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You clearly don't understand why scale matters. It's not a "just cause we like big things", its because economically it becomes more efficient. I guess we cannot expect designers to know much though.
Scale is literally a massive factor in bringing down the environmental impact of individual objects, and it's also the only way to provide for 7+ billion people
@めぐみんじゃない I think you misunderstood my point. Growth and scale helps with efficiency....but growth at all costs is when we run into the problems we have right now.
There was loads of problem with the lead free solder in the beginning. But most of them was eventually solved, and today its relatively problem free. Most of the problem was an effect of that old components was med to be soldered with lead based solder and when they switched over there was galvanic reactions that lead to brittle joints and whisker. This was back 15 years ago, i have not seen much problem later.
The biggest recycling hurdle I know of that could be solved with minimal inconvenience is shipping labels. Hurray Amazon for their 100% recyclable packaging...until they stick the impossible to remove non recyclable shipping label in place. It's the same for many companies. Cardboard is one of very few easily recycled materials and we ruin that option with a non recyclable, non removable sticker.
@@Blubatt you could mark packaging more sustainably with things like ink stamps, paper stickers, punch-outs in the cardboard, etc. you’d have to find the most permanent solution for bad weather and such but there are alternatives.
@@Blubatt Adhesive and paper that peels off in one piece, or is itself recyclable. Ordinary paper printed on with ink instead of thermal paper would be one option, with a starch based adhesive. That would be recyclable along with the cardboard
Actually, cardboard is NOT one of the materials with the best recycling rates. It is NOT suistainable 1.) If you've ever made paper, you know that pulp loses rigidity upon re-utilisation. Its reutilisation is equivelant to the types of plastic that are able to be recycled (7 times). the fact that plastics and paper can only be used so many times is important. essentially, it's like chromosomal or DNA damage during cell division. There are only so many times you can split the bonds of the material (pulp or plastic) before it ceases to have viable properties to complete the process. The number of times is laughably low at around 7 to 10 times. Meanwhile, you need to use new material, with the recycled material for both plastics and cardboard to increase strength. so, new material is always necessary. the ratio is usually 10% recycled material to 90% virgin: but they slap a made from recycled materials lable on it and everyone swoons. This is even more annoying because the US passed a law that requires companies to add 10 percent recycled plastics to all new plastics when possible. AGH, it's just like those annoying car companies that say "carbon neutral by 2030". Uh, yeah, thanks FORD/ CHEVY : are you going to mention that this is ONLY because this is when a law will be enacted leveraging crazy taxes on you if you haven't met this goal? Cool, thanks for greenwashing you corporate slugs. it is NOT a solution. 2.) Soggy carboard and paper weakens the material, and most recycling centers will just throw it away because it is 'soiled' at this point. Anytime you've left you recycling out in the rain, or tried to recycle a pizza box, or spilled the contents of a bottle that you were also recycling onto the cardboard: it is then trash. There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings surrounding recycling. Stay vigilent, and choose better options. Better options? Aluminun, steel, glass: they have basically no limit to the number of times they can be re-used because the material itself is maliable: not their binders or fragile reordering of their molicules like paper and plastic. Fun fact: Ceramics are not recyclable.
If glass bottles were standardized they could be cleaned rather than crushed and reformed. I am sure standardization of commonly used parts can be an important factor in increasing recyclability in many other products as well.
The biggest sector thar can actually tremendously benefit from reusing it's packaging is cosmetic industry. The amount of plastic they produce. Is mind blowing. I run out of chapstick within 2-3 months. Wished there was refill outlets at their store. This will also reduce the cost for the customer. There should be a mandatory law in every country that every whether big or small cosmetic company needs to take back their empty bottles and also hv refill station.
This kind of deposit-return scheme works really well in Germany. You get the money back with supermarket coupons once you return the bottles and if you can't be bothered to return it, someone who needs the money can return the bottle themselves for coupons. such incentives work well for plastic bottles too, especially the larger ones that come in cases which can be returned and cleaned. I wish they had this kind of scheme in other countries!
I know how well dishes are "cleaned" in restaurants. You how many people stick these things up to their asses?🤌 And I'm not ready to pay x2 for the bottles and walk extra weight home. 😒 I'm ok with the plastic ones.
Right to repair has a long way to go. It's another great example of corporate kicking, screaming, and foot-dragging. Louis Rossman has been leading the charge against Apple in particular
I am a major pro-right to repair guy, a really awful example is REDCINEMA camera battery packs with the BMS program in ram. I cannot wait for the right to repair being fully pushed through.
Agreed, the whole system is f'd and I don't mean "right to repair" I mean our whole system of profit above all else, this is why the world is coming to an end and we're so far down the road we can't turn back, we have one option and one option only, we have to replace the pursuit of wealth and power with the pursuit of knowledge and experience. People like to learn, and a country only hurts itself by making education cost the student. We made education through to high-school not only free but compulsory, it's time to do the same with college. we can't learn from our mistakes and make corrections if we cannot guarantee the right to learn, not to mention, having freely available knowledge that anyone can access as long as they live makes right to repair more useful, I mean, this way people have a place to go to learn HOW to repair their stuff, if they don't want to/can't afford to have someone else do it.
stuff like this reminds me that one day about 100 years ago, every lightbulb company came together and decided there was a max amount of years they're products could last to maintain their customer base.
@@smileyp4535 Capitalism just means freedom. Don't blame freedom. Freedom is more important than the planet anyway. Blame the fricked up society that abuses the freedom. Regulation has never changed minds in human history. if we wanna change the world, change hearts. Also, government make up the majority of this garbage and waste worldwide. Do you really think giving them regulatory power would solve anything?
Apple: We're trying to be good for the environment. That's why we make our devices next to impossible to repair outside of our own specialized tools we don't sell to anyone we don't want repairing them; have absurd amount of waste packaging with our products; and create our products to be as fragile as possible so that when they inevitably break you're forced to buy a new one and dispose of the old one which ends up in a landfill because many of the components cannot be recycled in their current state, and converting them to a renewable state would cost too much.
Thyas why I don't buy from Apple. They are greenwashing to hide the fact they don't care and because it's" trendy". It's like the hp commercial where they say they plant trees while promoting the use of paper . They could say print on both sides to reduce paper waste. Instead they don't.
Aren't they the most hypocritical tech brand at this point? Almost everything they say is a lie. I still remember them removing jack because it "didn't fit". And making tons of decisions due to "courage", while products get worse and worse. They only have courage to tell blatant lies to masses.
Apple: We removed the charger from the box cuz everyone already has one. Also Apple gives a c to light ing cable with the phone which doesnt fit the charging bricks everyone already had so ppl got a useless cable or they bought a new charger in its own seperate box in a plastic sleeve
Also quoting high prices for replacement parts is a common practice ti make people say "It makes more sense to buy a new phone instead of paying this much for just a screen change."
So I actually am a material scientist and this is probably the best video I've seen on this whole matter. Pretty much all of them are incredibly one-sided. And I appreciate you looked at it all from different directions. Because things are complicated. A sustainable material isn't everything. Thank you for the video!
Our mindset could definitely change in just a generation or two and I think it will some day. It drives me insane how disposable everything is, even if you WANT to avoid it you just cant
Sadly we only have 2 decades and not 2 generations “The IPCC report 2022 warned that the world is set to reach the 1.5ºC level within the next two decades and said that only the most drastic cuts in carbon emissions from now would help prevent an environmental disaster.”
@JD Power I believe them right now because we have been seeing the effects of climate change and global warming, there isn't much time. The world is like a person with ADHD (i have ADHD) waiting and not doing anything because it's just fine and then only acting once it is too late. Because it didn't feel like there was an emergency. But there is!
People who are environmentally conscious also do not understand that it is multiple time better for the environment to reduce consumption than to recycle / repurpose. The amount of crap that we buy and hoard in our homes today is mind-boggling.
The main problem is regulatory capture- large corporations wield the regulatory state against competition and consolidate the market then hyper scale increasing centralization increasing shipping which is heavily subsidized.
A lot of people have no idea the true scale of waste being created in industrial manufacturing and raw material extraction. The single best thing that could be done to initiate a change in sustainability practices is to penalize corporations for producing waste. The problem doesn't just occur in fossil fuels, it permeates the entire system.
I agree, but... Hit these companies and they'll do two things put up prices and cut jobs to preserve their profits. That will have consequences, look at the US and 2016. Look at China and pollution, they're the worst polluter but with CO2 China emits less per head than the US. Does China stop growing or does the US activity reduce consumption (e.g. put up fuel prices to make fuel efficient cars popular) neither will be popular in their respective countries.
That's completely true but there's a reason that hasn't happened sufficiently. Capitalism allows unlimited wealth accumulation, which allows unlimited political power (because wealth will always buy power). So anytime we have massive wealth building up in the hands of a few people, they are going to be able to use their money to sidestep democratic processes and bribe politicians to not implement those regulations. Mega wealth also allows the purchasing of major media organisations and education establishments in order to churn out pro-free market, anti-regulation propaganda which also corrupts the democratic process by misinforming the public. We will never be able to regulate these corporations and individuals out of their damaging behaviours. As a species we have to learn that excessive wealth accumulation is the biggest existential threat to our species and we must put a stop to it. And sadly that cannot be achieved peacefully.
How can any form of mineral extraction not produce waste? That’s like asking households not to produce trash. Concentrating minerals from a diffuse ore body into a monolithic pure metal Ingot is literally the process of separating valuables from waste.
@@Bloated_Tony_Danza the issue is that they have managed to get off with ignoring the waste they create entirely. I live in Alberta and the oil companies here have created tailings ponds (waste sludge from the oil sands extraction process), that hold some 1.3 billion cubic meters of liquid that contains all kinds of toxins. There's a dam that's 18km long holding it all in. The Government has only recently begun making them figure out ways to treat the water and make it safe again. The only reason a lot of these businesses are profitable at all is because they're allowed to completely ignore the environment.
So, a year or so ago Nestlé decided to make the straws for Milo paper. They had turned it completely into a paper straw, which was an effort to greenwash the company. Though it had many downsides and side effects. Such as the straw completely dissolving into the drink making it impossible to drink without the straw falling apart, the wood pulp making the drink feel pulpy and have paper inside your milo, the straw was utterly trash at poking through the seal to open the drink, which then made the straw end bend and unable to let liquid through, and the straw would start deteriorate once you start drinking which forces a time limit before you become sad. Then a few months after that, they swapped the wood pulp paper straw, out for a better "paper" straw. This time, it solved the issue of the straw completely dissolving into the drink and the issue of the straw bending and failing completely. Though this iteration caused even more problems, like for example, since the straw was too thick, less liquid is able to pass through and the seal for the packet sometimes breaks out like a hole puncher punching paper which gave you the surprise of a high chance to swallow the plastic seal. Remember how I stated "paper" in quotation marks? Yes, it is not paper. It is a plastic straw with a paper straw covering it, which completely defeats the purpose it had in the very first place. Literally made it worse in every possible way. Edit: I just realised that they recently fixed the straws. They no longer have any plastic, and are as durable as the plastic straws. It might be that the changes to the straws were made due to pressure from the public, and that induced incredible haste to change it regardless of the quality. Though now it seems that they have fixed the issues, and the fully paper straws are here. They are surprisingly sturdy and have no sign of any plastic. I highly recommend trying the drink out at least once.
This is why you shouldn't buy Nestlé products. They're often worse than the Alternatives for the Consumer. I still don't get why People buy their Crap.
I run an Etsy store and have tried somewhat desperately to get my packaging to be easily recyclable. I know customers won't separate the plastic and paper parts of bubble mailers, so I switched to padded cardboard mailers. The address labels are where the real fun begins. Label printers use thermal paper, which normally can't be recycled. There is ecoenclose (great company!), but they're American, and shipping a roll of labels over to Europe costs 70usd and adds carbon emissions. Then there's noissue, which have labels that are compostable, which isn't the same as recyclable, so I'm not even sure I can use them. The best part: they added text stating how friendly the labels are to the edge of the labels, which means the printable area is now too small for me to even use them in the first place! 🤡 I also looked for recyclable stickers to close the mailers with, and that's where I truly lost my mind. I've reached out to so many businesses to ask if their "eco-friendly" stickers are recyclable. No one knows. No one can tell me if their stickers are OK to throw into paper recycling, and they most of them don't care to find out. One company was sure theirs were, and included the details of the material they used. When I checked the website of the manufacturer, it was a different, very specific product of theirs that was recyclable. The stickers I got told were 100% OK to recycle... 100% weren't. It is so hard to *actually* be sustainable. I'm really trying to do what I can but it is so disheartening, seeing how hard it is to do the right thing.
I'm in the same position right now and it's just genuinely very hard and very expensive for a small shop unless a customer is willing to pay more, which too many aren't. I hope there is a better solution for us in the near future as I need to make the money to live but feel awful for not being able to be more eco-friendly about it.
Sell local-only? Like farmer's markets and direct to store? Then you can choose the tytpe of impact, like just driving your car to the places but know that the package is simple and good. Even better would be to ride an ebike to deliver the goods powered by a small solar array and a body fed by a garden, that'd be a super light impact. When you participate in the shipping market most everything is out of your control and subject to the optimazation forces of industry itself. Only way to escape that is to go small and simple and local. At least unless we get star trek replicators that can perfectly recycle matter and limitless energy to do it all with.
I totally feel that. I work at a company that produces noodles, and apart from everything else (production not properly recycling, plastic packaging, thermal paper as receipts etc) there is SO MUCH what I think is paper coated with silicon, the part "paper" you peel the sticker from, not recyclable via our normal container. This stuff is all over our entire building, 2 stickers per product, stickers for storage, adress labels with what I recently found out is thermal "paper". The printer for the adress labels often sucks at its job and give out empty labels, sticker for product often leave DinA4 pages that are partly empty, and our office sometimes prints out the wrong labels x100. I overdramatize here, but all of this goes into our paper container. Man, I´m not sure if my inner Monk comes out at times, but this just feels so wrong. Political turning point now, pleeeease :O
a family member of mine has been growing a skincare company for a good few years now. last time i visited, they said something that i found really depressing - that when the company started struggling a while ago, it was because they got too comfortable; they had the company at a size that worked for them and thus stopped growing it. then they realised their competitors were outgrowing them, putting them in the red. this sentiment, coming from a lefty-but-not-particularly-anticapitalist relative, made me realise how absolutely imperative it is to any business under our economic system to strive for infinite growth
that mexico city example brings to mind a though i had about sustainability: Negative incentives don't work. When you ban something, people will find a workaround and cheese the system. Positive incentives are much better, making public transport better, cheaper and more convenient. If we wanted to get rid of single use plastic packaging, the way to go would not be to introduce a tax on it, but instead create a tax benefit for those companies who use sustainable packaging.
the US offers tax breaks and other positive incentives for businesses that “go green”. hasn’t seemed to do much in regards to the big companies who are really running the game. i believe the next logical step is to punish them on top of incentivizing them for a double whammy lol
@@shelbydan Its not like your idea disagrees with krisha its just that you guys are talking about different things. Mexico city was trying to manipulate behaviour of citizens and youre referencing the behaviour of companies. While it makes sense to punish companies for avoiding or breaking regulations citizens are sort of the opposite under our law. We make laws so that companies will operate in certain ways, laws for citizens are so that they WONT operate in those ways and in that sense the negative enforcement idea makes sense. Just ask yourself: Has the threat of being ticketed stopped people from speeding in their cars?
@@shelbydan how do you punish them without hurting consumers. Raising taxes will only raise the price of products and the company will have no punishment while the consumer suffers. Especially if that product has some level of inelastic demand.
@@zachweyrauch2988 It might, if they were pulled over and ticketed instead of getting the ticket in the mail weeks later when the incident is long forgotten. ie: If we had police ticket people instead of cameras.
I really like this. He doesn't just say "oh we need to go all electrical!" and leave it at that, he actually talks about how this issue is pretty complicated and what direction we need to head
@@supermasterfighter You're going to be pissed when you find out how much of that electricity gets used to make things that further pollute. I really don't get you people - do you think plastic, oil, gasoline, and other big pollution problems aren't created in part by using electricity? Do you think electricity is only used to charge electric car batteries? Are you really this stupid?
@@MJ-uk6lu Oh no doubt, but electrical cars are not the answer. Better public transportation and human powered vehicles are the answer. Some people have tried to make the argument of "well electrical cars can be self driving and stuff, they can ferry more than one group of people around" and I have to say this: what prevents regular cars from doing the same thing? They both pollute the atmosphere equally, one just uses petrol and the other uses coal.
The best thing a consumer can do is buy less in general. Try to only buy things you really need and try to purchase things of higher quality so you can use it longer. Think of everything you buy as something going into a landfill at some point. Another action to take is to avoid peer pressuring/judging people who use older electronic devices, clothes, vehicles, or even houses. Companies already spend billions trying to convince you to buy the next best thing. Why work for them for free?
@VaderxG The double comments and device justification with the added "you sound like you cause issues because your phone is old" kind of sounds like some major copium, my dude.
I would love to NOT having to replace my mobile device any time soon, but companies don't like that mindset and will try to make you buy a new device one way or another. At least with clothes I can wear them until they consist of more holes than fabric. xD
I'm suddenly reminded of a woman our family always just called "the Zipper Lady." She ran a little shop somewhere on the south side of town, and whenever a zipper broke on one of our jackets, Mom would take it to the Zipper Lady and she would fix it. I don't know what the viability of clothing repair as a small business is, but I can't help but think that we would have thrown out many bulky jackets and winter coats if not for this little old woman who was willing to fix them for a reasonable price.
I noticed that these shops still exist in cities near good transit hubs, if only one or two of them. I think if you can find a location where a huge amount of people can flock to, you can get enough business to scale enough to be viable.
I just wanna point something out here: While i totally agree with your point about bottling water, when it comes to sustainability, cargo ships are the wrong place to start. Even though their engines produce a LOT of CO2, the sheer volume of material they can ship is so ridiculous, the amount of CO2 per container is the tiniest part of the CO2 footprint of any given product.
@@someweeb3650 That is not how international waters work. While in international waters, the ship follows the laws of the country whose flag it is sailing under, and when it leaves international waters, it follows the laws of the country in whose territory it operates, therefore, it's more down to a lack of regulation than to a lack of regulatory facilities.
Fair enough, thanks for the nuanced perspective. I haven't done research on the efficiency of cargo ships to comment much more than I already have in the video. However I would still argue that localized manufacturing, in addition a combination of several other factors, is a good direction to move towards.
@@Rokomarn How did i miss the point, exactly? What i was saying is that, when you want to become more sustainable, you need to start at the place that causes the most damage and is cheapest to fix. Making marine shipping CO2 neutral for the comparatively tiny amount of CO2 that saves in the transport line, when the trucks transporting these goods from the harbor to the inland cities demanding them produces orders of magnitude more CO2 per kilo than the ship that transported these goods across an entire ocean to begin with, especially considering that electric trains are theoretically carbon neutral if driven with renewables, is pretty much the opposite of minimum effort for maximum effectiveness.
That's funny, "move fast and break things" was our motto for unloading trucks at Wally's Center for Disease Spread (aka Walmart). Management is very clear that they want the truck unloaded as fast as possible, but they don't really pay attention to how much merchandise is broken in the process. So without any knowledge of the damages, just how long it took, they'd fuss at you if you cause less than ~$30 of damages. Unfortunately, inventory was not the only thing that would break in the truck. Equipment and even workers on occasion. My supervisor actually forbid me from being inside the truck, not because I couldn't keep up, but because I had proven I was worth keeping. It was kinda funny, everyone in management hated him for having ideologies like that, but when he left it became very clear he was holding the store together.
Wally world retails the most out of any retailer. My sister's experience at her store made me cautious to apply to our local Walmart. The sucky thing is that it's the closest business to the neighborhood so it would have been very convenient to work there.
