth of plastic. The recycling at the end is the part that isn't really baked into the price. A quick search didn't reveal much as far as the costs for recycling/kg, but did suggest that recycled PET seems to sell for more like $0.20-0.30/kg. This, to me, suggests that either it needs a fair bit more processing to make it into "useful PET" or that whatever recycling process they use requires minimal energy & processing compared to the initial chemical inputs that made the plastic in the first place.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Plastic recycling is basically more expensive than creating new plastic, still. Very little plastic actually gets recycled. (Most of what you put in your household bin does not). https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use-plastic-chemical-recycling-disposal/661141/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use...
  - seventytwo 4y ago
    Because new plastic creation doesn’t include the cost of disposal, as the poster above mentioned. In theory, the cost of manufacture a new piece of plastic should pay for the recycling of that same piece of plastic.
blamazon 4y ago
On negative externalities - if we don't change our course, practically every facet of our daily lives will continue to be dependent on petrochemical solids for long after we switch completely to electric vehicles and renewable energy. Plastic in my eyes is basically petro byproducts 'blitzscaled' to all layers of the economy, all the way down to the literal bloodstreams of all living organisms.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  I’ve had the fortune of working in industries that most people don’t see the back end of… Like it or not; we will use every drop of oil there is, one way or another. I wouldn’t bet against oil companies even if all cars were electric by means of a genie.
  - Gare 4y ago
    It seems only 4% of the World oil/gas production is used for plastics. https://www.bpf.co.uk/press/Oil_Consumption.aspx https://www.bpf.co.uk/press/Oil_Consumption.aspx
    - blamazon 4y ago
      Good lord, all the plastic in the world being four percent of oil and gas production is terrifying. Implying the rest basically ends up combusted into the atmosphere? The fact that increasing the percentage of oil and gas used for plastic looks like a good option by comparison turns my stomach.
      - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        The wonder composites that make electric cars possible are all oil. Carbon fiber is hilariously not-green to produce. Make a tube out of oil and burn it over and over. Now make a car out of it with zero chance to recycle and talk about how green it is. Two things to your post though. Yes, making things out of oil is probably better than burning it. But don’t mistake how much oil is used in the side-processes. We will burn the oil one way or another. Until there is a better source of energy with better safety and density than hydrocarbons, we’ll use it all. If not in cars, in power plants, if not there in military, if not there in 3rd world, etc.

mjhay 4y ago

Items that actually get reused a lot (e.g., not reusable shopping bags) aren't as bad waste-wise, for the simple reason less of them need to get made. Personally, I'd like to see plastics restricted to areas where they have major advantages over wood, steel, etc. Many consumer items like this would hold up well enough using bioplastics.

PopAlongKid 4y ago
> I'd like to see plastics restricted to areas where they have major advantages over wood, steel, etc. I suppose you could make a cheap laundry basket out of chicken wire, but there would have to be some way to protect from rust caused by damp clothes.
- mjhay 4y ago
  Like I alluded to, some low-cost consumer products that aren't really meant to last forever (like a laundry basket) would be good candidates for bioplastics (some of which do fine with water).
  - pvillano 4y ago
    Alternatively, make a laundry basket that is meant to last forever.
    - mjhay 4y ago
      That would be ideal, but a lot more difficult to market. Most people just don't care enough when they buy items like this, and/or they don't want to pay a premium because they'll probably be moving soon/etc. Crap, if people just spotaneously started buying qualty, durable things, and companies actually made them, that would go an enormous way to help the global environmental collapse.
- 13of40 4y ago
  You can actually just look to what people were using before plastic became ubiquitous: wicker, cotton, burlap Unfortunately if you live in the US you're starting out at about $50 instead of $5. I think that's a little bit of a HCOL price point, though. I picked up a burlap shopping bag in India earlier this year for about the equivalent of five cents, that any store here would have charged a couple of bucks for.
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    I'm still using the reed clothes baskets I bought 30 years ago...then they were around $10-20 ea
- pvillano 4y ago
  A plastic laundry basket can be made to last forever. That's the point of this post.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    But they aren't. This guy got very lucky. Mine never last more than a few years. Most of them inevitably crack somewhere in less than a year. They are made so that you need to keep buying them. I probably buy 3 a year just to replace the ones that break.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      You are failing to drill out the ends of the cracks, as the author did, failing to glue, and failing to buy a better quality product, slightly more expensive, that would not demand you return to the dollar store so frequently. You have anyway lots of company. That should not be reassuring. (I use "you", here, to denote all readers in the same boat, not any particular individual.)
    - teg4n_ 4y ago
      what the heck are you doing to your laundry baskets that you break 3 a year??? I don’t think i’ve _ever_ broken a laundry basket.
    - quesera 4y ago
      Avoid hard plastics and square edges/sharp corners. Notice that the basket from the article has rounded edges, and rounded cutouts. The plastic appears to be thickish and should be very slightly flexible/rubbery (bending because the material is flexible, not merely because it is thin). These products should (and definitely can) last decades.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  Reed/grass baskets are really old technology. Like, prehistoric. There's no need for newfangled materials developed only in the last several thousand years.

