Ick! It just feels crappy and bad and cheap. Plastic things make creaky noises and fall apart, and they feel bad to interact with. Idk if it’s a sensory thing or I’m just an asshole, but I fully believe that under FALGSC I would never have to touch this shit.
They don’t make glass and metal TV remotes or game controllers. I can never replace my Kindle Oasis because every other e-reader is made of the cheapest, worst plastic.
How can I just …not have to touch plastic anymore?
get one of those metal 3d printers and make housings for every little gadget. or wood might be cheaper. anything that’s a clamshell kinda deal you can take apart can be any material you want.
it would be very funny to glue up one of those “hide a gun in the book” spy things for an e-reader.
Idk if it’s a sensory thing
It 100% sounds like a sensory thing.
Celluloid feels pretty nice though.
Idk if I’ve ever actually touched celluloid, but I’ve used a bakelite rotary phone and that definitely felt nice in a way.
I thought about bakelite first too.
I wish I could take in glass bottles and jars to be refilled directly, rather than relying on recylcing. I always think about how wasteful it is that I have to buy a gallon jug every time I want a jug of juice, instead of just reusing the same huge glass jug for ten years.
YES! This is what I’m talking about. They should wash and sterilize it and then refill it. You could probably even do this at the local level.
These are the most widely used here
But I also really like these
They are refilled ~50 times before being recycled.
It’s cheaper to go to the supermarket and buy some beers than to buy empty bottles, at least until you buy them by the pallet.
That was how it was done before plastic took over. It’s just more labor intensive and has more points of failure and puts more of a burden on customers to remember not to lose or break their glasses, so plastic out-competed it.
I still like to buy glass just because it’s actually recyclable. Plastic mostly gets thrown away by “recycling” centers.
also to not break the glass in transit. you can fit more plastic bottles of stuff on a truck because of the weight too. and while it would solve OP’s problem, if you sufficiently pad out your pallet of glass bottles you’re going to be using a fuckload of plastic anyway
I imagine that one day in the not too distant future, we’ll be digging up landfills for plastic to pyrolyze because that will be easier than extracting oil.
i forget the dork name for it but there’s a sort of haha jk unless gestalt material that you can dig out of landfills that have been there a while.
The children yearn for the garbage mines.
I used to be able to do that with beers but I think COVID wiped out growlers as an option
Local place still has growlers, I bring em leftover pizza from my work ans they fill me up for free. It rocks
Im taking a break from working on a plasric model kit.
Is it worth it?
No, keyboard and mouse are vastly superior obviously.
Sometimes I think about how when I die, my oily bits might slowly descend into the earth and crushed over millions of years and someone will pump me out and turn me into plastic. I know this isn’t actually how it works, but I’m still worried about it.
Apparently you are already breathing out plastic as we speak so do with that info what you will.
The monomer, not a polymer.
I fully believe that under FALGSC I would never have to touch this shit.
Why?
Why would you make permanent stuff out of cheap, fragile, and crappy-to-touch plastic when you could make it out of a nicer material to touch? Metal, glass, wood, stone, etc. There are definitely some plastics that are better than others, too. I had a Pixel 2XL which had a textured composite coating on the back that felt very nice to touch.
I just got shown some glassware that’s being packaged in a mycelium-based composite. It’s usually paper or bagasse, so it’s not like a huge change with regards to eliminating single use plastic, but it had a really nice texture to it. Idk how stable a material it is or if it would break too easily or degrade too quickly to make long-term household items.
I’m not going to defend single use, which I consider distinct from plastic as a material, but there are a ton of great use cases for plastic. It’s less brittle than glass and wood has complications for many uses due to being porous. The methods of manufacture for different materials have significance; you can injection mold plastic but not wood for example, and I don’t think all things should be (or at least should need to be) artisanal.
There are definitely places where it’s just the best option. Like there are tons of medical applications for plastics I don’t think should go away, there’s even PEG 3350 which is a very effective laxative.
I guess I’m talking particularly about what car manufacturers call “touch points.” I don’t actually care that the headlights or the bumpers or the dashboard are plastic, I just don’t want to touch plastic on places like the steering wheel, visors, belt buckle, vents, infotainment.
I want a tv remote or a flyswatter that’s not plastic. I can already get things like light switches, pill organizers, lotion or shampoo bottles but I want plastic not to be the default.
Right? There are so many different kinds of plastics, and they don’t all have the same undesirable properties that capitalism optimizes for. So I would expect that even under a different economic model in a more advanced future, we would still have a considerable amount of plastic. It might have a very different composition and purpose and lifecycle, but you wouldn’t get to stop interacting with it.
It would be pretty tough to never need plastics of any sort. I’m fine with it being around in places where the properties of the material make it genuinely the best choice. I just want most of the household things we use and touch daily to be not plastic.
there are even valid single use scenarios (most examples that spring to mind are medical waste) but yes that was where I landed
The DSA Marxist-Leninist Glassblower’s Caucus said so
Tip for tv remote and game controllers, get a rubber grip if there are any available.
Sometimes there is a small error in the production process and the rubber coating decomposes into sticky goop after a few years.
rubber
Still plastic!
Rubber comes from a tree doesn’t it?
Some does but a lot of it is the side product of cracking naphtha into ethylene.
Wait, is rubber that is made from tree sap still technically a plastic?
synthetic plastics are called plastics because they’re like other stuff that we used to call plastic (adjective).
It’s a natural plastic, cis-1,4-polyisoprene! It’s made of a volatile called isoprene that tons of plants and animals make, including humans. We breathe it out.
Trans-1,4-polyisoprene is a harder natural plastic called gutta-percha and dentists use it to refill root canals because it has really good biocompatibility.
Rubber is still a plastic, it just has a really low glass transition temperature so it stays soft. Even if it comes from sap.
Really? Because I never got the plastic feel from rubber grip.
Surely a high grade silicone would suffice, madame?
Yeah, platinum cure silicone is quite good.
A extremely impractical solution would be to take plastic X thing and submerge it in sand-oil then cast it in aluminum using the lost wax method
Lost PLA works for aluminum, too, which opens up 3D printing as an option for creating the cast molds.
Idea for an extremely niche business