As a former stocker, I absolutely loved how full length mirrors always came out with paint cans stacked on top of them. Nothing like sending merchandise all the way from China just to open it in the store, noting fractures in the middle of every single pane, and sending it off to claims for disposal, on top of the literal tons of cardboard and plastic packing material a single store generates per day.
i think it’s also worth mentioning the mental toll that trying to be sustainable takes. Looking directly at production methods takes work, and the answers always suck. Even if you try to be sustainable, your individual impact is so small. And really, it’s so much easier to just stop looking. Is learning about sustainability the morally right thing to do? Yeah, sure. But sometimes you just want to do normal stuff like eat a candy bar without worrying about single use plastics and child labor chocolate and how evil nestle is. Knowing doesn’t help any of those problems. It just hurts.
Yep, that. I've been cycling in and out of making efforts towards living a more sustainable life for years, because of that. It's so complicated and it never feels, like your're doing enough anyway. It takes an immense amount of willpower ans dedication, to just say 'screw it, I got enough problems' and just go live your life.
At least you can do the minimum. A friend said: "I buy Nestle. Cause the other ones are for sure not better." Yes, but at least avoid those you know are bad. Like if you could easily walk the lit street as much as the dark alleyway, then just walk the street. Even though you could also be robbed on the street. It is really not hard doing at least a little bit. As it is not hard for those effing mother***ers to drop their garbage into the bin than onto the beach. Gosh darn it. Humans are so friggin lazy. I am for sure not wasting my whole vacation picking up trash. But when I swim into something, I am gonna pick it up. Even if the trash lands into the ocean either way, cause governments dispose of it like that. At least it isn't 100% surely in the ocean.
Sometimes it does seem the only way to be sustainable is to be miserable. To live a stunted, unfulfilling existence without many of the joys the modern world allows us to experience, from the tropical vacation, to, as you say, the simple candy bar. It's the "hair shirt" mentality.
To clarify the solder part of the video. All solder used to have lead in it, but when lead usage started getting restricted. Industry moved to tin, 100% tin to be exact. ...And for some reason, over time (5y+) they discovered that 100% tin grows hair like wires and it can short circuit the electronics So they switched to a mostly tin alloy, it fixed the problem and we've been using lead free solder without issues since like the early 2000's. Leaded solder has been banned in products in most developed countries
It's also worth pointing out that the early lead free solders were more brittle than leaded solders. From what I read it was partly responsible for the infamous Xbox 360 red ring of death and early PS3 failures. Some of those issues have been resolved through better design. New package designs, new solder formulations, etc have worked to help to mitigate the issues. But that took time and painful experience. And alot of dead game consoles (and PCs - NVidia had a massive lawsuit because of these same issues with certain chipsets they made).
but still heavily used for prototyping because it's easier to solder :) For mass production, lead free is where it is at right now (except for aerospace and some forms of transport because of durability), but leaded solder will never fully disappear.
@@SaitoGray for rework, you often need to use leaded solder. Especially when you _cannot_ heat up the part of the board to the melting temp of the lead-free. (because silver-tin needs higher temperature than lead-tin). For desoldering you can use bismuth based low temp alloys, but those are far too weak for soldering.
SquareSpace does require physical resources, in the form of servers, electricity, cooling, maintenance, back-up tapes, etc. Just because you don’t see it or think about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
On the front talking about the Mexico City issue: Someone pointed out when they considered using public transport instead of driving to get to and from work to have more ability to do other things like reading, but when they did the calculations for getting to their destination, it added over an extra 2 HOURS. No one is going to take public transport unless they 100% have to if it means making their commute a living hell. (Of course this is assuming there’s public transport where you need to go, living at my parents place in NJ, if you weren’t going to NYC for “normal business”, it was lol good luck with that) And I’m not even sure what can be done to make it not so insane
i mean even if the time it took to get places was lower, public transport in mexico city (and most of mexico really) has a reputation for being unsafe. going on one with a bag of any kind is treated as basically asking to get robbed. I live in the north of mexico far away from CDMX and ive only been on public transit twice, once we got mugged and the other the bus driver must've been on something because he was going like 120 on a 30 and taking sharp turns. both times i felt like i was looking death right in the eye hahaha.
South England is very well connected in terms of public transport. It's much quicker for me to get the train to school than drive. It's great! And nobody living in London uses a car. Not saying the UK's the best country- I have many problems with it, but this is one thing they've done right. I just wish the North wasn't so deprived.
That's not terribly unique issue. I live in Kaunas and I had to commute every day for almost 4 hours to both directions to get to university by buses. With car that was just 40 minutes if not less.Public transport is almost universally shit, unless you make it uneconomical, but that's kinda the whole point of it.
@@MJ-uk6lu hearing about public transport all over the world makes me sad. where I live it's better for me (personally) to take a bus, when I was going to school it was even quicker than the car and I had an extra 20 minutes of sleep
@@eggi4443 It's not great. I also had some crappy locations where buses were infrequent, even if those locations were quite popular. If you miss a bus near botanical garden, then you will wait 40-50 minutes until next one. You can walk to better stop, but it's so far that it takes about that much to get there. I tried that once and was a tiny bit too slow so I missed a bus and ended up being even slower. Also there was bus stop near my old university building, but there were two routes that could take me close to home. It was also near one of the biggest malls in this city and still, it's 20 minute wait and then around 10 minute walk after ride. I can actually walk home from that place in 50 minutes and be only marginally slower than bus. So yeah, some stops are just cursed and waiting time is insane. Only some routes are actually frequent and thankfully I live very close to frequently driven bus stops. If I lived somewhere else in this city, then it would be hell of waiting long for bus and arriving nowhere near home. At least I can get fast to hospital with bus and this year I'm attending different university and bus ride will be like 10-15 minutes with 5-10 minute wait. That's glorious. Just that with car it would still be much faster. 5 minutes and you are there.
I think another reason the Patagonia repair program doesn't get used that much is because Patagonia makes really high quality products. They don't break easily and when they do come to the end of their lifespans it's been 10-15 years
something i think is interesting about that example, is it really better for the environment for you to send your old item back to them for repair or for them to just send you a new one and for you to more or less dispose of the item? (sending it to some sort of 2nd hand store most likely) that's a lot of transporting an item around if you don't like use of diesel fuel. personally I'm more of the type to hang on to something until it's not fit for purpose and can't be repaired back to being fit for purpose, I have a nice zip up sweater that is something like 10 years old and i still like it more then the new one that was meant to replace it from the same brand, partly because i just like that old comfy sweater.
Even if it becomes popular, Patagonia-style repair program is dubious in nature to begin with. For an eco friendly clothing repair program to be sensible, I think you would need to sell/donate used clothes to the program, which will repair it and then resell it to a different person. In other words, it needs to be a refurbishment process rather than repair. Why? Shipping in bulk, bulk processing, and shipping to stores is much more efficient and eco friendly than shipping individual items from person to repair factory back to the person. If every article of clothing need to return to the same owner, every step of the process becomes much more complicated and expensive as the article needs to be tracked on every step. With bulk processing they can just be thrown into a pile and sorted and processed in bulk, which simplifies handling. I think a refurbishment would also be much more acceptable to people. For the new owner, they will still feel like buying new clothes, just cheaper than buying new. Many people are already used to the idea of thrift shopping, it just needs to become more common. For the previous owner, they can just dispose of their clothing as usual, and they can still vary the clothes they wear over the years, and they can swap out clothes that no longer fit instead of getting back the same article of clothing which may no longer fit the same way when they were originally bought. The only problem? The fashion industry, which sets a certain fashion trend every year and every season, and which makes certain styles of clothing look dated and artificially makes people feel that they need to buy new clothes to keep up with the latest fashion. Fashion needs to stop, manufacturers should standardise cloth designs into fewer designs, to make it easier to build repair automations, and to make it easier to swap out parts between clothes.
@@ARockRaider I'm sure it depends on many factors, but that new product you buy has to be transported from the factory, to the distribution center, to your house. And there are even more steps depending on where you purchase. In all cases, your jacket will be in a truck with other products either way.
@@yvrelna that sounds like a large scale version of the secondhand clothing market here. Clothes are sent to non profits who sell used items Some people buy and fix designer stuff, usually it’s something mild like a broken zip. They mail or sell it in person. Still lots of clothes are binned/sent off to Africa for “recycling” maybe? Not everything is worth ♻️
In terms of legislation, we also need to consider the effects of legislation unrelated to sustainability. A favorite example for me is legislation related to the clarity of packaging and why it prevents the use of recycled plastic in packaging. On initial concept, packaging seems like like a great application for recycled plastic. Packaging tends not to have fine details, so the loss of viscosity in recycled plastic seems like a non-factor. It only needs to protect a product for a short period of time (as long as the product sells) so loss of durability shouldn't matter. And it seems silly to use virgin plastic on items that are disposed of as soon as a product is purchased. There's one issue though. If you have a package window, by law it needs to reach a certain level of clarity. This is to protect consumers from fraud, ensuring that labels aren't obscured and the product can be inspected by the end cobsumer. This law exists for a reason, and there's nothing wrong with that. But, recycled plastics cannot reach the clarity requirements. So, even though they'd kind of be perfect in this application, a reasonable law blocks they from being used. There are ways around all that, but they take careful thought. And it's just one example of how complex designing for sustainability can be. Especially, when it comes to legislation, not all of it is poorly thought out legislation. Some of it exists for good reason, but does block what would be otherwise good solutions from being implememted.
My favorite part of visiting Germany was seeing the extremely scuffed up and foggy plastic bottles for sodas and stuff. Seems like they actually applied the concept of recycling (in this case).
I notice that nobody here is talking about pyrolysis plant's and other plants that convert plastics etc into oil's and other useful energy's, the problem is the government and nothing else :D
19:00 Fun bonus fact about that car law in Mexico City: Because most people only planned on driving their second car that one day a week, they generally opted for the cheapest thing they could find, often very old, run-down cars with absolutely horrendous emissions and fuel economy. It's why things became worse instead of largely staying the same
Great video! I think that also the whole "environmentally friendly" thing has moved away from "we want to help our planet" to "virtue signal to get points with people," since (as you mentioned), a lot of companies are doing seemingly environmentally friendly things, but they are actually worse for the environment
Considering environmental impact is beyond getting points with people but actually plays a part in investment as well, it's not surprising that companies will do what they can to make themselves appear as environmentally friendly on paper with as little cost/effort as possible
One thing to note is that those massive shipping container ships are actually a REALLY efficienct method to transport stuff, like ridiculously efficient and we're never not going to be shipping stuff to other countries so it's not really a big deal to add a little bit more stuff to be shipped. The bigger issue is non aquatic shipping as they use much more fuel per item carried. Good video btw.
Using toxic materials like Lead is absolutely necessary in many products. The problem arises with sloppy handling, so Lead free solder is more of a band aid on a bigger problem. Car Lead-acid batteries are what, 15kg of Lead, and is a product that is almost completely recycled and safely handled statistically. 3rd world Lead production however is sloppy. But so is alternatives production in such places.
@@matsv201 yes, because we dont design with recycling in mind. We only think of immediate selling profits, and being wasteful is actually profitable thing to do.
@@heyhoe168 It really depends on what you are talking about. Cars are typically 98% recyclable. The ironic part is that this number is much lower for electric cars (typically 85-90%). For electronics its really the board and the circuits that is not recycled. And its really not that strange. They are basically made out of sand. Of cause, if you run it in a plasma oven, you can sort of get the sand back as well. Its strange that plasma ovens are more common, they pretty much solve the recycle problem.
@@heyhoe168 that's just not true at all, some things are simply un-recyclable. PCBs are impossible to break down and re-use. The cost of pulling out metals like gold from electronics is too costly due to the complexity. If there were an incentive to create easy to recycle electronics ie. Cheaper to use metals from old electronics than newly refined metals it would already exist.
I used Patagonia's "repair" program. My 5 year old jacket was unrepairable by their standards, so I got a merchandise credit. So even if you try to use their program, not sure it really works. Would love to know what percentage of garments are actually fixed vs deemed unrepairable. But still as noted, better than nothing.
@@weaponsgradepotato small .5 inch tears near both side pocket zippers. Main zipper had one missing tooth. Not sure if they even noticed, and did not ask to repair this, but if you held it up to light, inside insulation was pulled free from bottom, so bottom 1 inch or so wasn't as insulated as it should have been. At a glance, jacket still looked almost new.
@@mikado_m If I had a sewing machine, a replacement zipper, and the time and knowledge to do it, sure. But I don't, that is why I opted for their program. When I boxed it up to send, I had to pick either "Get item sent back" or "Get Merchandise Credit" if item deemed not repairable. Around 6 weeks later, they told me it was unrepairable and sent me a credit.
@@dividebyzero1000 I am Interested to know if there is an option to get the item back as is if its considered unrepairable or if there is more repair options, because I would definitely still wear something that has a bit of damage or try to repair it myself.
Fellow designer here - I wholeheartedly agree about the outsized role designers play in the chain of causality that leads to unsustainable products, & that we need to push hard wherever we can against the tide, but the problem isn't really that we're not pushing hard enough: it's the tide. The incentive structures favor short-term thinking, & even very good designers who stubbornly fight for more sustainable products will be placed at a disadvantage in the labor market - you're not going to get hired or promoted if everyone knows you'll just use your position to delay the schedule in the name of petty stuff like "not broiling the planet alive." We're not going to achieve any meaningful progress toward sustainability by focusing on individual behavior & choices, we have to change the landscape of incentives to make the sustainable option the most attractive one.
Absolutely! how can anyone expect people to make sustainable choices when they are being threatened with having their entire livelihood tossed away by the system that is destroying the earth! it seems obvious to me that the central force that is responsible it the capitalist profit incentive
I'm a mechanical engineer and have been working on developing "eco friendly" products on the side for many years. It's incredibly hard to make every part of the process truly eco friendly AND sustainable. It's also usually very expensive too. I personally don't design with recycling in mind anymore because the recycling system doesn't and will never work as well as we need it to. I design with biodegradability and toxicity in mind now. Not an easy task when you want to design durable products!
Back in the old days:) when I was in high school. LL Bean provided the best backpack, for about $60. Lifetime replacement. I spent $60 and replaced it only once for all of High School. That, helps. We need to support companies who do this wherever we can
It doesn’t really MATTER what you make it out of IF THE RECYCLE SYSTEM doesn’t RECYCLE We had a huge amount of industrial ink jet printing equipment get taken out of service because the repair boards did not make the cut when ROHS regulations affected spare parts production
Right? My city has a recycling program.... but even if I sort my trash into my apartment building's recycling bin it's all dumped in the trash truck together. I could go to a recycling center to put my sorted trash in, but after already realizing that my choice was an illusion, it's hard to trust that my extra efforts won't have the same results. And of course, it's hard to find information on what happens after they pick it up other than hollow assurances that it'll definitely be recycled.
@@PokemonTrainerAriel Totally true..At my school we have recycle bins but I found out they're just dumped with the rest of the trash anyways, so even if you think or feel like you're helping you aren't.
@@PokemonTrainerAriel Check the internal look of that truck. In case of my city trucks it looks like they dump it together, but inside a truck it gets into separate container.
Tin whiskers were a problem on the start of the lead free solder era, nowadays alloys are far better. It is true that working with lead alloy solders are far more convenient, comfortable and requires less training. The cost of pb/sn solder is sometimes way cheaper.
I like silver-tin solder, because I do not need to be super careful where the solder paste goes. The solder paste contains solder powder. And lead powder in my home would be really bad. (I still have a small PbSn roll for special cases)
Yeah if someone wanted to fix something at home I don't see how they do that without leaded solder. The silver stuff is really good but so hard to work with or remove.
Leaded solder also flows much better than the lead free stuff. Everyone in the industry that I know sticks with using leaded solder because it is simply easier to work with.
The whole solder debate becomes pointless when the device manufacturers make access to schematics, tools and parts impossible (without breaking laws), and serialize parts electronically so that even if your repair is as good or better than the original, the device STILL will not work because of how the company designed failures into the parts. I'm looking at Apple, but every time Apple is successful, the other electronics companies see the profit margins and follow suit.
It seems that the idea of infinite growth is the primary problem that needs to change. As long as companies are incentivized by infinite growth nothing gets better.
While there is an argument that can be made for a more sustainable mindset, the mostly negative tail of the industrial revolution and the current industrial problems glosses over the implications of the industrial revolution not happening. The two important facts to understand are that humans on average would like to work 4-6 hrs a day with 6-10 hrs of social time and, two, the current population of the world would be reduced by 30-40% if there were no industrial agriculture, which itself is a cutting edge product of the current industrial system. These are important because after the invention of stationary farming the workday went from 4 hrs to 14 hrs. The return to the 4 hr workday has been a constant pressure on humanity for the last 10,000 years pushing for new technologies and the exploitation of new resources. The vast majority of the world population in the 1600's, 1700's, 1800's and very early 1900's lived and died in small farming communities from work accidents, illness and violent conflict. The factory system offered an opportunity for the next generation to get off the farm and for many it actually worked. It wasn't only the malevolent force of greed that drove growth. It was also a dream of humanity's children working less.
@@ianbelanger7459 That's a really interesting comment! Thanks! I think one of the most crucial and challenging parts of moving towards a more sustainable world is in finding a way to cut jobs in unsustainable and wasteful sectors and funnelling those workers into filling the gaps left by shortening shifts in more essential sectors without treating it as an economic catastrophe (and without it becoming an economic catastrophe!). There are so many jobs that from both an objective-based and production-based standpoint are completely pointless, and literally only exist to pay a wage or to produce a return on investment without actually producing anything of real value - either just juggling money around, or producing e-waste for the sake of producing e-waste. If we had universal basic incomes and/or much more comprehensive social services, these jobs would no longer be necessary, and it would free up a massive section of the workforce while giving them the financial stability to take the time to retrain and fill gaps in more essential industries, such as sustainable agriculture, healthcare, and education. The problem is achieving this without causing an economic collapse. There's enough money and resources in the system, but due to the way the stock market currently works any major redistribution of resources and culling of non-essential industries WILL be seen as a contraction of the market, which could easily cause panic selling of stocks and shares resulting in an unnecessary economic crash. The key thing is finding a way of ensuring stability and trust while transitioning to what would essentially be an entirely reshaped economy. That being said, I'm not an economist so I don't know how to do that 😅
@@BambiTrout while categorizing some sectors as unsustainable or wasteful is a little harsh, the general idea that there are enough resources, but they are currently very poorly allocated and inefficiently used is spot on. It is also true that the actual changes needed to achieve a sustainable world are many, but conveniently an individuals doesn't have to solve the problem for everyone. One of the major advantages of a market based system is that it responds rapidly to profit pressure. This is because when pressure is placed on a market all the people participating or thinking about participating begin to look for ways to profit from the new condition. As a populous, we simply have to organize around actions and policies that apply that pressure. It is not easy to organize a community or national campaign, but it is far easier to make doing the right thing profitable than developing all the systems and processes to actually achieve those profits.
While you don't explicitly state it, you do kind of imply that we can solve this by personal action. Unfortunately the vast majority of this issue is corporate in scale, and even if every individual who has watched this video switched to 100% sustainable processes it would barely make a dent in the amount of damage almost any large company does. Yes we should become better informed, and it certainly is worthwhile to practice more sustainable living on a personal scale, but really the changes that need to be made are on the corporate and governmental scales, and unless we can achieve that, no amount of reuse and recycling will really actually matter.
Fat agree, we can do as much as we want and actually do save lots of unnecessary packaging n whatnot, but on the scale of everything, Big Corp is so so much heavier. Believing its enough if each individual reduces is probably harmful too because "i do my part already :)" doesnt pressure any corporations.
The fact is at the end of the day corporations only make products and services that people buy. If they know that their customers are willing to pay for environmentally better products, or that they won't tolerate certain wasteful practices, they'll change. If not they won't.
I work in a hardware store and always advocate for the products that get repaired and allow you to buy spare parts as opposed to brands where they just swap the item out. Many customers aren't happy when they hear a tool they have issues with is going to be away getting repaired for two weeks or so, but i always explain it to them, that the manefacturer doing this means the tool would cost more to replace, meaning it is (aside from the issue they might be having when coming in, which might be due to misshandling from the user side) better made. If you have something like a table saw that costs $200, and at the slightest fault the manufacturer can throw it away and replace it for the whole 3 year period, that means what you're buying likely costs like $20 to manufacture and use sub-par parts, methods, and once you're outside of their 3 year warranty, they often don't offer parts so the machine is junk after that. Its why i don't recommend sanders, because their pads do wear out over time, and that isn't a warranty thing, its like the sawblade on a saw getting worn. It needs replacing, and one of our brands don't even offer that. And i have to tell many customers who buy sanders which are even cheaper versions from other hardware stores when they are looking for the part that it doesn't exist. That's like the first thing a cheapo brand gets rid of. The expensive building, logistics, and staff needed to run a spare parts warehouse.