tonyarkles 4y ago

> Maybe it shouldn’t be that cheap (since it’s probably being externalized somewhere) I mean, there's four main pieces to this: - Injection moulding machine - Mould itself - Raw materials - Disposal The moulding machine is quite expensive until you amortize across the number of produced pieces. Most of the time these aren't custom-built and can be used to make multiple patterns. The mould is also quite expensive and is made for one specific part. To your point, this is why things get cheap when the design doesn't change. They will eventually wear out, but from a high quality mould you should be able to get roughly a bazillion of these consumer plastic parts. The materials are ridiculously cheap. Polyethylene, as an example, is $1200/metric ton: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171074/price-high-density-polyethylene-forecast-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171074/price-high-densi.... I don't know exactly what a laundry basket weighs, but I'd guess somewhere in the 500-1000g range, so somewhere between $0.60-$1.20 worth of plastic. The recycling at the end is the part that isn't really baked into the price. A quick search didn't reveal much as far as the costs for recycling/kg, but did suggest that recycled PET seems to sell for more like $0.20-0.30/kg. This, to me, suggests that either it needs a fair bit more processing to make it into "useful PET" or that whatever recycling process they use requires minimal energy & processing compared to the initial chemical inputs that made the plastic in the first place.

jrochkind1 4y ago
Plastic recycling is basically more expensive than creating new plastic, still. Very little plastic actually gets recycled. (Most of what you put in your household bin does not). https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use-plastic-chemical-recycling-disposal/661141/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use...
- seventytwo 4y ago
  Because new plastic creation doesn’t include the cost of disposal, as the poster above mentioned. In theory, the cost of manufacture a new piece of plastic should pay for the recycling of that same piece of plastic.

blamazon 4y ago

On negative externalities - if we don't change our course, practically every facet of our daily lives will continue to be dependent on petrochemical solids for long after we switch completely to electric vehicles and renewable energy. Plastic in my eyes is basically petro byproducts 'blitzscaled' to all layers of the economy, all the way down to the literal bloodstreams of all living organisms.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I’ve had the fortune of working in industries that most people don’t see the back end of… Like it or not; we will use every drop of oil there is, one way or another. I wouldn’t bet against oil companies even if all cars were electric by means of a genie.
- Gare 4y ago
  It seems only 4% of the World oil/gas production is used for plastics. https://www.bpf.co.uk/press/Oil_Consumption.aspx https://www.bpf.co.uk/press/Oil_Consumption.aspx
  - blamazon 4y ago
    Good lord, all the plastic in the world being four percent of oil and gas production is terrifying. Implying the rest basically ends up combusted into the atmosphere? The fact that increasing the percentage of oil and gas used for plastic looks like a good option by comparison turns my stomach.
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      The wonder composites that make electric cars possible are all oil. Carbon fiber is hilariously not-green to produce. Make a tube out of oil and burn it over and over. Now make a car out of it with zero chance to recycle and talk about how green it is. Two things to your post though. Yes, making things out of oil is probably better than burning it. But don’t mistake how much oil is used in the side-processes. We will burn the oil one way or another. Until there is a better source of energy with better safety and density than hydrocarbons, we’ll use it all. If not in cars, in power plants, if not there in military, if not there in 3rd world, etc.