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> 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

> 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.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    It’s not just the cost of disposal. Recycling aluminum or steel works because the alloys can be separated into their constituent parts and recombined into an alloy of the same or higher quality. That recycling them is cheaper than extracting it from ore is just a nice bonus that obviates the need for political incentives. Recycling plastics breaks down the polymers into smaller ones which degrades the quality in almost every respect. The cheapest way, for example, is literally just shred the plastic into lower quality injection moulding pellets.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    There is an entire waste disposal industry that can economically bury your broken plastic stuff in landfills, and which most people already pay for. This is a perfectly fine solution; we’re at no realistic risk of running out of landfill space. If you live in a particularly corrupt country where your waste disposal industry is run by gangsters who dump your garbage off the coast of Somalia, I would suggest solving the gangster problem.
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      America exports a lot of plastic to countries that dispose of it problematically. (while pretending it's going to be recycled). Less since China stopped taking it to dispose of much of it problematically. I agree we should stop. Perhaps we are the corrupt country who exports it's waste to places where disposal is controlled by gangsters. Supply and demand. Why don't we just put all that garbage into big pits domestically, instead of exporting it? I guess you need to convince voters to like this solution better. I think it's important that we don't just dump the trash in poor and politically unpowerful neighborhoods and regions to (which is kind of what we do now, just internationally). https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/05/huge-rise-us-plastic-waste-shipments-to-poor-countries-china-ban-thailand-malaysia-vietnam https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/05/h...
      - philwelch 4y ago
        I agree that we should stop pretending to recycle plastic. I do my part by throwing my waste plastic into the garbage instead of the recycling bin.
neilv 4y ago
The sometimes high cost of tooling and low cost of materials is a boon for counterfeits... When I worked on an anti-counterfeiting and supply chain integrity startup, one of the kinds of counterfeits I heard was of factories that make the legitimate product secretly also make the counterfeits. (Sometimes called "third-shift counterfeits".) They'd not only reuse the design and processes, but also reuse the same tooling. Corner-cutting the design/materials/QA is optional. There's huge money in counterfeiting (hey, the brand hand counterfeiters their IP and brand-building and even tooling; and counterfeiters just pay materials, labor, and distribution), and some other supply chain shenanigans. My impression was that besides hurting many businesses large and small (e.g., lost sales, price pressure, brand damage, and support/returns costs), and consumers (e.g., substandard product), it might also be concern for the relative economic power of countries (e.g., interests in one country steal profits from a major company, then that company sometimes also gets bought out by interests in that same country). (Though, bought-out companies still sometimes face supply chain fraud problems, including originating in other countries, so it's just not one single coherent national entity that's the problem.) Had Covid not hit right after my startup's successful factory launch, and then the subsequent VC skittishness when we really needed a round (to grow our big-ticket enterprise sales/partnership and high-skilled engineering), we might've made bigger dents in the problem.
- akiselev 4y ago
  Third shift counterfeiting has been an endemic problem since the invention of the Gutenberg press. I collect old and rare books going back to the 1500s and printers have been doing it for half a millennia. Once the type is set up for a print run, there’s nothing preventing the printer from running a secret shift to print a bunch more copies just for themselves. They’ll usually use cheaper paper or binding so they’re just different enough from real first editions to be worthless but you won’t know it until it gets to appraisal unless you physically inspect the book yourself and know exactly what to look for.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    They are also a sort of first edition, and equally old. It is odd that they are worthless. There probably is an opportunity awaiting the person who formalizes third-shift first editions.
pvillano 4y ago
If the laundry basket lasts forever there is no externalized cost of disposal. Like you said, plastic is incredibly cheap, but if it wasn't, we'd use it only for things that are designed to last forever. Plastic is a miracle material. It's a shame we treat it as disposable
lazide 4y ago
The big issue with plastic recycling is getting ‘clean’ plastic. Both color, and chemically. If someone leaves their old laundry basket out in the sun, that will degrade the plastic in a way that will make it unusable if recycled, and there is no easy or scalable way to detect it. Same with it someone spilled a bunch of nasty pesticides on it, or used it to hold some kind of toxic heavy metals. This is rather different than metals, but a similar problem exists with glass (but less severe), which also makes it hard to effectively recycle. That the raw new material is dirt cheap doesn’t help.