Quick note on Benzene. Yes it is Iligal in the US to use, though it is an extremely important chemical in organics. Pretty much all sugars have a benzene ring at their core for example. In industry, it's usually easy enough to use something like Toluine or Xylene and just break off the one oxygen that makes it legally not Benzene later in the process. The laws banning Benzene were made by people who fundamentally did not understand what they were regulating.
@@tylerfb1 +1 to this. On literally any topic from driving to shooting, legislators live in nonsense-world. My family run a law firm and I'll ask my dad to outline a case we're doing and just rub my temples because of how roundabout the laws are. Here in England, "handguns" are illegal, but carbines are not. They define the difference between "handgun" and "carbine" not through asking whether or not the weapon is a carbine or a pistol, but simply through how LONG the weapon is. So... a pistol with an absurdly long barrel is legal, and not a pistol, but a carbine. But it very obviously isn't. cbnmsdftghj Similar thing in the USA with the ATF and their rulings on braces, 80% finished receiver lowers, "short barreled rifles" and all the rest of that crap.
An interesting thing to mention (I think it's interesting at least) is that in my country (Sweden) *any* store selling aluminum cans, PET-bottles and certain glass bottles *have* to add a few Swedish crowns to the price. You can get that money back when recycling them at the store. I believe that in the case of glass bottles they don't even melt them and just wash, sterilize and refill them. I understand that this is only one out of many problems and a solution which is not perfect plus a few crowns is not much money but people tend to actually want to recycle the stuff with this system as while each can or bottle may not give you much money, together a bag of cans or bottles can be used to buy fika. Or you could think about it like this, "if I buy 6 cans of soda I can buy another one "for free" as long as I recycle them."
I made over 10 Euros in a month collecting cans and bottles people left at parks n stuff. Now seeing crushed cans makes me sad for the loss of the 10 cents I've experienced 😂
We do something similar in Canada with a recycling thing. You get charged some extra, so you are incestivized to recycle that stuff so you can get that money back.
I wish we had that system here in the UK. Not only does it incentivise the consumer to return packaging to be reused/recycled, it also provides a source of income. It's not much for sure, but when you're unemployed or homeless, any little helps- so as well as encouraging consumers to return the bottles and cans, I'd be very surprised if trash started disappearing from the streets- that empty can that someone tossed is now worth something, so people would collect them up. In fact, that's exactly what I did when I was unemployed. I'd keep an old shopping bag in my pocket, and whenever I saw a can I'd crush it and take it with me, to turn into an independent recycling scheme that paid cash for aluminium cans, among other items. I filled a 55 gallon drum with cans in my back yard, and when it was full I loaded it onto a wheelbarrow and took it down to the recycling place... only to find out they'd stopped taking cans a couple of weeks previously. At least all that junk was off the streets though- I just dumped it into my recycling bin and the local council got the cans instead.
About the México legislation you omitted a lot of facts of how the system works. I live here and it’s not a very good policy but it's not as bad as you make it sound. And by far is not as bad implemented as you make it out to be. How it works is that every car need to go for emissions inspection every semester to determine if the car is in good shape, based on the results you get a number the goes from 0 to 2 if you pass which determines the amounts of days your car needs to stay at home every week if the car is in perfect condition you can use it every day if it's not then you have to avoid using it one or two days a week. If the car does not pass the inspection, you can’t use it at all until it passes. Yes this is not a perfect policy and it has a lot of problems like corruption during the inspection, favoring people that have money to change cars more often. But the public transport here in Mexico City has improved considerably in the last 23 years since the program started.
that's better than PH! I thought it was the same thing but different reason (traffic is the reason here iirc) so certain numbers cant go out on certain days (unless you're a medical/law professional) my cousins family bought a second car to go around this so what was described in the vid felt more like it was describing us xd
Anal point about solder. All common solder is tin based. But as said, to prevent whiskers it must be alloyed with lead or silver. Lead is both cheaper and more effective. While lead-free solder is a nice marketing term, the more important consideration is for the people manufacturing the gadgets. Once manufactured, the lead escaping isn't really a concern.
Excellent video. Memorable thumbnail (I actually saw this recommended to me yesterday, watched it today because I saw a Tumblr post about plastic today and remembered it), efficient and effective use of examples, well rounded perspective of the topic, with appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos, and a good conclusion to capstone it all. You definitely are a designer, thats for sure :) Again, great work!
The key problem with repair programs for items like clothing is that the average person doesn't have the option to go without i.e. a jacket for the time it takes to get it fixed. If I need a jacket, and it'd take months to get the damaged one repaired or I could go to the store and grab a new one right now, it just doesn't make sense to sentence yourself to not having a jacket for that long. The same applies to a lot of products. In the modern world, everything shifts quickly. You can't just live without a phone, not in this day and age, you *have* to use something, and if your phone is already on the tail end of its intended lifetime, then it doesn't make sense to go without for days to weeks as it gets repaired when you can go and grab a new, better one right away. To say this is just convenience at play would be foolish at best. A lot of people simply can't afford to wait. It's not a choice any more than it is a choice to breathe. Sure, you could try not to breathe for a bit, but it won't go well for you. It'd take a much greater societal shift to prevent this from being an issue, and I don't see it happening. Nobody's gonna care that you can't get anywhere because you had i.e. documents or tickets on your phone in an app, nobody's gonna care that you can't pick up the phone because it broke, nobody's gonna care that you can't get anywhere on time because you're gonna catch a cold if you try to do it without the proper clothing, and if you try to explain, they'll just tell you to buy the thing you're missing and stop making a big deal out of nothing. I don't want to just say it's privileged to have the ability to choose more sustainable means of doing things, but... I can't help the feeling that in many ways it is. Your own life and that of your immediate family members takes precedence, if you or they are negatively affected by the choice to be sustainable like described above, then you simply choose not to be. Fix the state of the world that puts people up against a wall like this, and you'll give more people the ability to genuinely make the choice to be sustainable. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it sounds, and so we are where we're at.
I think a good way to address (part) of this is to also bring back the skills of fixing and mending your possessions. For example, my brother in law throws out his socks when he gets a hole in them and just buys new ones. I sew mine up a few times, until they are genuinely beyond repair. This doesn't take much time or even a lot of skill - I remember doing this since I was very little. My mum had a basket where we would put clothing in need of small repairs and we would just go through it when watching TV etc. It takes my family years and years to wear down an article of clothing because I put the effort to maintain out clothes, but that's because I know how and I care. Contrast that with companies like SHEIN, which use slave labour to mass produce plastic garments meant to be work a few times and thrown out. Of course the average person won't be able to fix the electronic components of a phone, although there are other solutions possible too - e.g. getting a simple loan phone while yours is in the shop, like with cars. That requires input by the repair companies though, which is unlikely to happen soon.
@@YumeOUtau This is a decent solution, but you also have to remember that it wasn't necessary until a few years ago, because in many parts of the world places existed locally where you could get your things fixed for cheap. Unfortunately, with how companies have been, and with covid, and a whole lot of other things, those places are a rarity now, while skills like you mention aren't realistic for everybody to have. I do like fixing things myself, though more on the mechanical side than garment side of things, but I'm neither great nor quick at it, and it's more of a physical limitation than lack of knowledge or willingness to learn. Another thing is that the purchase of good quality materials and tools for any kind of work like this, while usually spread out and helpful in saving you a lot of money in the long run, are still purchases, which deters a lot of us. In the end, I stand by my opinion that local businesses for repairing everyday items are the best solution. And that last part is why I decided to swap out my last phone frankly a while ahead of its time. I have it around, lying in wait, ready to fill in for this one, should anything happen to it. But... yeah, it's really not very fair to say that we should be responsible for everything. Big companies are the ones that create ecosystems where it's not feasible to have your belongings repaired, both through various practices like locking down software and hardware or making parts unavailable, and through their market practices that drive the places that used to perform the repairs out of business.
We need to revive the good local tailor shops. If my jacket is torn and a local tailor can patch it in a less than a day with halve the cost of buying a new one then I would go there 10/10
@@ofrund Half is generous, I've had some of my belongings repaired for fractions of the original product cost, even though I was more than willing to pay way more than I did. And yet these places are increasingly rare...
That’s true but I broke both phones I had last year and I’ve been waiting to get them repaired. I’ve missed many important calls bc of this but I’m still waiting until I can afford to fix them bc I have bigger issues like rent and food. It would be convenient to buy a second hand one for £50 but I’d rather pay out to get one of these fixed at a time. Idk if what I said made sense or was relevant but I agree with you for the most part
I appreciate that you pointed out that “renewable” doesn’t necessarily mean good for the environment. The sheep example was one I hadn’t heard of before. An example within the US is the growth of hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest destroying migratory fish populations. Dams are great as a cheap, renewable source of energy, but their presence is tanking salmon populations which are a key species within their ecosystem.
@Heather Petersen what's the point of lesser carbon emissions if there's not an ecosystem to help save? I'd argue climate change is more of a human existential threat that a planetary existential threat. The planet has gone through more catastrophic change and extinction events. The harm comes from how much we want to drag the rest of the planet down with us. Biodiversity is very important if we want the best chance for organisms to survive through climate change and our pollution. Not to mention that ecological collapse will also cause a disruption of fishing and agricultural industries so it does not exist in a vacuum.
@Heather Petersen I get the point you’re making, and yeah people do have to consider which is more important. The thing to keep in mind is that it isn’t just one species of fish being impacted, it is all migratory fish in the region. Anything that swims up river is impacted, and everything that relies on these fish is impacted too. It’s not just the animals that eat them, but a significant portion of plant life as well. Fish that spend a majority of their lives in the ocean then die in freshwater rivers have nutrients and minerals in their body not typically found in rivers that are released when decomposing, and the plants in the area require them to grow properly. Additionally, salmon in particular are incredibly important to the Native Americans in the region, both culturally and in their diet (of course everyone is different and not all indigenous people currently eat salmon as a staple part of their diet, but especially in more remote areas such as in Alaska it can be the main food source for some groups). Also, I’m not trying to say that hydroelectric power is bad in general, just specifically in this region. Unfortunately there are a lot of rivers in the Pacific Northwest so it is an attractive place to build dams. That was kind of an info dump lol, sorry about that. Short version is: all migratory fish populations get impacted, removing these fish from rivers could potentially collapse the ecosystem as a whole, and the fish are important to the Native Americans in the region both culturally and as a part of their diet.
@Heather Petersen Those are good points! I do agree that people do inevitably have to make choices and sacrifices when it comes to energy consumption. If it came down to the whole world vs a single ecosystem I’d probably choose the world, but realistically I don’t think it will come down to that. There are viable alternatives to hydroelectric power or even improvements on how dams work. That and there’s no way for dams to power the whole world, so alternatives are necessary regardless. Hydroelectric is a great power source now, but there are some significant issues with using it as a long term, global solution for renewable energy. I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we can tear down most dams in the Pacific Northwest, though the development of new technology and improving current technology gives me hope that we may be able to get to that point relatively soon. Though it’s not like every single dam needs to be removed. Unfortunately the driving factor behind using hydroelectric power has less to do with it being renewable and more to do with it being cheap. Large tech companies like Facebook have headquarter locations in the Pacific Northwest because the energy is so cheap, which also encourages the building of more dams to increase energy supply for a growing market. Unless a cheaper alternative arises, even if people develop better, less environmentally damaging ways of producing power large companies probably won’t switch over unless they’re forced to. That’s more so why I think it’s important to spread awareness about the impact of dams on the environment. It takes a long time for any sort of legislation or regulations to be enacted, so rather than waiting to push for change until after new technology has emerged it may be better to start now. Though it is hard to be optimistic at times.
Every time I see environmentalists talking about how planned obsolescence and unsustainable energy sources are ruining the planet. It seems reasonable and concerning. Then you people come out of the woodwork, talking about how Native Americans won’t get their salmon and the planet won’t be fit for life after humanity is extinct. It just makes me want to go out and buy a whole bunch of junk that I don’t need and, I don’t know, vote for fracking or something ‘cause god damn do I feel like I wasted a ton of worry on a whole big pile of nothing.
I actually worked for Patagonia for just under a decade across a bunch of different locations. I would say for every 1 repair that got logged in and sent to a repair facility, the staff at the store would make 5-10 simple repairs (zipper slider replacement, small patch etc) that didn't really ever get counted. Your main point, however, I think is still valid because by and large, a plurality of customer would not even entertain the idea of a repair in favor of demanding a replacement under the guarantee, usually stemming from an issue that was caused by ignorance on the part of the customer of how to properly take care of their garment. The outdoor industry has been hemmed into a corner by these unconditional guarantees and while appealing from a buyers standpoint, it becomes an opportunity for them to avoid making full use value of the things they buy.
You made a good point about the Patagonia repair program. The cost of shipping your clothing item for repair is about equal with just purchasing a new garment
One thing about tin solder and lead solder. Lead solder is mixed with tin 40/60 usually. So it's not pure lead, pure lead will not work for solder joints. But tin solder is mixed with other material and often each company has their own different combinations. Bad thing you can't use tour soldering iron on these different material because it will ruin it. Now that soldering iron is stuck using that solder. Dame goes for your device if you mix different tin solder together it 99% of the time will not work causing more issues. Lead solder work so well because it just is so universal, strong, and frankly easy to access since alot of hardware store have it. If we can find a non toxic solder I am all for it but as of now you can't trust tin solder for the many faults it has.
With leaded solder, the kneejerk reaction of "its toxic, don't use at all" is a problem. If its manufactured in a safe environment (fume hoods) and it is used is on components that aren't touched or even seen by the end user, use should be considered, especially if there justification over the alternatives.
@@mrbombastikalime9867 that's the thing, though, lead solder once set doesn't go ANYWHERE. Not for like 200 years. circuit boards today are constructed by machines, so no human even touches them until it's time to test them usually, and even when you melt the solder, it's at such a low temp that the lead cannot vaporize. There's no damage in using it. In fact, the fumes from the FLUX are far more damaging. Also, recycling lead is actually very very easy, and can be done as part of the process they do when recovering gold from PCBs.
9:47 : If you do make a video on Right to Repair, I think an important point to bring up is how most of the Right to Repair movement is only focused on hyper-mainstream consumer devices like phones and automobiles, and while it's great that there is attention on making such things repairable and allowing people to bypass the DRM on their software, that focus also means that any legislation focused on those issues is only making carve-out-exceptions for things like the DMCA's provisions on DRM anti-circumvention; rather then actually fundamentally revising the law on a wider basis. I think there is a serious concern that if right to repair legislation passes, legislators and activists may see it as a solved problem and that will weaken support for fully repealing laws making bypassing DRM illegal, and leaving software/hardware modifications for more niche products like game consoles or video games themselves in a bad situation (which is a major issue for games preservations or people making mods/fan patches for games).
I'm not sure "struggle" is the best description for corporations becoming eco-friendly. "Dragged" (kicking and screaming) might be a better word. A big chunk of the problem is democratisation of the problem. Big industry used a very convincing ad campaign to take responsibility for their waste from them and put it on the consumer. Partly true, but mostly not. We still adhere to this false narrative. I wish they'd apply the much vaunted AI algorithms to help solve some of the waste - perhaps in a hierarchical system of AIs that can build a big picture.
The customer is at fault. Because convenience is above all. I repair my things locally, even if it costs more than buying a new one. But most of my friends don't.
The customer has absolutely nothing to do with it. If I want my steak wrapped in butcher paper instead of plastic, I can go home and not eat. Guess what...that's not an option. I remember when you couldn't buy a steak wrapped in plastic and I've been complaining about this non-sustainable packaging practice since started. The same applies to other corporate practices. Moreover individual consumers cannot possibly stay informed of the plethora of procedures and materials, many of which are proprietary and or legally protected secrets, across every industry that they do business with. Assigning consumer responsibility is nothing more than corporate deflection
@@jeromewesselman4653 its still ultimately the customer's fault, but its harder to get people to change their spending habits then it is to have government intervention. The business aren't beholden to anyone but their customers, but they can get sued into changing their practices.
The reason why consumer spending habits are difficult to change is lack of available (and or perceived) options. Look at spending habits during the so-called pandemic. Consumers love McDonald's, right? Apparently so, until you consider that all the mom and pop restaurants were closed because indoor dining was deemed non-essential. Why weren't potential super-spreader centers such as Walmart CLOSED during 2020? If public health were truly at stake, they would have been, with smaller less-risky grocery and dining venues remaining open. And don't get me started about public drinking fountains versus plastic bottles. Once again, the safer option lost out due to top-down regulation (and propaganda), completely bypassing consumer choice. And while we're at it..."free" vaccines? News flash: nothing's free, but some things are heavily subsidized
Nice to see someone who understands that the changes aren't going to happen just by wishing for them. Your video was very well done and informative, thanks!
Even though I have some fundamental issues with this take, it's still one of the best pieces that deal with this issue. I very much appreciate the amount of nuance that you have managed to fit into this short video. I rarely comment to voice my appreciation, but this video deserves it.
Let me break down the paper bottle at 14:18 and why it _is_ actually a good option: You can't pack liquids in pure paper/carton, unless you coat it with organic wax, or paraffin wax, or a layer of plastic and/or aluminum foil. The only sustainable option here is a plastic coating made from bioplastic .. but is it? No matter which option you choose, you have to include a step of heavy chemicals to separate plastic and paper, before you can recycle the paper, or compost it or whatever. This one step of chemical separation makes paper bolltes insustainable. If you go for glass, you have to take it's weight into account and the amount of fuel it takes to transport this extra weight .. not to mention the cleaning and/or melting down of glass for its recycling: not sustainable. If you go for aluminum, it's light weight, but unlike glass, it corrodes, its corroded layer is abrasive, and aluminum itself is structurally weak and vulnerable to abrasion. Then there is the immense environmental damage caused by aluminum production (bauxite mining, electrolysis) and aluminum recycling (smelting with production of .5 t of toxic slag per 1 t of recycled aluminum). .. not sustainable .. Then there's plastics, which combine the advantages of glass with the advantages of aluminum. Biodegrad plastic isn't available in sufficient amounts, so let's stick with fossil plastic. You can't reduce the amount of plastic you use for a bottle arbitrarily, because thin plastic is either too brittle or too soft, and either way it becomes permeable to light, gases and vulnerable to temperature change, mechanical stress etc. Now consider the "paper bottle" in the video .. it combines the advantages of an actual paper bottle with the advantages of a plastic bottle. You get the strength and shock-absorption and temperature-insulation and UV-protection of paper, and you get the chemical resistance of plastic, and you get the light weight from both. But unlike with a paper-bottle layered with wax or plastic, you need no chemical separation step .. all you need is a human who recycles responsibly and separates the paper and plastic. With that low amount of plastic needed with this combo, a switch from fossil plastic to bioplastic becomes possible, even with the relatively low amounts of bioplastic that can be produced.
Yeah I know the paper bottle grossly oversimplifies the concept. That's pretty much what the whole video is explaining. But you need to get people to click somehow before you can educate them on the nuances.
_"aluminum recycling (smelting with production of .5 t of toxic slag per 1 t of recycled aluminum)"_ - I have never heard anything like that. I could be wrong here, but to my knowledge aluminium recycling has very little loss, certainly not 33%. Maybe you made a mistake with the numbers? Also, not sure why the slag would be particularly toxic, it should be mostly just aluminium oxide, which is harmless, shouldn't it?
@@Basement-Science Austrian ministry for environment: Udo Boin, Thomas Linsmeyer, Franz Neubacher, Brigitte Winter: Stand der Technik in der Sekundäraluminiumerzeugung im Hinblick auf die IPPC-Richtlinie. (Österreichisches) Umweltbundesamt
@@Basement-Science and I should add that the slag isn't loss of aluminium. The regain acutally is 90%, but the problem is all the chemistry it takes to get there. Starting with: "aluminium" we use typically isn't pure Al but some type of alloy with another metal (tin, iron, manganese, magnesium), because aluminium alone can't withstand much heat or mechanical stress. This is why the first step of aluminium recycling involves chemistry & sometimes electrolysis to remove the other metals, producing one big portion of that toxic slag I mentioned. This is also the step that causes those 10% loss in aluminium. Next is: now you have regained your pure aluminium .. first you need to replenish those 10% aluminium you lost with primary aluminium which comes with the disadvantages I mentioned already. Then you can work it or re-alloy it with something, and then process it into some shape. These processes use certain inorganic salts that cover the metal without mixing with it, which prevents the aluminium from oxidizing too much. When finished, these salts are rinsed off .. and you have another portion of toxic slag.
@@augustaseptemberova5664 I'll have to look into it in more detail, thanks. I knew that aluminium is always in various alloys, but I would have assumed that they would mostly get the right alloys out by mixing in the right types of recycleables. I know many scrapyards differentiate between several types of it, for example extruded aluminium. But I could also see that you cant always get the right mix since it's not going to be as easy as adding or removing carbon in steel.
Electrical engineer here Wanted to mention that at 8:37, there was a mention of most electronics using leaded solder. For the most part, leaded solder has disappeared ( not completely, but mostly) in nearly all electronics. Especially anything sold in the EU, it’s illegal to use leaded solder. RoHS compliance is huge, and the compliance refers to environmentally safer materials in electronics. Whether it is ICs, solder, connectors, etc., it is pretty much the default at this point. The US still does allow leaded solder, but it’s not used as often because of global requirements. But there is also other solders that are not mainly tin, such as low temperature solder (about 52% bismuth, 47% tin, and a little amount of gold). I’ve been using it lately as it makes soldering and removing components much easier and given bismuth is close to lead but not toxic (as far as we know), it shares some similar properties. Curious to see if we find other solders that replace the 95% tin solders. Though there are tons of other solder alloys too, but I don’t work with them so I can’t comment on it.
Back in my day, we learned Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in that order for greatest effect. Reduce the things you own/buy, reuse what you own for other purposes, and when you can't anymore, recycle them. That simplicity made sense to me, so I have been living my life by it and aside from the hopeful environmental benefits, it made my life much simpler and enjoyable (especially finding reuse examples). Challenge of course is, over time humanity has gravitated towards the opposite (increasing consumption, throwing away things that can be reused for other purposes, and not recycling) so how do we deal with either reversing that back or dealing with the complex effects which are much harder? The video of course gives some ideas on the latter, but could the former still be explored as a viable option? Perhaps we have progressed too far into consumerism as a backbone of society that it's impossible to reduce our consumption without severe job losses and lower economic growth. It just feels like making everything sustainable is an insurmountable obstacle given human nature, but changing enough minds to reduce consumption of the worst offenders would go a long way with less effort. Take water bottles for example. I see folks everywhere filling their carts with those 40-packs of water bottles for $5 on their weekly shopping trip. If more people knew how good and inexpensive filters have gotten nowadays and how easy it is to just filter their water, not having to deal with all those plastic bottles and spending $240+ a year on water, more would make the switch, reducing demand and forcing companies to adjust by not making as many bottles and coming up with better solutions, such as making and selling increasingly better filters instead.
Unfortunately people don't want to change. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" had become a shockingly controversial expression now'n days. People dissociate themselves from the system, reject agency so they can reject responsibility. Now it's all "the companies need to change". And sure that's true. But when that change does happen people complain that their paper straws or simple packaging feels cheap, or that an electronic device doesnt have a new iterations this year for them to buy. I hear it all the time "why am I being punished for THEIR waste". Nobody wants to change, and nobody wants the natural result of the companies changing for us. Too many only accept environmental measures while they believe the measure in question will have no inconvenience on their life.
@@Ash_Yu Well said. The part that always gets me though, is that following the Reduce > Reuse > Recycle method actually is MORE convenient in most cases. People just don't want to change as you mentioned. Just like the water example: imagine people that haul that heavy package of 40 water bottles every week, putting into the cart, taking out into the car, and from the car to the home. They can just get a filter and never get water again, but week after week they torture their backs and wallet by buying water. Another easy example is moving. Most of us have to move to another place at some point in our lives. Having less stuff makes that process way easier and convenient. So many people dread moving and spend weeks stressing over it, packing, hiring movers, etc. because they have too much stuff. If they simply had less stuff (Reduce), the process would be so much easier and stress free.
@@travellingslim What about in a job interview? If two people have similar credentials one has his own clothes the other has obviously adapted second hand, the guy with wardrobe money gets the job. How about the water bottles youre hung up on?(me too... like wtf its water, why do you need a single packaged serving? cant you just drink some?) Are those purchases of convenience or purchases out of unvalidated fear of the unsanitary natural world? I cant know for certain but i often assume the second one of most folks. Its the same reason people cant buy a whole chicken and quarter it themselves but will for some reason spend that same price on a package of too many drumsticks for "barbeque day". Much like a water filter the whole chicken doesnt come out of a package theres a personal effort step before you get the thing you want. We have excused convenience that was actually making people lazy and we have lauded people for the very mild effort of showing up to a job. I think weve become detached from reality over it too.
@@zachweyrauch2988 I'm not an extreme hippy or anything like that :) For the clothes, you don't need to have ragged hand-me-downs. I'm not saying don't buy new. My response in an RRR sense would be instead of buying a whole wardrobe of dress clothes, just have one or two white buttoned shirts and a pair or two of nice slacks (or the equivalent for women). Not only would you be able to use it for any job interview, but you can also multi-use it for any other semi-formal event where you need a nice shirt and pants. Sure, if you're going for a job on Wall St. or a law firm or something like that, yeah you'll probably need to buy a nice new suit if you don't have one already, but the RRR takeaways would be to just buy what you need, try and reuse it for other purposes (like a date, funeral, wedding, event, etc), and when you're done with it, you can probably donate it to charity if it's not too rough. Clothing isn't as much of a pain point anyway in my view compared to other things. There's already a culture of hand-me-downs, donating old clothes to charities, thrift stores, etc. Perhaps a point would be that some people buy clothes that they never wear, so it's wasteful there, but there are certainly bigger fish to fry in the efforts of RRR.
A wood mouse or metal mouse would be amazing, no one is going to make that since it's far more expensive. The feel of metal and rubber or good quality wood is unmatched with anything.
Great job pointing out the complexity with figuring out whether a product is sustainable or not - eg when companies deliberately trying to mislead their customers. It's definitely a symptom of our massive appetite for consumption like you mention and we all have the personal responsibility to buy less.
If I could have something repaired as easily and cheaply as buying a new jacket I would. Even a local repair is a lot more expensive than buying something completely new. Cost is the BIGGEST factor to adopting anything progressive.
Try taking a course in sewing or watch some tutorials online. A small hole or a button that's fallen off is relatively easy to learn how to do. Might not be the neatest but you'll get better. Stuff like replacing a zip is more of a sewing-machine job, but a rip, tear, hole etc is very mendable with a needle and thread. Also there's a saying "A stitch in time saves nine", meaning that taking a couple minutes to sew up a tiny hole would stop it growing and becoming a huge job.
Almost any dry-cleaner also does alterations and repairs on clothing that are more affordable than buying new. Getting a zipper completely replaced or a lining fixed costs less than. $15-20 here in Los Angeles,which is so much cheaper than buying a $60-100 new jacket. The average sewing machine or vaccuum repair costs hundreds of dollars less than purchasing new. It’s just not convenient and might require actually speaking to a human being, which so many of us avoid now. We want to click and receive something in 2 days.
@@Hippidippimahm i think assuming that most are buying the $60-$100 jacket is the issue. most (american) people can’t even afford that. the rare times i buy myself clothes, i head straight to walmart since it’s all that i can afford. i’ve tried thrifting but i can’t always find things that fit me or prices have been driven up by the thrifting trend. it makes way more sense to the average minimum wage worker to go buy another $15 jacket than it is to spend that on material or service to repair an older jacket. especially when you factor in time. most working people spend most of their time working and it’s much easier to make a 5 minute stop to buy another jacket than to have to wait for a repair or do the repair yourself (plus the amount of time it may take to learn how to do the repair). while i’ve said that it’s “easier” multiple times, some people just don’t have a choice
If you use Google and go into a shop tailored (haha) for tailoring repairing and sewing, of course its going to be expensive. You are walking into the place design for it. But instead if you have a good social network, you can find people who repair holes, buttons, tears etc much much cheaper! Because to them it's a side hustle for some cash not a major business model. Better yet learn to do basic clothing repair at least if it's too far gone you cant fix it, you have the option to recycle it
One issue is that with technical and material evolution, we've become accustomed to certain standards in products, and products that consist of so many materials that make them impossible to separate and recycle - even if the infrastructure to recycle the materials would be present (which it sorely isn't). It is also incredibly difficult to design and develop certain products made with only one material. Sure, t-shirts can be made entirely of cotton, but when you reach performancewear or outerwear, it becomes a serious challenge. Where I work, we tried to redevelop what we perceive as one of our simplest technical garments that we currently sell into a mono-material product for the sake of recyclability. We realised at the early stages of development that certain material swap-outs simply don't exist yet, and removing technical components reduces the function drastically. I believe that many industries like the textile and apparel industries are hoping and waiting for technocentric innovation to save us, but sadly innovation and commercialisation of it are outpaced by the consumerism that is happening now. If you look around you, you'll likely see that most of the items surrounding you contain a mix of materials that can't be separated for recycling even if you tried. It is miraculous what we can create by combining materials - what is not fantastic is that most products aren't built to last.
@@user-gu9yq5sj7cMixed fabric can indeed be used for certain things like stuffing and sometimes rags as you say, however, it's downcycling rather than recycling. Currently, more things can be downcycled rather than recycled, and there is only so much demand for scraps or downcycled materials.
Hey cool, just discovered another super-quality channel! Whilst the images shown in the video may not always directly correlate to what you are saying, the script is absolutely bonkers. You definitely put immense time of research and thinking into that video. It basically feels like a mixture between podcast and video, with the topic being shown extremely well, with all aspects worth knowing explained easily understandable. I'm impressed!
The big problem with electronics isn't that the circuits can't be repaired, but that the software itself is designed to not be updateable by anyone but the manufacturer. Many manufacturers these days only support devices for several years. For example, the Pixel 3a by Google was released 2019 and will reach end-of-life in May 2022. What this means is that there will be no more security updates, so once a sufficiently severe vulnerability has been found, you can't use your phone safely anymore. Yes, there exist third-party projects like LineageOS, but whether or not a specific phone will be supported is up to luck. While the Pixel3a *is* supported, the Pixel C tablet is not.
its the other way around isnt it. Security updates are pushed through android long after devices reach end of life. Regular updates are stopped, but security updates for most devices are shipped even to EoL devices. In this case it's through the Android OS, not through googles fork of android being used on Pixel.
@@wafu6058 except that most Android phones never receive those updates unless the manufacturer and/or service provider decides to, unlike iPhones which Apple will send to all (supporting) devices.
I'm nowhere near 0 waste or anything like that, I have really tried over the past year to abandon that consumer mindset though, rather my motto is buy it once, buy it right. I have started to extend this to some of the areas I struggle with most like clothes. I found my style and build my wardrobe with a lot of care and concern, making sure that they wont just fall apart, I've completely abandoned fast fashion after lots of disappointment. I've gotten a lot more serious about making things too, I have been building up my knitting skills and making my own wool sweaters, the wool I buy is made it the same province and sold at the dollar store so I feel really happy about that. Repairing clothes too, I bought a moth eaten cashmere sweater from the thrift store and embroidered patches over every hole. The less we support this model, the more self sustaining we can become and the more we learn to reject consumerism, the better we can be.
That’s awesome! I think people being thrifty is important too, and I haven’t seen that advertised a lot. If people put enough thought into it, they can reduce their own waste a lot, even other people’s waste too. There’s all kinds of ways to repurpose packaging and such. I’m a pretty big eco-brick maker. (If y’all haven’t heard of it, feel free to look it up, it’s pretty neat) I don’t save just my plastics for them, but friend’s plastic too. I’ve even had people see me making them at church and leave plastic for me instead of tossing it. I also pick up plastic from sides of roads because there’s a place for it to be contained and serve a purpose too (you make a different kind of eco-bottle to contain dirty plastic) There’s no recycling program here, so I save every can we get too. I use them to start seeds, washing them nicely between uses so they last longer. Idk about the recycling rate for cans anyway? Like, how many of them get recycled versus just going to a landfill. By no means will this alone save the world or anything and it’d be cool for packaging to become biodegradable and everything, but these materials already exist now, and I like using them. Idk if that mindset makes any sense, I’m just a crafty and poor urban kid where recycling programs don’t exist djfjfhffhcj
Benzene is carcinogenic, but it is like a mother of all organic compounds in a way and CAN NEVER be avoided and NEED NOT BE - it's like a railway terminus. It's just that you've to make sure that the end products are purified enough to not have residual benzene above safe limits. Also, one of the biggest things required is localization of processes. Like the saying goes, if everyone had to do everything, everything would become automated in days. So, also, if everything is done locally, and in a distributed manner, not only would customization, maintenance, and even, need based production be easier, but also, will things have less environmental impact. And it does need lots of social and technological change, one of them being people ditching new age and old age religion/superstition, for practising STEM, the other being throwing out the casteist division of labour and lack of dignity of some labour, and finally, an economy based around needs, using mutual-aid (sharing), over trading & speculative accumulation. ;)
"Like the saying goes, if everyone had to do everything, everything would become automated in days." If everyone had to do everything, we would revert back to living as subsistence farmers, after a short and chaotic bout of mass violence where the vast majority of the population dies fighting over the now much less productive land. A small fertilizer factory simply can't create the same amount of fertilizers with the same cost (in other words, the same amount of inputs) as a large one. This is called economies of scale. By building larger, we can build more efficiently, using less resources to make more. It's not just a matter of wanting to build bigger. The laws of physics dictate it. When we stop doing that, we will either need to give up our standard of living and reduce our population, or use significantly **more** natural resources than we do today.
Man it is really refreshing to hear takes like this. You rarely see sustainability videos that are at all pleasant to watch, typically they use guilt or insults to just bully viewers into agreement. It is nice to see a guy being reasonable and enjoyable to watch. Subscribed.
Buy products with repair programs and make sure to use them. I had a Jansport framed pack that lost a large irregular thumb screw. Over a decade later I emailed about if they has any, they asked for a picture and Machined me a bunch of extras and mailed them out. I still use that pack and since it has been everywhere with me it means a lot to me now.
it's also be possible to plan the economy in such a way as to disincentivize planned obsolescence and single use unrepairable products on both the corporate end and the consumer end. for example: getting my car fixed shouldn't cost more than buying a new car
I really love your emphasis on actually looking at the consequences of eco-focused policies. I feel like so often people will support some supposed eco-friendly product or law without thinking it through. It's important to recognize that a label isn't reality and we always have to look more closely at the true effects to determine whether something is actually doing what it claims
Well, there is tin already in leaded solder. It is typically 60% tin, 40% lead. Lead-free solder has about the same amount of tin (typically), but it has other additives instead of lead (silver, copper, antimony, bismuth, cobalt, etc.)
Most lead-free solder is 99% tin. The only somewhat common exception is Bismuth-Tin solder with around 40% tin, but it's very specialized and not used in manufacturing to my knowledge.
It's worth a mention that you don't necessarily have to ship things away for repair. If you have a local Patagonia store you can just drop it off there. Ofc it does take time, and still ends up shipped somewhere else, but I don't find it terribly inconvenient compared to printing off return labels etc
0:16 "[you'll be able to] make better decisions around how we might design a more sustainable future." okay, here's my question: *the majority of people watching this won't be "designing" anything but rather, likely, consuming. so what should we take from this then?* and I don't wanna hear "vote with your wallet" or anything similar. that's the obvious answer most commonly given but without any thinking ahead. more "sustainable" products are only environmentally sustainable. which is obviously good & should be strived for by all. the problem is that they often cost more for less than what you get otherwise, especially up front, and there are still too many people who cannot afford it.
Great video ❤️ One note: At some point you mention digital solutions as a sustainable alternative. Even though I think that is true in some cases, we should stay concious of data centers. They use huge amounts of energy and also emmit a lot if heat. Digital solutions still use resources ;). Besides that awesome video!!
This is very true. However, they are better primed for future sustainability. As using something “on the grid” largely uses resources that are consumed more efficiently. It also allows for a larger solution to be handled and upgraded easier. It’s far more affordable for a ton of people to have a small tax hike and cover an electric conversion of an existing plant than it is for each one of those same individuals to install windmills, solar panels, or another form of green energy generators at their homes and also deal with the yearly financial upkeep. The heat is a very good point, as data centers do generate a TON of heat. However, there are data centers out there which use the waste heat to cut their heating costs by pumping the heat into their offices and surrounding communities, and some are even testing the use of a heat capture device to turn it into straight up usable energy (which helps keep it more sustainable in the summer when hot air isn’t needed.)
@@benjaminorr1823 interesting, you seem to know a lot more than me! I think its great to hear, and not unsurprising, that people are already improving these systems. I just wanted to highlight that nothing is for free and we always impacting the planet in some way. Thanks Benjamin ;)
Yes, it is a complicated topic. One that is easy to get overwhelmed in trying to figure out the right things to do. The current model of more is probably the worst thing that the consumer and the manufacturers embrace
13:00 no, truth is that there just is not enough time in the day to waste on such things. Perhaps if we weren't forced into working so many hours by wider society there would be more time for activities like clothing repair, but do you really think anybody is going to bother with it when there is about 3 hours of free time to spend on a weekday?
The effort this guy is putting in the extra mile of explaining basic business strategies such as for example fooling your customers and the "concept" of cause and effect in for example legislation is amazing me
Thank you for some even more insight on this issue. Something a lot of people don't actually know about me is that multiple professionals in the design field actually wanted me on the industrial design track in college. I declined and went with architecture (which still does have its problems) primarily due to that feeling of impending doom. People like you do give me some hope in the field of design, especially as someone looking to enter the field.
I really like how you've got both sides of the argument in one video, most of the ones I've come across are very "don't do this because it's bad for the environment, end of story" or "do this because its the best material, end of story". Great video, well done!
He's limiting his analysis to a capitalist-market frame of reference which imposes some (I'd argue) insurmountable constraints on the problem of creating a sustainable economy AND a desirable society, but for confining oneself to that frame, he did a pretty good job.
I think the part about scale is interesting. I've seen some LCA's that show that huge companies on the other side of the world can make products with less carbon footprint even considering logistics. That's because scale makes things efficient. Sure a big ship runs on lots of fossil fuel, but they carry millions of products and always fill up their vehicles so split up on each product it's not much. Compare that to a small, local company that runs half filled cars to the postal office and you'll be a lot worse off. And in both cases the biggest output of carbon is likely the trip to the store to buy the thing if you run a fossil fueled car. That artisanal cloth in the beginning of your video that took 2 weeks to produce is likely worse for the environment than a thousand cloths in an automated factory where each cloth takes 60 seconds. At least if it's people with equal standard of living producing the cloths. And for Patagonia and their repair-scheme, I assume their production is really efficient. How much carbon is put out by shipping the garment to a repair shop, a person working on it for a while and then shipping it back? Single part handling is a lot less efficient, both for economy and sustainability, compared to full scale efficiency.
Yes, excellent thoughts in here. Thank you for pointing them out. I think they are important to take into account when trying to design a circular economy or a more sustainable system.
One of the problems of scale is just that: Scale. I agree with what you are saying, but it relies on the consumption that we have. Many products would just not exist were it not for the wasteful way that we rigged our system. However, these products help push scale in many ways - if we removed 90% of the ships on the world's oceans, the ships would be harder to fill, the companies would be smaller and probably forced to having more, smaller, less efficient ships, and so on. I would agree with you to some extent, but also point out that a large part of the problem is in over-consumption, not in the efficiency of manufacturing. Much of what we do, we could continue doing it, if we just did 10 times less of it.