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.
- akiselev 4y ago
  It’s not just the cost of disposal. Recycling aluminum or steel works because the alloys can be separated into their constituent parts and recombined into an alloy of the same or higher quality. That recycling them is cheaper than extracting it from ore is just a nice bonus that obviates the need for political incentives. Recycling plastics breaks down the polymers into smaller ones which degrades the quality in almost every respect. The cheapest way, for example, is literally just shred the plastic into lower quality injection moulding pellets.
- philwelch 4y ago
  There is an entire waste disposal industry that can economically bury your broken plastic stuff in landfills, and which most people already pay for. This is a perfectly fine solution; we’re at no realistic risk of running out of landfill space. If you live in a particularly corrupt country where your waste disposal industry is run by gangsters who dump your garbage off the coast of Somalia, I would suggest solving the gangster problem.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    America exports a lot of plastic to countries that dispose of it problematically. (while pretending it's going to be recycled). Less since China stopped taking it to dispose of much of it problematically. I agree we should stop. Perhaps we are the corrupt country who exports it's waste to places where disposal is controlled by gangsters. Supply and demand. Why don't we just put all that garbage into big pits domestically, instead of exporting it? I guess you need to convince voters to like this solution better. I think it's important that we don't just dump the trash in poor and politically unpowerful neighborhoods and regions to (which is kind of what we do now, just internationally). https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/05/huge-rise-us-plastic-waste-shipments-to-poor-countries-china-ban-thailand-malaysia-vietnam https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/05/h...
    - philwelch 4y ago
      I agree that we should stop pretending to recycle plastic. I do my part by throwing my waste plastic into the garbage instead of the recycling bin.

neilv 4y ago

The sometimes high cost of tooling and low cost of materials is a boon for counterfeits... When I worked on an anti-counterfeiting and supply chain integrity startup, one of the kinds of counterfeits I heard was of factories that make the legitimate product secretly also make the counterfeits. (Sometimes called "third-shift counterfeits".) They'd not only reuse the design and processes, but also reuse the same tooling. Corner-cutting the design/materials/QA is optional. There's huge money in counterfeiting (hey, the brand hand counterfeiters their IP and brand-building and even tooling; and counterfeiters just pay materials, labor, and distribution), and some other supply chain shenanigans. My impression was that besides hurting many businesses large and small (e.g., lost sales, price pressure, brand damage, and support/returns costs), and consumers (e.g., substandard product), it might also be concern for the relative economic power of countries (e.g., interests in one country steal profits from a major company, then that company sometimes also gets bought out by interests in that same country). (Though, bought-out companies still sometimes face supply chain fraud problems, including originating in other countries, so it's just not one single coherent national entity that's the problem.) Had Covid not hit right after my startup's successful factory launch, and then the subsequent VC skittishness when we really needed a round (to grow our big-ticket enterprise sales/partnership and high-skilled engineering), we might've made bigger dents in the problem.

akiselev 4y ago
Third shift counterfeiting has been an endemic problem since the invention of the Gutenberg press. I collect old and rare books going back to the 1500s and printers have been doing it for half a millennia. Once the type is set up for a print run, there’s nothing preventing the printer from running a secret shift to print a bunch more copies just for themselves. They’ll usually use cheaper paper or binding so they’re just different enough from real first editions to be worthless but you won’t know it until it gets to appraisal unless you physically inspect the book yourself and know exactly what to look for.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  They are also a sort of first edition, and equally old. It is odd that they are worthless. There probably is an opportunity awaiting the person who formalizes third-shift first editions.

pvillano 4y ago

If the laundry basket lasts forever there is no externalized cost of disposal. Like you said, plastic is incredibly cheap, but if it wasn't, we'd use it only for things that are designed to last forever. Plastic is a miracle material. It's a shame we treat it as disposable

lazide 4y ago

The big issue with plastic recycling is getting ‘clean’ plastic. Both color, and chemically. If someone leaves their old laundry basket out in the sun, that will degrade the plastic in a way that will make it unusable if recycled, and there is no easy or scalable way to detect it. Same with it someone spilled a bunch of nasty pesticides on it, or used it to hold some kind of toxic heavy metals. This is rather different than metals, but a similar problem exists with glass (but less severe), which also makes it hard to effectively recycle. That the raw new material is dirt cheap doesn’t help.