@@arildedvardbasmo490 The thing about over-consumption though, is how can we say what is "just right" consumption? What most people 50-100 years ago would call over-consumption is the base level of life quality we expect today. I don't believe that lowering consumption is the right way to handle the future. I don't even think it's feasible. People wouldn't accept it, there would be too much pushback. I believe that if we want the future to be sustainable we need to keep improving life quality while making things more efficient and cleaner. When the more sustainable thing gives a better quality of life than the less sustainable thing, that's when we make real progress.
Logistics can be made carbon neutral, at least in theory. There is no way to make sourcing the materials for everything we currently manufacture entirely sustainable - producing and using less is worth pursuing, even if it makes the logistics less efficient.
full scale efficiency is the enemy of sustainability. Jevon's paradox perfectly explains why this is the case. The planet does not care what the carbon emission is per capita. The planet only cares what the total carbon emission is. Like it or not, learning to consume less collectively is the way moving forward.
The simple fact is we need to make education accessible to everyone, making manufacting sustainable and progress takes knowledge, and channels like this show people like to learn, but education needs to become free and open to all so we can make more jobs that keep things sustainable and take advantage of automation
“Free”. Not necessarily against what you are saying but it would be nice if we could reach this new open utopia you mention by being honest about what “free” programs are. There is not free lunch just trade offs and many of the of the great “free” stuff introduced prior is a handicapping the youth today with obligations we never benefited from.
@@cendrizzi universally accessible* it would pay for itself exponentially because of reasons explained in the comment. People would be able to take jobs and expand the economy rather than syphon it like it does now.
Of all the useless stuff we learn at school, we could have at least have teachers who studied economics and ecology or similar, to open up a new school subject.
I don't know where you live but education is already accessible here in the US. Every child up to about the age of 18 can go to a free government run school. After that it's up to the person to decide if they want to invest in their education.
@@agisler87 you already acknowledged that you know I'm talking about university level education so you can drop the intentionally misinterpreting my points act. But, as you know, we already made public school available (and all but mandatory) for everyone, the same should apply to university/college level. Student debt can be canceled any time, with the only consequences being republicans doing whatever they can to stop it and then make all college free and open to everyone who meets educational requirements (and can if they need to through free GED programs etc) and then it will pay for itself almost immediately and return the investment exponentially through a highly educated workforce and job creation
8:40 correction: solder is made up of a 60/40 mixture of tin and lead. In lead-free solder, it is normally made up of a lower conc. of gold or copper (normally 99.3% tin, 0.7% copper)
I'm not yet a designer... but it feels as if sustainability, quality and affordability are in some form of triangle where you can only truly acomplish 2 objectives in a design. I would for the benafit of the environment personally value quality and sustainability over affordability although I feel most other consumers wouldn't, so would it be fair to argue this is a social issue, as much as a greed driven, issue caused by large organisation? Perhaps environmental issues are moreso influenced by the demand of consumers and for a change to truly be made an international shift in mindset must be made? I'm sure large organisations are also a massive driving factor, just thought I'd share my unexperienced outlook !
Would love for there to just be high quality sustainable products but indeed it isn't that simple. Price is one of the most important factors unfortunately. Even though lot's of the time cheap means there will be higher costs long term. Much like the environmental issue itself, short term it works and is cheap, but long term it will cost.
You're right. Corporations only value the high output of cheap products because that's what makes them the most profit today. If Consumers changed their priorities, then corporations would be incentivized to make stuff that matches those priorities. If we're willing to pay more for sustainably produced products, they'll make more sustainable products. This gets complicated by many things such as deceptive marketing like that 'paper' bottle in the thumbnail, but is still something we can move toward. Vote with your wallet.
@@syndaquil4838 going forward as a consumer I think I'd value sustainability even more so, I think another way the consumer can have in impact moreso than the supplier is in resale where people could choose to buy pre owned clothes over fast fashion or donate their old clothes etc. Perhaps more important than buying more but environmentally consciously is to buy less and make more of what we already have.
One way some countries address the issue is having the companies take back the product at end of life. If they are then responsible for dealing with the waste (note the country also puts a cost on waste) then the situation improves as it adjusts the equation if waste is included In It by default. I was thinking about Germany in this instance, they are fairly progressive with this. Not ideal as I don’t think it applies with good sold outside the country, but certainly a concerted try to fix the issue. I personally found the title of this video either clickbait or misleading. To say they “can’t” is to give an out in a situation where they do have some control. Some go as far as to distort social discussion though ads and lobbying to a degree that is generally considered perverse. The ‘recycling’ of plastic has been one. Downcycling is usually the best case scenario for plastics and that’s if they even get reprocessed as it appears to have been a crock in most cases. So in these cases the plastic producers and petro chemical companies have gone out of their way at great expense to obfuscate the situation. Sure it may be true a usable solution may cost more, but to willingly drive the discussion in a way that actively thwarts it solving is something a number of companies/industries have done is just gross and needs to be addressed.
I think about these systems like a tug of war. Initially designers make many simple decisions that are always good. Use recycled aluminum instead of virgin aluminum because it's cheaper and more energy efficient to produce than mining ore. Easy win. That's the part of a tug of war where the lines are getting pulled tight. But then we run out of easy decisions and we start fighting on every decision. Do we use durable but toxic lead solder or safe but fragile tin solder? It's not an easy choice anymore, we've already made all the easy decisions where everybody wins. Now we need to decide if we want to use more expensive materials and manufacturing techniques in order to make expensive but less polluting products, or if we prioritize getting our products into more people's hands. Getting cheaper products into more people's hands sounds like simple greed in the context of luxury items like phones and clothes, but what about food? There are a lot of people who don't have the resources to eat organic and fair trade with every meal. So is a farmer who uses lots of glyphosate in RoundUp Ready fields instead of hiring teams of laborers to hoe the field really making a bad decision when it allows him to sell his products for cheaper, allowing poor families to buy more food for their limited income?
I do enjoy Mexico's concept to re-use 2 litter coca cola bottle's as well as glass soda bottles of any brand. The same would be so useful for various products such as refillable soap/shampoo stations the way we have the 5 gallon water refill stations. I imagine the same could apply to other items such as expensive perfumes where you bring in your glass container & get it refilled for a lower price. While the company may lose the initial price of a full sale, they'd gain a number of reoccurring customers that enjoy the scent and aren't as inclined to buy a new brand/container from someone else for more than they have to pay for the refill.
Perfume is luxury, so they have to be expensive and differentiate from common item. "Refilling perfume is for pleb. Our perfume is sold in single use bottles." Different example - clothes are clothes, they should keep you covered. So why buy 100, 200, 500 dollar designer t-shirt over 5 dollar one? There's no increase in quality that justifies the purchase. It's a status symbol, that's it. Most poor people don't want to seem poor so they will do and buy what elites buy. Solution: make elites live like normal people, so there's no difference between upper and lower class. Unfortunately this goes against human nature and humanity itself, so it will never happen.
I think the obvious answer to striking a balance between our "need for the new" and the need to take care of our planet is an intense but casual customization. I don't want to replace my computer sooner than I have to, because I've customized certain aspects of it to my liking, and I'll have to recustomize whatever I replace it with. I don't want to throw out my wardrobe and start anew, because I've selected pieces that suit my specific aesthetic, and I've tailored them to better fit me. If you're attached to it, and it's serviceable, you're less inclined to just toss it in the bin. And if you want "new," then you can just alter what you already have.
You would have to replace your computer, because new one is faster, has larger RAM and in general is better. Same applies to everything else - fashion changes.
@@ceu160193 no. At most, 80% of users will only need a new CPU over a period of decades. And most them not even that. For most you replace your PC when it breaks in a way you cant fix. Although fashion can and does change that’s societal fashion and an individual may find a style and stick with to the grave.
@@randombrit13 Then that individual becomes outcast. Social norms demand you to wear clothes up to current fashion. As for PC - mine is self-assembled, but enough people do not have expertise in that area.
@@ceu160193 what type of 2012 Disney channel high school do you think we’re living in? Societal norm in the developed is to embrace and celebrate individuality including unique style. And no I don’t believe you made your own pc when you can make comments like above that blatantly display your ignorance of PC building norms and culture.
@@randombrit13 There is no PC culture in my country, luckily. And I did assemble my computer myself, because it's cheaper, than paying specialised firms.
I just want to point out that at the early beginning of industrialization, mechanized agriculture changed the western world forever. Most people had been farmers for generations, the occurrence of imported cheap mass produced grain made that way of living very difficult in a lot of European countries, with their tiny subdivided plots it was hard to compete and it drove a lot of people into cities and factories trying to survive. It also coincides with a lot of famine and emigration out of Europe. Living and working conditions in those cities were overcrowded, unsanitary unhealthy and miserable. Child labor, minimal rights, excessive working hours.... It took a long time and a lot of fighting for conditions to actually improve. They key point here is that it got way worse before getting better, there was no way back to the way of living before industrialization, most people had no choice.
“Companies want to earn money now!” Not unlike a certain youtuber, who first spams you with a paid by logo, for then to mention his patreon account, and completes the tour de force ad-bombing by cheekily throwing in an ad read before you know what just happened. And let’s not forget the pinned comment under the video. Chef’s kiss
It all boils down to one thing: money. As long as environmentally friendly methods are more expensive than other legal methods of manufacturing, it will be foolish for any company to use them. They are for profit companies, so wasting money on stuff they don't need to makes no sense. A CEO that wastes millions on having his portrait painted on all walls of the factory by some artist faces criminal charges. Same for a CEO that spends the same amount of money on some not legally mandated pro-environment stuff that cannot be explained as advertising. This is where laws come into play. Lawmakers can legally make laws that don't care about profits. And when those laws apply the same for all companies, no company will have an advantage or disadvantage. It's only when laws apply unevenly that we see problems. If you make all books more expensive, the competition between publishers won't be affected, but consumers will go to the movies instead, killing the book industry as a whole. And this is why companies spend billions to influence lawmakers wherever they can. (And in countries where political parties have no income other than what companies give them, this effect is see the most. Just compare environmental law making in the US and EU.)
There is no such thing as an "even" law. All laws create winners and losers. If you require LED lights for example, you just transferred money artificially into companies that make and install LED lights, taking it away from every other company. You've damaged one industry to benefit another. Nothing is free and every government action involves violent transfer of wealth from someone to someone else.
there will always be an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to these kinds of laws. even if these theoretical laws effect all companies equally in their impact on an individual unit of some environmentally unfriendly product, that doesn't mean the overall effect on every company will end up the same. For example if there was a new law making it more costly to run a gas station, companies like Exxon would likely be fine, but a mom and pop gas station may not be able to handle those added costs and would close down. The most common way monopolies form now is through this very same process, by getting their competition effectively outlawed because it is too expensive for anyone to start a competing business. In the end all that will result is that because of less competition the average citizen will be harmed, the big oil companies will be even better off, and the environment will be no healthier.
It's not just laws, even our economic systems are flawed. There are so many different ones, social credit, capitalism, and socialism are just a few. But these do absolutely nothing to help our planet. We have to learn a lot before we can truly fix this situation. And their is just too much to learn and fix.
re: 19:38 Mexico City and unforeseen consequences with laws. The difference between a law on when you can drive and a new public transit system is that a law regulating behavior is immediately enforceable and requires little government investment, basically free for the tax payers and governments; Its just a rule. A robust public transit system costs millions of tax dollars and years to build. It should be done, but there are clear reasons why rules are an easier and perhaps more frequently chosen path. Great video, thanks for sharing it.
I don't agree that scaling up production in ego-driven. As you said, we live under a system that puts profit over everything, large scale production is more efficient and therefore cheaper (per item produced). That in itself is an objective and everpresent reason to scale up. Also due to inflation and competition there are only the two options for companies: actively growing or demishing. Even if most of us are completly aware and willing to do something about the climate crisis it only needs very few that aren't to ruin all the effords made by others. Those that don't care would be able to produce cheaper, make more profits than others and therefore dominate the competition. The only way to get to a completely sustainable mode of production is to completely abolish the profit motive.
The problem with this is that it _simply isn't true_ . Economies of scale do not say that bigger is better; they say they is an optimal size for everything (depending on many global and local variables, of course). When you break those monopolies apart, you'll get _more_ profit out of them, not less. When Standard Oil was forced to break into multiple companies, _each_ of those companies had bigger profits than Standard Oil as a whole. When France started to rebuild after WW2, they went with the "bigger is better" mindset; very soon, they realized how stupid that is - when e.g. a steel mill would be more efficient while it's running... but then racking up loads and loads of waste when it was being maintained, for example. And even worse, the bigger you are, the more power you inevitably get in the government, which allows you to gain unfair advantages, become "too big to fail" and all the good old illnesses. The whole economic theory the modern world is built on is a bunch of lies made by dishonest academia and happily abused by the people who get to the new money first. Inflation is _not_ a good thing. Deflation is _not_ a bad thing. Prices change because the world changes. Pretending as if that weren't true is a big chunk of how we got where we are today. When the central banks were created to "tame" inflation, sure, they made inflation more incremental. But money lost value year after year, and in a decade... Where does the new money come from? Someone sold the lie that making mortgages "cheap" (i.e. low interest) would make it easier for people to own their homes. But what really happens? Exactly, the prices rise to compensate; the supply isn't very flexible. Low mortgages with high interest rates were exchanged for ridiculously large mortgages with low interest rates. Which means you don't have a chance of buying a home without a mortgage in the west - and you end up paying a mortgage for half of your life. And all that time, that money "created" by those loans slowly filters through society, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. If the managers really put profits above everything... we would actually often be better off, as awful as that sounds. Sadly, they are even more consumed in the wild consumerism, even more obsessed with their ego and appearances, of _course_ they need a brand new car every two years - that's how everyone knows they're successful, right? It's not really profitable squeezing the last ounce of work out of your employees, but they do it anyway - because they don't care about the company, they care about being able to say "See how I motivated my reports to work extra hours?" I've switched to six hour workdays; I get much more work done in those six hours than I ever did in eight. We need to stop the obsession with "work long and hard". It often hurts productivity. In the end, the managers will always find something to fill your time with, regardless of how stupid or backwards it is. Honesty. There's where it all starts.
Finally, a video that dosen't berate the viewer and tell them they are evil. A video that doesn't act like "oh it's so easy, just buy and use the more expensive and less reliable products".A video that actually gets how hard it is to be ecofriendly.
13:18 "Repairing an item meant printing out a shipping label, packaging the jacket safely and waiting for UPS to come pick your package..." Imagine how the other 90% live, there is no UPS to pick up your package you have to wait in line at the post office, shipping is probably not free and most likely costs half the price of the item.
Another great video John. You put a LOT of valuable information into a short video defining this critical feature of design as a mindset. One thing that is clear or should be clear to any designer entering the field is that design is becoming more of a mindset than a profession. This is how it should be - whereby the thought process, the flow of ideas, and the flexibility to use a wide range of skills and awareness becomes more important than the skill to craft an object - one often predicated on false needs. This is how design was before industrialization; more a philosophy of crafting. Industry triggered mankind's addiction to scale. As @Quixotic End indicates via new generations. we can make the paradigm shift to new frontiers leveraging other potentially expansive venues with sustainable markets beyond object scaling in the physical space.
The part about designers being at fault is actually the exact same when it comes to software devs and privacy. While we don't want to harm our users by mining all their data, we also really love data and collecting it - not nessecarily for monetary gains, but even just to see how our users use the product we've created.
I love this video. This is an excellent example of tackling an issue and not shying away from all the complexities surrounding the issue. I have been trying to shop truly sustainable, and it is nearly impossible. I think the ultimate solution is decentralization. We need to go back to small thinking, thinking on a micro level, instead of changing the world we would change the world within our reach. If enough people did this, then the world would change.
I don't know if the typo at 14:58 is voluntary or not and I have trouble deciding which would be funnier. More seriously, this is a great video, but I would like to point out that scale isn't always a bad thing. Large scale production and transportation isn't just a matter of ego or even cost effectiveness. It can actually reduce the environmental cost. Transporting thousands of tons of cargo with one massive ship is way less polluting than doing the same thing with trucks. Now obviously, overproduction leads to waste and over-consumption and the ease of access and sometimes the necessity of large scale industrial methods to stay competitive can force some companies to overproduce. But for some widely used products and resources, large-scale solutions are beneficial because there are a lot of people on Earth and demand will be high anyway. Basically, we shouldn't make everything big, but we can't equivocate big=bad.
13:00 I once bought a hoodie that came with a warranty that essentially said if it ripped, tore, wore out, etc. I could send it in and they would fix it, free. Well, the REPAIR was free, I'd have to pay for shipping. And if I have to pay $20 to ship a hoodie across the country to get fixed vs pay $30 for a new hoodie you don't have to wonder why that warranty never got used. Perhaps the reason the repair plan doesn't get used is not because people want to repair their items but because its just not cost effective for the customer. Who is going to pay more than the item is worth to get it repaired?
Cool video in some ways, but presented in an extremely eurocentric, first world view. Kinda crazy to say "quality of life for the average person was improving" during the industrial revolution. Where do you think the materials came from? Who do you think mined or extracted them (and still do)? Who had their quality of life improved? I'm a designer too and love the topic, I just think this video treats sustainability as if it was just ecology and limits it's scope very clearly to North America + Europe's point of view (places that actually benefited from the exploitation and extraction system).
The industrial revolution was indeed build on colonialism and the massive concentration of resources it caused. Despite formal colonialism having (mostly) ended, exploitation of poor nations still happens through economic dependency and political/military intervention, so history continues. Also, colonialism also kinda happened within Europe, as the workforce for industry was in part created by enclosure of the commons, depriving farmers of their land and forcing them (and craftsmen that relied on them for their earnings) into the cities. I doubt these workers noticed anything from that improvement in average quality of life, not until the early 20th century at least.
Quality of life for the average person was improving. You are really so delusional to think that Africa, china, or any other place for that matter, would be better off without the industrial revolution?
The "Convenience is king" mentality can be overwritten with sentimentality (repair something that's been with you for a long time) plus well with inflation, hopefully repairing something can be cheaper than buying a new one eventually.
Repairing things yourself is usually way cheaper (in fact, surprisingly often even when you have to buy all the tools necessary!). But going to a repairman is an entirely different matter - the only way to make that cheaper than buying new stuff is for wages to go _way_ down.
I think legislation could reduce bottled water consumption if it built more drinking water fountains in public places, there's probably a lot of little direct things that would reduce overconsumption and benefit the average person
while a good idea, I could very easily see disease rates spiking because of people constantly using them, not to mention the additional work required to clean them, the parts required to make them and the piping you would have to install for it, and that's just a few things off the top of my head. It could help in the long run, but it's had to say, and could definetly cause a lot of short-term or even long term problems
8:33 leaded solder has been baaned in commercial production since 2006. It remains only in very specialized applications like space travel, medical devices and military equipment, where other metal alloys aren't as resilient to shock vibration and temperature change.
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You clearly don't understand why scale matters. It's not a "just cause we like big things", its because economically it becomes more efficient. I guess we cannot expect designers to know much though.
Scale is literally a massive factor in bringing down the environmental impact of individual objects, and it's also the only way to provide for 7+ billion people
They not subcontracting because of overload, it is obfuscation and price reduction.
@めぐみんじゃない I think you misunderstood my point. Growth and scale helps with efficiency....but growth at all costs is when we run into the problems we have right now.
There was loads of problem with the lead free solder in the beginning. But most of them was eventually solved, and today its relatively problem free.
Most of the problem was an effect of that old components was med to be soldered with lead based solder and when they switched over there was galvanic reactions that lead to brittle joints and whisker. This was back 15 years ago, i have not seen much problem later.
The biggest recycling hurdle I know of that could be solved with minimal inconvenience is shipping labels. Hurray Amazon for their 100% recyclable packaging...until they stick the impossible to remove non recyclable shipping label in place. It's the same for many companies. Cardboard is one of very few easily recycled materials and we ruin that option with a non recyclable, non removable sticker.
That and the God forsaken plastic air packs they stuff the boxes with
How would you replace it?
@@Blubatt you could mark packaging more sustainably with things like ink stamps, paper stickers, punch-outs in the cardboard, etc. you’d have to find the most permanent solution for bad weather and such but there are alternatives.
@@Blubatt Adhesive and paper that peels off in one piece, or is itself recyclable. Ordinary paper printed on with ink instead of thermal paper would be one option, with a starch based adhesive. That would be recyclable along with the cardboard
Actually, cardboard is NOT one of the materials with the best recycling rates. It is NOT suistainable
1.) If you've ever made paper, you know that pulp loses rigidity upon re-utilisation. Its reutilisation is equivelant to the types of plastic that are able to be recycled (7 times). the fact that plastics and paper can only be used so many times is important. essentially, it's like chromosomal or DNA damage during cell division. There are only so many times you can split the bonds of the material (pulp or plastic) before it ceases to have viable properties to complete the process. The number of times is laughably low at around 7 to 10 times. Meanwhile, you need to use new material, with the recycled material for both plastics and cardboard to increase strength. so, new material is always necessary. the ratio is usually 10% recycled material to 90% virgin: but they slap a made from recycled materials lable on it and everyone swoons. This is even more annoying because the US passed a law that requires companies to add 10 percent recycled plastics to all new plastics when possible. AGH, it's just like those annoying car companies that say "carbon neutral by 2030". Uh, yeah, thanks FORD/ CHEVY : are you going to mention that this is ONLY because this is when a law will be enacted leveraging crazy taxes on you if you haven't met this goal? Cool, thanks for greenwashing you corporate slugs. it is NOT a solution.
2.) Soggy carboard and paper weakens the material, and most recycling centers will just throw it away because it is 'soiled' at this point. Anytime you've left you recycling out in the rain, or tried to recycle a pizza box, or spilled the contents of a bottle that you were also recycling onto the cardboard: it is then trash.
There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings surrounding recycling. Stay vigilent, and choose better options.
Better options?
Aluminun, steel, glass: they have basically no limit to the number of times they can be re-used because the material itself is maliable: not their binders or fragile reordering of their molicules like paper and plastic.
Fun fact: Ceramics are not recyclable.
If glass bottles were standardized they could be cleaned rather than crushed and reformed. I am sure standardization of commonly used parts can be an important factor in increasing recyclability in many other products as well.
The biggest sector thar can actually tremendously benefit from reusing it's packaging is cosmetic industry.
The amount of plastic they produce. Is mind blowing. I run out of chapstick within 2-3 months. Wished there was refill outlets at their store.
This will also reduce the cost for the customer.
There should be a mandatory law in every country that every whether big or small cosmetic company needs to take back their empty bottles and also hv refill station.
I lived in Matamoros, Mexico for 7 years and they have a lot of returnable glass and plastic bottles.
This kind of deposit-return scheme works really well in Germany. You get the money back with supermarket coupons once you return the bottles and if you can't be bothered to return it, someone who needs the money can return the bottle themselves for coupons. such incentives work well for plastic bottles too, especially the larger ones that come in cases which can be returned and cleaned. I wish they had this kind of scheme in other countries!
my mum told me they used to ask you to return bottles idk why they'd stop (i do, it was probably for more money) :/
I know how well dishes are "cleaned" in restaurants. You how many people stick these things up to their asses?🤌 And I'm not ready to pay x2 for the bottles and walk extra weight home. 😒 I'm ok with the plastic ones.
Right to repair has a long way to go. It's another great example of corporate kicking, screaming, and foot-dragging. Louis Rossman has been leading the charge against Apple in particular
I am a major pro-right to repair guy, a really awful example is REDCINEMA camera battery packs with the BMS program in ram. I cannot wait for the right to repair being fully pushed through.
Agreed, the whole system is f'd and I don't mean "right to repair" I mean our whole system of profit above all else, this is why the world is coming to an end and we're so far down the road we can't turn back, we have one option and one option only, we have to replace the pursuit of wealth and power with the pursuit of knowledge and experience.
People like to learn, and a country only hurts itself by making education cost the student. We made education through to high-school not only free but compulsory, it's time to do the same with college.
we can't learn from our mistakes and make corrections if we cannot guarantee the right to learn, not to mention, having freely available knowledge that anyone can access as long as they live makes right to repair more useful, I mean, this way people have a place to go to learn HOW to repair their stuff, if they don't want to/can't afford to have someone else do it.
stuff like this reminds me that one day about 100 years ago, every lightbulb company came together and decided there was a max amount of years they're products could last to maintain their customer base.
@@ErieRosewood welcome to capitalism
@@smileyp4535
Capitalism just means freedom.
Don't blame freedom. Freedom is more important than the planet anyway.
Blame the fricked up society that abuses the freedom.
Regulation has never changed minds in human history. if we wanna change the world, change hearts.
Also, government make up the majority of this garbage and waste worldwide. Do you really think giving them regulatory power would solve anything?
Apple: We're trying to be good for the environment. That's why we make our devices next to impossible to repair outside of our own specialized tools we don't sell to anyone we don't want repairing them; have absurd amount of waste packaging with our products; and create our products to be as fragile as possible so that when they inevitably break you're forced to buy a new one and dispose of the old one which ends up in a landfill because many of the components cannot be recycled in their current state, and converting them to a renewable state would cost too much.
Thyas why I don't buy from Apple. They are greenwashing to hide the fact they don't care and because it's" trendy". It's like the hp commercial where they say they plant trees while promoting the use of paper . They could say print on both sides to reduce paper waste. Instead they don't.
Aren't they the most hypocritical tech brand at this point? Almost everything they say is a lie. I still remember them removing jack because it "didn't fit". And making tons of decisions due to "courage", while products get worse and worse. They only have courage to tell blatant lies to masses.
I always hated apple for their products but wow apple is litterally killing us all
Apple:
We removed the charger from the box cuz everyone already has one.
Also Apple gives a c to light ing cable with the phone which doesnt fit the charging bricks everyone already had so ppl got a useless cable or they bought a new charger in its own seperate box in a plastic sleeve
Also quoting high prices for replacement parts is a common practice ti make people say "It makes more sense to buy a new phone instead of paying this much for just a screen change."
So I actually am a material scientist and this is probably the best video I've seen on this whole matter. Pretty much all of them are incredibly one-sided. And I appreciate you looked at it all from different directions. Because things are complicated. A sustainable material isn't everything. Thank you for the video!
Our mindset could definitely change in just a generation or two and I think it will some day. It drives me insane how disposable everything is, even if you WANT to avoid it you just cant
Sadly we only have 2 decades and not 2 generations “The IPCC report 2022 warned that the world is set to reach the 1.5ºC level within the next two decades and said that only the most drastic cuts in carbon emissions from now would help prevent an environmental disaster.”
@JD Power I believe them right now because we have been seeing the effects of climate change and global warming, there isn't much time. The world is like a person with ADHD (i have ADHD) waiting and not doing anything because it's just fine and then only acting once it is too late. Because it didn't feel like there was an emergency. But there is!
The planet is not use & throw - and it will be just too late when we truly realize this.
People who are environmentally conscious also do not understand that it is multiple time better for the environment to reduce consumption than to recycle / repurpose. The amount of crap that we buy and hoard in our homes today is mind-boggling.
The main problem is regulatory capture- large corporations wield the regulatory state against competition and consolidate the market then hyper scale increasing centralization increasing shipping which is heavily subsidized.
A lot of people have no idea the true scale of waste being created in industrial manufacturing and raw material extraction. The single best thing that could be done to initiate a change in sustainability practices is to penalize corporations for producing waste. The problem doesn't just occur in fossil fuels, it permeates the entire system.
I agree, but... Hit these companies and they'll do two things put up prices and cut jobs to preserve their profits. That will have consequences, look at the US and 2016. Look at China and pollution, they're the worst polluter but with CO2 China emits less per head than the US. Does China stop growing or does the US activity reduce consumption (e.g. put up fuel prices to make fuel efficient cars popular) neither will be popular in their respective countries.
That's completely true but there's a reason that hasn't happened sufficiently. Capitalism allows unlimited wealth accumulation, which allows unlimited political power (because wealth will always buy power). So anytime we have massive wealth building up in the hands of a few people, they are going to be able to use their money to sidestep democratic processes and bribe politicians to not implement those regulations.
Mega wealth also allows the purchasing of major media organisations and education establishments in order to churn out pro-free market, anti-regulation propaganda which also corrupts the democratic process by misinforming the public.
We will never be able to regulate these corporations and individuals out of their damaging behaviours. As a species we have to learn that excessive wealth accumulation is the biggest existential threat to our species and we must put a stop to it. And sadly that cannot be achieved peacefully.
How can any form of mineral extraction not produce waste? That’s like asking households not to produce trash. Concentrating minerals from a diffuse ore body into a monolithic pure metal Ingot is literally the process of separating valuables from waste.
@@Bloated_Tony_Danza this is not whats being argued and you may have missed the point
@@Bloated_Tony_Danza the issue is that they have managed to get off with ignoring the waste they create entirely. I live in Alberta and the oil companies here have created tailings ponds (waste sludge from the oil sands extraction process), that hold some 1.3 billion cubic meters of liquid that contains all kinds of toxins. There's a dam that's 18km long holding it all in. The Government has only recently begun making them figure out ways to treat the water and make it safe again. The only reason a lot of these businesses are profitable at all is because they're allowed to completely ignore the environment.
So, a year or so ago Nestlé decided to make the straws for Milo paper.
They had turned it completely into a paper straw, which was an effort to greenwash the company. Though it had many downsides and side effects. Such as the straw completely dissolving into the drink making it impossible to drink without the straw falling apart, the wood pulp making the drink feel pulpy and have paper inside your milo, the straw was utterly trash at poking through the seal to open the drink, which then made the straw end bend and unable to let liquid through, and the straw would start deteriorate once you start drinking which forces a time limit before you become sad.
Then a few months after that, they swapped the wood pulp paper straw, out for a better "paper" straw. This time, it solved the issue of the straw completely dissolving into the drink and the issue of the straw bending and failing completely. Though this iteration caused even more problems, like for example, since the straw was too thick, less liquid is able to pass through and the seal for the packet sometimes breaks out like a hole puncher punching paper which gave you the surprise of a high chance to swallow the plastic seal.
Remember how I stated "paper" in quotation marks? Yes, it is not paper. It is a plastic straw with a paper straw covering it, which completely defeats the purpose it had in the very first place. Literally made it worse in every possible way.
Edit: I just realised that they recently fixed the straws. They no longer have any plastic, and are as durable as the plastic straws. It might be that the changes to the straws were made due to pressure from the public, and that induced incredible haste to change it regardless of the quality. Though now it seems that they have fixed the issues, and the fully paper straws are here. They are surprisingly sturdy and have no sign of any plastic. I highly recommend trying the drink out at least once.
And the fact they can’t simply stop is the main problem as it would down there reputation even tho it would be better to simply pull out
Eat the rich
@@TheGallantDrake I agree. You'd be tasty with some pepper jack
This is why you shouldn't buy Nestlé products.
They're often worse than the Alternatives for the Consumer.
I still don't get why People buy their Crap.
And also the paper straw is still wrapped in plastic (at least where i live)
I run an Etsy store and have tried somewhat desperately to get my packaging to be easily recyclable. I know customers won't separate the plastic and paper parts of bubble mailers, so I switched to padded cardboard mailers.
The address labels are where the real fun begins. Label printers use thermal paper, which normally can't be recycled. There is ecoenclose (great company!), but they're American, and shipping a roll of labels over to Europe costs 70usd and adds carbon emissions. Then there's noissue, which have labels that are compostable, which isn't the same as recyclable, so I'm not even sure I can use them. The best part: they added text stating how friendly the labels are to the edge of the labels, which means the printable area is now too small for me to even use them in the first place! 🤡
I also looked for recyclable stickers to close the mailers with, and that's where I truly lost my mind. I've reached out to so many businesses to ask if their "eco-friendly" stickers are recyclable. No one knows. No one can tell me if their stickers are OK to throw into paper recycling, and they most of them don't care to find out. One company was sure theirs were, and included the details of the material they used. When I checked the website of the manufacturer, it was a different, very specific product of theirs that was recyclable. The stickers I got told were 100% OK to recycle... 100% weren't.
It is so hard to *actually* be sustainable. I'm really trying to do what I can but it is so disheartening, seeing how hard it is to do the right thing.
I'm in the same position right now and it's just genuinely very hard and very expensive for a small shop unless a customer is willing to pay more, which too many aren't. I hope there is a better solution for us in the near future as I need to make the money to live but feel awful for not being able to be more eco-friendly about it.
Can you do a stamp and pad of ink instead of stickers? Takes longer but more sustainable..
@@HosCreates This! Stamps are a cheaper solution too
Sell local-only? Like farmer's markets and direct to store? Then you can choose the tytpe of impact, like just driving your car to the places but know that the package is simple and good. Even better would be to ride an ebike to deliver the goods powered by a small solar array and a body fed by a garden, that'd be a super light impact. When you participate in the shipping market most everything is out of your control and subject to the optimazation forces of industry itself. Only way to escape that is to go small and simple and local. At least unless we get star trek replicators that can perfectly recycle matter and limitless energy to do it all with.
I totally feel that.
I work at a company that produces noodles, and apart from everything else (production not properly recycling, plastic packaging, thermal paper as receipts etc)
there is SO MUCH what I think is paper coated with silicon, the part "paper" you peel the sticker from, not recyclable via our normal container.
This stuff is all over our entire building, 2 stickers per product, stickers for storage, adress labels with what I recently found out is thermal "paper".
The printer for the adress labels often sucks at its job and give out empty labels, sticker for product often leave DinA4 pages that are partly empty, and our office sometimes prints out the wrong labels x100. I overdramatize here, but all of this goes into our paper container. Man, I´m not sure if my inner Monk comes out at times, but this just feels so wrong. Political turning point now, pleeeease :O
a family member of mine has been growing a skincare company for a good few years now. last time i visited, they said something that i found really depressing - that when the company started struggling a while ago, it was because they got too comfortable; they had the company at a size that worked for them and thus stopped growing it. then they realised their competitors were outgrowing them, putting them in the red. this sentiment, coming from a lefty-but-not-particularly-anticapitalist relative, made me realise how absolutely imperative it is to any business under our economic system to strive for infinite growth
that mexico city example brings to mind a though i had about sustainability: Negative incentives don't work. When you ban something, people will find a workaround and cheese the system. Positive incentives are much better, making public transport better, cheaper and more convenient.
If we wanted to get rid of single use plastic packaging, the way to go would not be to introduce a tax on it, but instead create a tax benefit for those companies who use sustainable packaging.
the US offers tax breaks and other positive incentives for businesses that “go green”. hasn’t seemed to do much in regards to the big companies who are really running the game. i believe the next logical step is to punish them on top of incentivizing them for a double whammy lol
@@shelbydan Its not like your idea disagrees with krisha its just that you guys are talking about different things.
Mexico city was trying to manipulate behaviour of citizens and youre referencing the behaviour of companies. While it makes sense to punish companies for avoiding or breaking regulations citizens are sort of the opposite under our law. We make laws so that companies will operate in certain ways, laws for citizens are so that they WONT operate in those ways and in that sense the negative enforcement idea makes sense.
Just ask yourself: Has the threat of being ticketed stopped people from speeding in their cars?
@@shelbydan how do you punish them without hurting consumers. Raising taxes will only raise the price of products and the company will have no punishment while the consumer suffers. Especially if that product has some level of inelastic demand.
@@stepb2788 You can't. People will eventually have to accept that their favorite crappy consumable isn't affordable anymore. One way or another.
@@zachweyrauch2988 It might, if they were pulled over and ticketed instead of getting the ticket in the mail weeks later when the incident is long forgotten. ie: If we had police ticket people instead of cameras.
I really like this. He doesn't just say "oh we need to go all electrical!" and leave it at that, he actually talks about how this issue is pretty complicated and what direction we need to head
Because electricity is actually one of the biggest causers of pollution in the world
@@supermasterfighter You're going to be pissed when you find out how much of that electricity gets used to make things that further pollute.
I really don't get you people - do you think plastic, oil, gasoline, and other big pollution problems aren't created in part by using electricity? Do you think electricity is only used to charge electric car batteries? Are you really this stupid?
@@supermasterfighter Right, but without it we'd be setting ourselves waaaaaaay back technologically.
@@supermasterfighter All things considered, fossil fuels are even worse
@@MJ-uk6lu Oh no doubt, but electrical cars are not the answer. Better public transportation and human powered vehicles are the answer.
Some people have tried to make the argument of "well electrical cars can be self driving and stuff, they can ferry more than one group of people around" and I have to say this: what prevents regular cars from doing the same thing? They both pollute the atmosphere equally, one just uses petrol and the other uses coal.
The best thing a consumer can do is buy less in general. Try to only buy things you really need and try to purchase things of higher quality so you can use it longer. Think of everything you buy as something going into a landfill at some point.
Another action to take is to avoid peer pressuring/judging people who use older electronic devices, clothes, vehicles, or even houses. Companies already spend billions trying to convince you to buy the next best thing. Why work for them for free?
I totally agree! We need to work to shift our consumer mindset, and the best way to do it is to start on an individual scale with our own choices.
THIS or used
@VaderxG The double comments and device justification with the added "you sound like you cause issues because your phone is old" kind of sounds like some major copium, my dude.
We do but its no good if the product is desinged to fail.
I would love to NOT having to replace my mobile device any time soon, but companies don't like that mindset and will try to make you buy a new device one way or another.
At least with clothes I can wear them until they consist of more holes than fabric. xD
I'm suddenly reminded of a woman our family always just called "the Zipper Lady." She ran a little shop somewhere on the south side of town, and whenever a zipper broke on one of our jackets, Mom would take it to the Zipper Lady and she would fix it. I don't know what the viability of clothing repair as a small business is, but I can't help but think that we would have thrown out many bulky jackets and winter coats if not for this little old woman who was willing to fix them for a reasonable price.
I noticed that these shops still exist in cities near good transit hubs, if only one or two of them. I think if you can find a location where a huge amount of people can flock to, you can get enough business to scale enough to be viable.
@kailo6762 your then bf?? Why everybody these days have so many ex boyfriends
@kailo6762please get him back and give him many sons
Based Zipper lady
Takes time to find the right person bud
@@jaishree701
I just wanna point something out here: While i totally agree with your point about bottling water, when it comes to sustainability, cargo ships are the wrong place to start. Even though their engines produce a LOT of CO2, the sheer volume of material they can ship is so ridiculous, the amount of CO2 per container is the tiniest part of the CO2 footprint of any given product.
They don't produce much Co2 but because international waters, they use the cheapest fuel they can, dumping shit tons of toxic exhaust
@@someweeb3650 That is not how international waters work. While in international waters, the ship follows the laws of the country whose flag it is sailing under, and when it leaves international waters, it follows the laws of the country in whose territory it operates, therefore, it's more down to a lack of regulation than to a lack of regulatory facilities.
Fair enough, thanks for the nuanced perspective. I haven't done research on the efficiency of cargo ships to comment much more than I already have in the video. However I would still argue that localized manufacturing, in addition a combination of several other factors, is a good direction to move towards.
@@Chrischi3TutorialLPs congrats on missing the point
@@Rokomarn How did i miss the point, exactly? What i was saying is that, when you want to become more sustainable, you need to start at the place that causes the most damage and is cheapest to fix.
Making marine shipping CO2 neutral for the comparatively tiny amount of CO2 that saves in the transport line, when the trucks transporting these goods from the harbor to the inland cities demanding them produces orders of magnitude more CO2 per kilo than the ship that transported these goods across an entire ocean to begin with, especially considering that electric trains are theoretically carbon neutral if driven with renewables, is pretty much the opposite of minimum effort for maximum effectiveness.
That's funny, "move fast and break things" was our motto for unloading trucks at Wally's Center for Disease Spread (aka Walmart). Management is very clear that they want the truck unloaded as fast as possible, but they don't really pay attention to how much merchandise is broken in the process. So without any knowledge of the damages, just how long it took, they'd fuss at you if you cause less than ~$30 of damages.
Unfortunately, inventory was not the only thing that would break in the truck. Equipment and even workers on occasion. My supervisor actually forbid me from being inside the truck, not because I couldn't keep up, but because I had proven I was worth keeping. It was kinda funny, everyone in management hated him for having ideologies like that, but when he left it became very clear he was holding the store together.
lol
Not too far from Walmarts procedure for loading trailers, they will also let you go for asinine reasons when demand drops.
Wally world retails the most out of any retailer. My sister's experience at her store made me cautious to apply to our local Walmart. The sucky thing is that it's the closest business to the neighborhood so it would have been very convenient to work there.
yeah, they were getting TO that point when I left last year, glad I left when I did
As a former stocker, I absolutely loved how full length mirrors always came out with paint cans stacked on top of them. Nothing like sending merchandise all the way from China just to open it in the store, noting fractures in the middle of every single pane, and sending it off to claims for disposal, on top of the literal tons of cardboard and plastic packing material a single store generates per day.
i think it’s also worth mentioning the mental toll that trying to be sustainable takes. Looking directly at production methods takes work, and the answers always suck. Even if you try to be sustainable, your individual impact is so small. And really, it’s so much easier to just stop looking.
Is learning about sustainability the morally right thing to do? Yeah, sure. But sometimes you just want to do normal stuff like eat a candy bar without worrying about single use plastics and child labor chocolate and how evil nestle is. Knowing doesn’t help any of those problems. It just hurts.
Yep, that.
I've been cycling in and out of making efforts towards living a more sustainable life for years, because of that. It's so complicated and it never feels, like your're doing enough anyway. It takes an immense amount of willpower ans dedication, to just say 'screw it, I got enough problems' and just go live your life.
Damn son. Very very relatable
At least you can do the minimum. A friend said: "I buy Nestle. Cause the other ones are for sure not better." Yes, but at least avoid those you know are bad. Like if you could easily walk the lit street as much as the dark alleyway, then just walk the street. Even though you could also be robbed on the street.
It is really not hard doing at least a little bit. As it is not hard for those effing mother***ers to drop their garbage into the bin than onto the beach. Gosh darn it. Humans are so friggin lazy.
I am for sure not wasting my whole vacation picking up trash. But when I swim into something, I am gonna pick it up. Even if the trash lands into the ocean either way, cause governments dispose of it like that. At least it isn't 100% surely in the ocean.
It's good that it hurts, at least you are still able to feel compassion towards your fellow humans.
Sometimes it does seem the only way to be sustainable is to be miserable. To live a stunted, unfulfilling existence without many of the joys the modern world allows us to experience, from the tropical vacation, to, as you say, the simple candy bar. It's the "hair shirt" mentality.
To clarify the solder part of the video.
All solder used to have lead in it, but when lead usage started getting restricted. Industry moved to tin, 100% tin to be exact.
...And for some reason, over time (5y+) they discovered that 100% tin grows hair like wires and it can short circuit the electronics
So they switched to a mostly tin alloy, it fixed the problem and we've been using lead free solder without issues since like the early 2000's.
Leaded solder has been banned in products in most developed countries
Thank you for the additional context, I appreciate it
It's also worth pointing out that the early lead free solders were more brittle than leaded solders. From what I read it was partly responsible for the infamous Xbox 360 red ring of death and early PS3 failures. Some of those issues have been resolved through better design. New package designs, new solder formulations, etc have worked to help to mitigate the issues. But that took time and painful experience. And alot of dead game consoles (and PCs - NVidia had a massive lawsuit because of these same issues with certain chipsets they made).
but still heavily used for prototyping because it's easier to solder :)
For mass production, lead free is where it is at right now (except for aerospace and some forms of transport because of durability), but leaded solder will never fully disappear.
@@iFireender It's banned where i live, you can't buy it. Everyone use Lead free and flux.
@@SaitoGray for rework, you often need to use leaded solder. Especially when you _cannot_ heat up the part of the board to the melting temp of the lead-free. (because silver-tin needs higher temperature than lead-tin).
For desoldering you can use bismuth based low temp alloys, but those are far too weak for soldering.
SquareSpace does require physical resources, in the form of servers, electricity, cooling, maintenance, back-up tapes, etc. Just because you don’t see it or think about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
On the front talking about the Mexico City issue: Someone pointed out when they considered using public transport instead of driving to get to and from work to have more ability to do other things like reading, but when they did the calculations for getting to their destination, it added over an extra 2 HOURS. No one is going to take public transport unless they 100% have to if it means making their commute a living hell. (Of course this is assuming there’s public transport where you need to go, living at my parents place in NJ, if you weren’t going to NYC for “normal business”, it was lol good luck with that) And I’m not even sure what can be done to make it not so insane
i mean even if the time it took to get places was lower, public transport in mexico city (and most of mexico really) has a reputation for being unsafe. going on one with a bag of any kind is treated as basically asking to get robbed.
I live in the north of mexico far away from CDMX and ive only been on public transit twice, once we got mugged and the other the bus driver must've been on something because he was going like 120 on a 30 and taking sharp turns. both times i felt like i was looking death right in the eye hahaha.
South England is very well connected in terms of public transport. It's much quicker for me to get the train to school than drive. It's great! And nobody living in London uses a car. Not saying the UK's the best country- I have many problems with it, but this is one thing they've done right. I just wish the North wasn't so deprived.
That's not terribly unique issue. I live in Kaunas and I had to commute every day for almost 4 hours to both directions to get to university by buses. With car that was just 40 minutes if not less.Public transport is almost universally shit, unless you make it uneconomical, but that's kinda the whole point of it.
@@MJ-uk6lu hearing about public transport all over the world makes me sad. where I live it's better for me (personally) to take a bus, when I was going to school it was even quicker than the car and I had an extra 20 minutes of sleep
@@eggi4443 It's not great. I also had some crappy locations where buses were infrequent, even if those locations were quite popular. If you miss a bus near botanical garden, then you will wait 40-50 minutes until next one. You can walk to better stop, but it's so far that it takes about that much to get there. I tried that once and was a tiny bit too slow so I missed a bus and ended up being even slower.
Also there was bus stop near my old university building, but there were two routes that could take me close to home. It was also near one of the biggest malls in this city and still, it's 20 minute wait and then around 10 minute walk after ride. I can actually walk home from that place in 50 minutes and be only marginally slower than bus.
So yeah, some stops are just cursed and waiting time is insane. Only some routes are actually frequent and thankfully I live very close to frequently driven bus stops. If I lived somewhere else in this city, then it would be hell of waiting long for bus and arriving nowhere near home. At least I can get fast to hospital with bus and this year I'm attending different university and bus ride will be like 10-15 minutes with 5-10 minute wait. That's glorious. Just that with car it would still be much faster. 5 minutes and you are there.
I think another reason the Patagonia repair program doesn't get used that much is because Patagonia makes really high quality products. They don't break easily and when they do come to the end of their lifespans it's been 10-15 years
This is very possible.
something i think is interesting about that example, is it really better for the environment for you to send your old item back to them for repair or for them to just send you a new one and for you to more or less dispose of the item? (sending it to some sort of 2nd hand store most likely)
that's a lot of transporting an item around if you don't like use of diesel fuel.
personally I'm more of the type to hang on to something until it's not fit for purpose and can't be repaired back to being fit for purpose, I have a nice zip up sweater that is something like 10 years old and i still like it more then the new one that was meant to replace it from the same brand, partly because i just like that old comfy sweater.
Even if it becomes popular, Patagonia-style repair program is dubious in nature to begin with.
For an eco friendly clothing repair program to be sensible, I think you would need to sell/donate used clothes to the program, which will repair it and then resell it to a different person. In other words, it needs to be a refurbishment process rather than repair.
Why? Shipping in bulk, bulk processing, and shipping to stores is much more efficient and eco friendly than shipping individual items from person to repair factory back to the person. If every article of clothing need to return to the same owner, every step of the process becomes much more complicated and expensive as the article needs to be tracked on every step. With bulk processing they can just be thrown into a pile and sorted and processed in bulk, which simplifies handling.
I think a refurbishment would also be much more acceptable to people. For the new owner, they will still feel like buying new clothes, just cheaper than buying new. Many people are already used to the idea of thrift shopping, it just needs to become more common. For the previous owner, they can just dispose of their clothing as usual, and they can still vary the clothes they wear over the years, and they can swap out clothes that no longer fit instead of getting back the same article of clothing which may no longer fit the same way when they were originally bought.
The only problem? The fashion industry, which sets a certain fashion trend every year and every season, and which makes certain styles of clothing look dated and artificially makes people feel that they need to buy new clothes to keep up with the latest fashion. Fashion needs to stop, manufacturers should standardise cloth designs into fewer designs, to make it easier to build repair automations, and to make it easier to swap out parts between clothes.
@@ARockRaider I'm sure it depends on many factors, but that new product you buy has to be transported from the factory, to the distribution center, to your house. And there are even more steps depending on where you purchase. In all cases, your jacket will be in a truck with other products either way.
@@yvrelna that sounds like a large scale version of the secondhand clothing market here.
Clothes are sent to non profits who sell used items
Some people buy and fix designer stuff, usually it’s something mild like a broken zip. They mail or sell it in person.
Still lots of clothes are binned/sent off to Africa for “recycling” maybe? Not everything is worth ♻️
In terms of legislation, we also need to consider the effects of legislation unrelated to sustainability. A favorite example for me is legislation related to the clarity of packaging and why it prevents the use of recycled plastic in packaging.
On initial concept, packaging seems like like a great application for recycled plastic. Packaging tends not to have fine details, so the loss of viscosity in recycled plastic seems like a non-factor. It only needs to protect a product for a short period of time (as long as the product sells) so loss of durability shouldn't matter. And it seems silly to use virgin plastic on items that are disposed of as soon as a product is purchased.
There's one issue though. If you have a package window, by law it needs to reach a certain level of clarity. This is to protect consumers from fraud, ensuring that labels aren't obscured and the product can be inspected by the end cobsumer. This law exists for a reason, and there's nothing wrong with that. But, recycled plastics cannot reach the clarity requirements. So, even though they'd kind of be perfect in this application, a reasonable law blocks they from being used.
There are ways around all that, but they take careful thought. And it's just one example of how complex designing for sustainability can be. Especially, when it comes to legislation, not all of it is poorly thought out legislation. Some of it exists for good reason, but does block what would be otherwise good solutions from being implememted.
My favorite part of visiting Germany was seeing the extremely scuffed up and foggy plastic bottles for sodas and stuff. Seems like they actually applied the concept of recycling (in this case).
I have seen some food packaging that uses 50/50 of the stuff. Using the clear stuff in the front and the non-clear stuff on the back.
I notice that nobody here is talking about pyrolysis plant's and other plants that convert plastics etc into oil's and other useful energy's, the problem is the government and nothing else :D
19:00
Fun bonus fact about that car law in Mexico City:
Because most people only planned on driving their second car that one day a week, they generally opted for the cheapest thing they could find, often very old, run-down cars with absolutely horrendous emissions and fuel economy. It's why things became worse instead of largely staying the same
Great video! I think that also the whole "environmentally friendly" thing has moved away from "we want to help our planet" to "virtue signal to get points with people," since (as you mentioned), a lot of companies are doing seemingly environmentally friendly things, but they are actually worse for the environment
Like the Hewitt Packard printer ad
Considering environmental impact is beyond getting points with people but actually plays a part in investment as well, it's not surprising that companies will do what they can to make themselves appear as environmentally friendly on paper with as little cost/effort as possible
One thing to note is that those massive shipping container ships are actually a REALLY efficienct method to transport stuff, like ridiculously efficient and we're never not going to be shipping stuff to other countries so it's not really a big deal to add a little bit more stuff to be shipped. The bigger issue is non aquatic shipping as they use much more fuel per item carried. Good video btw.
Using toxic materials like Lead is absolutely necessary in many products. The problem arises with sloppy handling, so Lead free solder is more of a band aid on a bigger problem. Car Lead-acid batteries are what, 15kg of Lead, and is a product that is almost completely recycled and safely handled statistically. 3rd world Lead production however is sloppy. But so is alternatives production in such places.
that is not quite the full troth. The recycle rate of lead-acid battery is like 99.9+%, for electronics its way lower.
Lead bad
@@matsv201 yes, because we dont design with recycling in mind. We only think of immediate selling profits, and being wasteful is actually profitable thing to do.
@@heyhoe168 It really depends on what you are talking about. Cars are typically 98% recyclable. The ironic part is that this number is much lower for electric cars (typically 85-90%).
For electronics its really the board and the circuits that is not recycled. And its really not that strange. They are basically made out of sand.
Of cause, if you run it in a plasma oven, you can sort of get the sand back as well.
Its strange that plasma ovens are more common, they pretty much solve the recycle problem.
@@heyhoe168 that's just not true at all, some things are simply un-recyclable. PCBs are impossible to break down and re-use. The cost of pulling out metals like gold from electronics is too costly due to the complexity. If there were an incentive to create easy to recycle electronics ie. Cheaper to use metals from old electronics than newly refined metals it would already exist.
I used Patagonia's "repair" program. My 5 year old jacket was unrepairable by their standards, so I got a merchandise credit. So even if you try to use their program, not sure it really works. Would love to know what percentage of garments are actually fixed vs deemed unrepairable. But still as noted, better than nothing.
What was wrong with your jacket?
@@weaponsgradepotato small .5 inch tears near both side pocket zippers. Main zipper had one missing tooth. Not sure if they even noticed, and did not ask to repair this, but if you held it up to light, inside insulation was pulled free from bottom, so bottom 1 inch or so wasn't as insulated as it should have been. At a glance, jacket still looked almost new.
Isnt that something you could fix yourself? It sounds fixable.. or at least not like a big enough issue to throw something out for..
@@mikado_m If I had a sewing machine, a replacement zipper, and the time and knowledge to do it, sure. But I don't, that is why I opted for their program. When I boxed it up to send, I had to pick either "Get item sent back" or "Get Merchandise Credit" if item deemed not repairable. Around 6 weeks later, they told me it was unrepairable and sent me a credit.
@@dividebyzero1000 I am Interested to know if there is an option to get the item back as is if its considered unrepairable or if there is more repair options, because I would definitely still wear something that has a bit of damage or try to repair it myself.
Fellow designer here - I wholeheartedly agree about the outsized role designers play in the chain of causality that leads to unsustainable products, & that we need to push hard wherever we can against the tide, but the problem isn't really that we're not pushing hard enough: it's the tide. The incentive structures favor short-term thinking, & even very good designers who stubbornly fight for more sustainable products will be placed at a disadvantage in the labor market - you're not going to get hired or promoted if everyone knows you'll just use your position to delay the schedule in the name of petty stuff like "not broiling the planet alive."
We're not going to achieve any meaningful progress toward sustainability by focusing on individual behavior & choices, we have to change the landscape of incentives to make the sustainable option the most attractive one.
Absolutely! how can anyone expect people to make sustainable choices when they are being threatened with having their entire livelihood tossed away by the system that is destroying the earth! it seems obvious to me that the central force that is responsible it the capitalist profit incentive
this. designers aren't the ones responsible. most designers are following higher-ups requests
I'm a mechanical engineer and have been working on developing "eco friendly" products on the side for many years. It's incredibly hard to make every part of the process truly eco friendly AND sustainable. It's also usually very expensive too.
I personally don't design with recycling in mind anymore because the recycling system doesn't and will never work as well as we need it to. I design with biodegradability and toxicity in mind now. Not an easy task when you want to design durable products!
Back in the old days:) when I was in high school. LL Bean provided the best backpack, for about $60. Lifetime replacement. I spent $60 and replaced it only once for all of High School. That, helps. We need to support companies who do this wherever we can
It doesn’t really MATTER what you make it out of IF THE RECYCLE SYSTEM doesn’t RECYCLE
We had a huge amount of industrial ink jet printing equipment get taken out of service because the repair boards did not make the cut when ROHS regulations affected spare parts production
Right? My city has a recycling program.... but even if I sort my trash into my apartment building's recycling bin it's all dumped in the trash truck together.
I could go to a recycling center to put my sorted trash in, but after already realizing that my choice was an illusion, it's hard to trust that my extra efforts won't have the same results. And of course, it's hard to find information on what happens after they pick it up other than hollow assurances that it'll definitely be recycled.
@@PokemonTrainerAriel Totally true..At my school we have recycle bins but I found out they're just dumped with the rest of the trash anyways, so even if you think or feel like you're helping you aren't.
@@PokemonTrainerAriel Check the internal look of that truck. In case of my city trucks it looks like they dump it together, but inside a truck it gets into separate container.
Tin whiskers were a problem on the start of the lead free solder era, nowadays alloys are far better. It is true that working with lead alloy solders are far more convenient, comfortable and requires less training. The cost of pb/sn solder is sometimes way cheaper.
Lead solder is still available at a hobbyist level, I have a roll sitting right inside my desk.
I like silver-tin solder, because I do not need to be super careful where the solder paste goes.
The solder paste contains solder powder. And lead powder in my home would be really bad.
(I still have a small PbSn roll for special cases)
Yeah if someone wanted to fix something at home I don't see how they do that without leaded solder. The silver stuff is really good but so hard to work with or remove.
Leaded solder also flows much better than the lead free stuff. Everyone in the industry that I know sticks with using leaded solder because it is simply easier to work with.
The whole solder debate becomes pointless when the device manufacturers make access to schematics, tools and parts impossible (without breaking laws), and serialize parts electronically so that even if your repair is as good or better than the original, the device STILL will not work because of how the company designed failures into the parts.
I'm looking at Apple, but every time Apple is successful, the other electronics companies see the profit margins and follow suit.
It seems that the idea of infinite growth is the primary problem that needs to change. As long as companies are incentivized by infinite growth nothing gets better.
While there is an argument that can be made for a more sustainable mindset, the mostly negative tail of the industrial revolution and the current industrial problems glosses over the implications of the industrial revolution not happening. The two important facts to understand are that humans on average would like to work 4-6 hrs a day with 6-10 hrs of social time and, two, the current population of the world would be reduced by 30-40% if there were no industrial agriculture, which itself is a cutting edge product of the current industrial system. These are important because after the invention of stationary farming the workday went from 4 hrs to 14 hrs. The return to the 4 hr workday has been a constant pressure on humanity for the last 10,000 years pushing for new technologies and the exploitation of new resources. The vast majority of the world population in the 1600's, 1700's, 1800's and very early 1900's lived and died in small farming communities from work accidents, illness and violent conflict. The factory system offered an opportunity for the next generation to get off the farm and for many it actually worked. It wasn't only the malevolent force of greed that drove growth. It was also a dream of humanity's children working less.
@@ianbelanger7459 That's a really interesting comment! Thanks!
I think one of the most crucial and challenging parts of moving towards a more sustainable world is in finding a way to cut jobs in unsustainable and wasteful sectors and funnelling those workers into filling the gaps left by shortening shifts in more essential sectors without treating it as an economic catastrophe (and without it becoming an economic catastrophe!).
There are so many jobs that from both an objective-based and production-based standpoint are completely pointless, and literally only exist to pay a wage or to produce a return on investment without actually producing anything of real value - either just juggling money around, or producing e-waste for the sake of producing e-waste. If we had universal basic incomes and/or much more comprehensive social services, these jobs would no longer be necessary, and it would free up a massive section of the workforce while giving them the financial stability to take the time to retrain and fill gaps in more essential industries, such as sustainable agriculture, healthcare, and education.
The problem is achieving this without causing an economic collapse. There's enough money and resources in the system, but due to the way the stock market currently works any major redistribution of resources and culling of non-essential industries WILL be seen as a contraction of the market, which could easily cause panic selling of stocks and shares resulting in an unnecessary economic crash. The key thing is finding a way of ensuring stability and trust while transitioning to what would essentially be an entirely reshaped economy.
That being said, I'm not an economist so I don't know how to do that 😅
@@BambiTrout while categorizing some sectors as unsustainable or wasteful is a little harsh, the general idea that there are enough resources, but they are currently very poorly allocated and inefficiently used is spot on. It is also true that the actual changes needed to achieve a sustainable world are many, but conveniently an individuals doesn't have to solve the problem for everyone. One of the major advantages of a market based system is that it responds rapidly to profit pressure. This is because when pressure is placed on a market all the people participating or thinking about participating begin to look for ways to profit from the new condition. As a populous, we simply have to organize around actions and policies that apply that pressure. It is not easy to organize a community or national campaign, but it is far easier to make doing the right thing profitable than developing all the systems and processes to actually achieve those profits.
While that is partly true, over 25% of emissions are food-related and near 75% are electricity and transport related, not unnecessary consumption.
@@ianbelanger7459 then why don't we push to the 4h work day anymore?
While you don't explicitly state it, you do kind of imply that we can solve this by personal action. Unfortunately the vast majority of this issue is corporate in scale, and even if every individual who has watched this video switched to 100% sustainable processes it would barely make a dent in the amount of damage almost any large company does. Yes we should become better informed, and it certainly is worthwhile to practice more sustainable living on a personal scale, but really the changes that need to be made are on the corporate and governmental scales, and unless we can achieve that, no amount of reuse and recycling will really actually matter.
Really it just means we need better government regulation. Corporations will not change without external pressure.
Fat agree, we can do as much as we want and actually do save lots of unnecessary packaging n whatnot, but on the scale of everything, Big Corp is so so much heavier. Believing its enough if each individual reduces is probably harmful too because "i do my part already :)" doesnt pressure any corporations.
The fact is at the end of the day corporations only make products and services that people buy. If they know that their customers are willing to pay for environmentally better products, or that they won't tolerate certain wasteful practices, they'll change. If not they won't.
I work in a hardware store and always advocate for the products that get repaired and allow you to buy spare parts as opposed to brands where they just swap the item out.
Many customers aren't happy when they hear a tool they have issues with is going to be away getting repaired for two weeks or so, but i always explain it to them, that the manefacturer doing this means the tool would cost more to replace, meaning it is (aside from the issue they might be having when coming in, which might be due to misshandling from the user side) better made.
If you have something like a table saw that costs $200, and at the slightest fault the manufacturer can throw it away and replace it for the whole 3 year period, that means what you're buying likely costs like $20 to manufacture and use sub-par parts, methods, and once you're outside of their 3 year warranty, they often don't offer parts so the machine is junk after that.
Its why i don't recommend sanders, because their pads do wear out over time, and that isn't a warranty thing, its like the sawblade on a saw getting worn. It needs replacing, and one of our brands don't even offer that. And i have to tell many customers who buy sanders which are even cheaper versions from other hardware stores when they are looking for the part that it doesn't exist. That's like the first thing a cheapo brand gets rid of. The expensive building, logistics, and staff needed to run a spare parts warehouse.
Quick note on Benzene. Yes it is Iligal in the US to use, though it is an extremely important chemical in organics. Pretty much all sugars have a benzene ring at their core for example.
In industry, it's usually easy enough to use something like Toluine or Xylene and just break off the one oxygen that makes it legally not Benzene later in the process. The laws banning Benzene were made by people who fundamentally did not understand what they were regulating.
Can I add an edit: sugars do *not* have a benzene ring at their core
Toluene and xylene are a lot less toxic than benzene. Man, this whole comment is just a train wreck of disinformation
“Laws made by people who fundamentally did not understand what they were regulating.” -define legislator without defining legislator.
@@ataphelicopter5734 idk what I'm on, I meant Aromatics :/ sugars have an oxygen in the ring.
@@tylerfb1 +1 to this. On literally any topic from driving to shooting, legislators live in nonsense-world. My family run a law firm and I'll ask my dad to outline a case we're doing and just rub my temples because of how roundabout the laws are.
Here in England, "handguns" are illegal, but carbines are not. They define the difference between "handgun" and "carbine" not through asking whether or not the weapon is a carbine or a pistol, but simply through how LONG the weapon is. So... a pistol with an absurdly long barrel is legal, and not a pistol, but a carbine. But it very obviously isn't. cbnmsdftghj
Similar thing in the USA with the ATF and their rulings on braces, 80% finished receiver lowers, "short barreled rifles" and all the rest of that crap.
An interesting thing to mention (I think it's interesting at least) is that in my country (Sweden) *any* store selling aluminum cans, PET-bottles and certain glass bottles *have* to add a few Swedish crowns to the price. You can get that money back when recycling them at the store. I believe that in the case of glass bottles they don't even melt them and just wash, sterilize and refill them.
I understand that this is only one out of many problems and a solution which is not perfect plus a few crowns is not much money but people tend to actually want to recycle the stuff with this system as while each can or bottle may not give you much money, together a bag of cans or bottles can be used to buy fika. Or you could think about it like this, "if I buy 6 cans of soda I can buy another one "for free" as long as I recycle them."
@Fishy thanks for the interesting comment.
I made over 10 Euros in a month collecting cans and bottles people left at parks n stuff. Now seeing crushed cans makes me sad for the loss of the 10 cents I've experienced 😂
same here in Germany. Its also like an additional income for some people who collect bottles in festivals and concerts :'D
We do something similar in Canada with a recycling thing. You get charged some extra, so you are incestivized to recycle that stuff so you can get that money back.
I wish we had that system here in the UK. Not only does it incentivise the consumer to return packaging to be reused/recycled, it also provides a source of income. It's not much for sure, but when you're unemployed or homeless, any little helps- so as well as encouraging consumers to return the bottles and cans, I'd be very surprised if trash started disappearing from the streets- that empty can that someone tossed is now worth something, so people would collect them up.
In fact, that's exactly what I did when I was unemployed. I'd keep an old shopping bag in my pocket, and whenever I saw a can I'd crush it and take it with me, to turn into an independent recycling scheme that paid cash for aluminium cans, among other items.
I filled a 55 gallon drum with cans in my back yard, and when it was full I loaded it onto a wheelbarrow and took it down to the recycling place...
only to find out they'd stopped taking cans a couple of weeks previously. At least all that junk was off the streets though- I just dumped it into my recycling bin and the local council got the cans instead.
About the México legislation you omitted a lot of facts of how the system works. I live here and it’s not a very good policy but it's not as bad as you make it sound. And by far is not as bad implemented as you make it out to be. How it works is that every car need to go for emissions inspection every semester to determine if the car is in good shape, based on the results you get a number the goes from 0 to 2 if you pass which determines the amounts of days your car needs to stay at home every week if the car is in perfect condition you can use it every day if it's not then you have to avoid using it one or two days a week. If the car does not pass the inspection, you can’t use it at all until it passes.
Yes this is not a perfect policy and it has a lot of problems like corruption during the inspection, favoring people that have money to change cars more often. But the public transport here in Mexico City has improved considerably in the last 23 years since the program started.
That sounds like a pretty good plan to me
THank you for a mature reply with actual information. So rare these days.
that's better than PH! I thought it was the same thing but different reason (traffic is the reason here iirc) so certain numbers cant go out on certain days (unless you're a medical/law professional)
my cousins family bought a second car to go around this so what was described in the vid felt more like it was describing us xd
@@galicry What is PH? :)
@@jokepp ah, the philippines!! xD
Anal point about solder. All common solder is tin based. But as said, to prevent whiskers it must be alloyed with lead or silver. Lead is both cheaper and more effective. While lead-free solder is a nice marketing term, the more important consideration is for the people manufacturing the gadgets. Once manufactured, the lead escaping isn't really a concern.
Excellent video. Memorable thumbnail (I actually saw this recommended to me yesterday, watched it today because I saw a Tumblr post about plastic today and remembered it), efficient and effective use of examples, well rounded perspective of the topic, with appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos, and a good conclusion to capstone it all.
You definitely are a designer, thats for sure :)
Again, great work!
The key problem with repair programs for items like clothing is that the average person doesn't have the option to go without i.e. a jacket for the time it takes to get it fixed. If I need a jacket, and it'd take months to get the damaged one repaired or I could go to the store and grab a new one right now, it just doesn't make sense to sentence yourself to not having a jacket for that long. The same applies to a lot of products. In the modern world, everything shifts quickly. You can't just live without a phone, not in this day and age, you *have* to use something, and if your phone is already on the tail end of its intended lifetime, then it doesn't make sense to go without for days to weeks as it gets repaired when you can go and grab a new, better one right away.
To say this is just convenience at play would be foolish at best. A lot of people simply can't afford to wait. It's not a choice any more than it is a choice to breathe. Sure, you could try not to breathe for a bit, but it won't go well for you. It'd take a much greater societal shift to prevent this from being an issue, and I don't see it happening. Nobody's gonna care that you can't get anywhere because you had i.e. documents or tickets on your phone in an app, nobody's gonna care that you can't pick up the phone because it broke, nobody's gonna care that you can't get anywhere on time because you're gonna catch a cold if you try to do it without the proper clothing, and if you try to explain, they'll just tell you to buy the thing you're missing and stop making a big deal out of nothing.
I don't want to just say it's privileged to have the ability to choose more sustainable means of doing things, but... I can't help the feeling that in many ways it is. Your own life and that of your immediate family members takes precedence, if you or they are negatively affected by the choice to be sustainable like described above, then you simply choose not to be. Fix the state of the world that puts people up against a wall like this, and you'll give more people the ability to genuinely make the choice to be sustainable. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it sounds, and so we are where we're at.
I think a good way to address (part) of this is to also bring back the skills of fixing and mending your possessions. For example, my brother in law throws out his socks when he gets a hole in them and just buys new ones. I sew mine up a few times, until they are genuinely beyond repair. This doesn't take much time or even a lot of skill - I remember doing this since I was very little. My mum had a basket where we would put clothing in need of small repairs and we would just go through it when watching TV etc. It takes my family years and years to wear down an article of clothing because I put the effort to maintain out clothes, but that's because I know how and I care. Contrast that with companies like SHEIN, which use slave labour to mass produce plastic garments meant to be work a few times and thrown out.
Of course the average person won't be able to fix the electronic components of a phone, although there are other solutions possible too - e.g. getting a simple loan phone while yours is in the shop, like with cars. That requires input by the repair companies though, which is unlikely to happen soon.
@@YumeOUtau This is a decent solution, but you also have to remember that it wasn't necessary until a few years ago, because in many parts of the world places existed locally where you could get your things fixed for cheap. Unfortunately, with how companies have been, and with covid, and a whole lot of other things, those places are a rarity now, while skills like you mention aren't realistic for everybody to have. I do like fixing things myself, though more on the mechanical side than garment side of things, but I'm neither great nor quick at it, and it's more of a physical limitation than lack of knowledge or willingness to learn. Another thing is that the purchase of good quality materials and tools for any kind of work like this, while usually spread out and helpful in saving you a lot of money in the long run, are still purchases, which deters a lot of us. In the end, I stand by my opinion that local businesses for repairing everyday items are the best solution. And that last part is why I decided to swap out my last phone frankly a while ahead of its time. I have it around, lying in wait, ready to fill in for this one, should anything happen to it. But... yeah, it's really not very fair to say that we should be responsible for everything. Big companies are the ones that create ecosystems where it's not feasible to have your belongings repaired, both through various practices like locking down software and hardware or making parts unavailable, and through their market practices that drive the places that used to perform the repairs out of business.
We need to revive the good local tailor shops.
If my jacket is torn and a local tailor can patch it in a less than a day with halve the cost of buying a new one then I would go there 10/10
@@ofrund Half is generous, I've had some of my belongings repaired for fractions of the original product cost, even though I was more than willing to pay way more than I did. And yet these places are increasingly rare...
That’s true but I broke both phones I had last year and I’ve been waiting to get them repaired. I’ve missed many important calls bc of this but I’m still waiting until I can afford to fix them bc I have bigger issues like rent and food. It would be convenient to buy a second hand one for £50 but I’d rather pay out to get one of these fixed at a time. Idk if what I said made sense or was relevant but I agree with you for the most part
I appreciate that you pointed out that “renewable” doesn’t necessarily mean good for the environment. The sheep example was one I hadn’t heard of before. An example within the US is the growth of hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest destroying migratory fish populations. Dams are great as a cheap, renewable source of energy, but their presence is tanking salmon populations which are a key species within their ecosystem.
Off shore wind farms beat hydroelectric by a mile in my opinion.
@Heather Petersen what's the point of lesser carbon emissions if there's not an ecosystem to help save? I'd argue climate change is more of a human existential threat that a planetary existential threat. The planet has gone through more catastrophic change and extinction events. The harm comes from how much we want to drag the rest of the planet down with us. Biodiversity is very important if we want the best chance for organisms to survive through climate change and our pollution. Not to mention that ecological collapse will also cause a disruption of fishing and agricultural industries so it does not exist in a vacuum.
@Heather Petersen I get the point you’re making, and yeah people do have to consider which is more important.
The thing to keep in mind is that it isn’t just one species of fish being impacted, it is all migratory fish in the region. Anything that swims up river is impacted, and everything that relies on these fish is impacted too. It’s not just the animals that eat them, but a significant portion of plant life as well. Fish that spend a majority of their lives in the ocean then die in freshwater rivers have nutrients and minerals in their body not typically found in rivers that are released when decomposing, and the plants in the area require them to grow properly.
Additionally, salmon in particular are incredibly important to the Native Americans in the region, both culturally and in their diet (of course everyone is different and not all indigenous people currently eat salmon as a staple part of their diet, but especially in more remote areas such as in Alaska it can be the main food source for some groups).
Also, I’m not trying to say that hydroelectric power is bad in general, just specifically in this region. Unfortunately there are a lot of rivers in the Pacific Northwest so it is an attractive place to build dams.
That was kind of an info dump lol, sorry about that. Short version is: all migratory fish populations get impacted, removing these fish from rivers could potentially collapse the ecosystem as a whole, and the fish are important to the Native Americans in the region both culturally and as a part of their diet.
@Heather Petersen Those are good points! I do agree that people do inevitably have to make choices and sacrifices when it comes to energy consumption. If it came down to the whole world vs a single ecosystem I’d probably choose the world, but realistically I don’t think it will come down to that. There are viable alternatives to hydroelectric power or even improvements on how dams work. That and there’s no way for dams to power the whole world, so alternatives are necessary regardless. Hydroelectric is a great power source now, but there are some significant issues with using it as a long term, global solution for renewable energy.
I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we can tear down most dams in the Pacific Northwest, though the development of new technology and improving current technology gives me hope that we may be able to get to that point relatively soon. Though it’s not like every single dam needs to be removed.
Unfortunately the driving factor behind using hydroelectric power has less to do with it being renewable and more to do with it being cheap. Large tech companies like Facebook have headquarter locations in the Pacific Northwest because the energy is so cheap, which also encourages the building of more dams to increase energy supply for a growing market. Unless a cheaper alternative arises, even if people develop better, less environmentally damaging ways of producing power large companies probably won’t switch over unless they’re forced to.
That’s more so why I think it’s important to spread awareness about the impact of dams on the environment. It takes a long time for any sort of legislation or regulations to be enacted, so rather than waiting to push for change until after new technology has emerged it may be better to start now. Though it is hard to be optimistic at times.
Every time I see environmentalists talking about how planned obsolescence and unsustainable energy sources are ruining the planet. It seems reasonable and concerning. Then you people come out of the woodwork, talking about how Native Americans won’t get their salmon and the planet won’t be fit for life after humanity is extinct. It just makes me want to go out and buy a whole bunch of junk that I don’t need and, I don’t know, vote for fracking or something ‘cause god damn do I feel like I wasted a ton of worry on a whole big pile of nothing.
I actually worked for Patagonia for just under a decade across a bunch of different locations. I would say for every 1 repair that got logged in and sent to a repair facility, the staff at the store would make 5-10 simple repairs (zipper slider replacement, small patch etc) that didn't really ever get counted. Your main point, however, I think is still valid because by and large, a plurality of customer would not even entertain the idea of a repair in favor of demanding a replacement under the guarantee, usually stemming from an issue that was caused by ignorance on the part of the customer of how to properly take care of their garment. The outdoor industry has been hemmed into a corner by these unconditional guarantees and while appealing from a buyers standpoint, it becomes an opportunity for them to avoid making full use value of the things they buy.
You made a good point about the Patagonia repair program. The cost of shipping your clothing item for repair is about equal with just purchasing a new garment
One thing about tin solder and lead solder. Lead solder is mixed with tin 40/60 usually. So it's not pure lead, pure lead will not work for solder joints. But tin solder is mixed with other material and often each company has their own different combinations. Bad thing you can't use tour soldering iron on these different material because it will ruin it. Now that soldering iron is stuck using that solder. Dame goes for your device if you mix different tin solder together it 99% of the time will not work causing more issues. Lead solder work so well because it just is so universal, strong, and frankly easy to access since alot of hardware store have it. If we can find a non toxic solder I am all for it but as of now you can't trust tin solder for the many faults it has.
With leaded solder, the kneejerk reaction of "its toxic, don't use at all" is a problem. If its manufactured in a safe environment (fume hoods) and it is used is on components that aren't touched or even seen by the end user, use should be considered, especially if there justification over the alternatives.
Where does it go though? Into the air for someone to breath and get cancer down the line?
@@mrbombastikalime9867 that's the thing, though, lead solder once set doesn't go ANYWHERE. Not for like 200 years. circuit boards today are constructed by machines, so no human even touches them until it's time to test them usually, and even when you melt the solder, it's at such a low temp that the lead cannot vaporize. There's no damage in using it. In fact, the fumes from the FLUX are far more damaging. Also, recycling lead is actually very very easy, and can be done as part of the process they do when recovering gold from PCBs.
Don't underestimate lead. That shit NASTY.
@@csquaredgaming I use leaded solder alot. Again ventilation and fume extractor.
9:47 : If you do make a video on Right to Repair, I think an important point to bring up is how most of the Right to Repair movement is only focused on hyper-mainstream consumer devices like phones and automobiles, and while it's great that there is attention on making such things repairable and allowing people to bypass the DRM on their software, that focus also means that any legislation focused on those issues is only making carve-out-exceptions for things like the DMCA's provisions on DRM anti-circumvention; rather then actually fundamentally revising the law on a wider basis. I think there is a serious concern that if right to repair legislation passes, legislators and activists may see it as a solved problem and that will weaken support for fully repealing laws making bypassing DRM illegal, and leaving software/hardware modifications for more niche products like game consoles or video games themselves in a bad situation (which is a major issue for games preservations or people making mods/fan patches for games).
I'm not sure "struggle" is the best description for corporations becoming eco-friendly. "Dragged" (kicking and screaming) might be a better word. A big chunk of the problem is democratisation of the problem. Big industry used a very convincing ad campaign to take responsibility for their waste from them and put it on the consumer. Partly true, but mostly not. We still adhere to this false narrative. I wish they'd apply the much vaunted AI algorithms to help solve some of the waste - perhaps in a hierarchical system of AIs that can build a big picture.
The customer is at fault. Because convenience is above all. I repair my things locally, even if it costs more than buying a new one. But most of my friends don't.
The customer has absolutely nothing to do with it. If I want my steak wrapped in butcher paper instead of plastic, I can go home and not eat. Guess what...that's not an option. I remember when you couldn't buy a steak wrapped in plastic and I've been complaining about this non-sustainable packaging practice since started. The same applies to other corporate practices. Moreover individual consumers cannot possibly stay informed of the plethora of procedures and materials, many of which are proprietary and or legally protected secrets, across every industry that they do business with.
Assigning consumer responsibility is nothing more than corporate deflection
TL;DR
That's why they make the big bucks
@@jeromewesselman4653 its still ultimately the customer's fault, but its harder to get people to change their spending habits then it is to have government intervention. The business aren't beholden to anyone but their customers, but they can get sued into changing their practices.
The reason why consumer spending habits are difficult to change is lack of available (and or perceived) options. Look at spending habits during the so-called pandemic. Consumers love McDonald's, right? Apparently so, until you consider that all the mom and pop restaurants were closed because indoor dining was deemed non-essential. Why weren't potential super-spreader centers such as Walmart CLOSED during 2020? If public health were truly at stake, they would have been, with smaller less-risky grocery and dining venues remaining open. And don't get me started about public drinking fountains versus plastic bottles. Once again, the safer option lost out due to top-down regulation (and propaganda), completely bypassing consumer choice. And while we're at it..."free" vaccines? News flash: nothing's free, but some things are heavily subsidized
Nice to see someone who understands that the changes aren't going to happen just by wishing for them. Your video was very well done and informative, thanks!
Even though I have some fundamental issues with this take, it's still one of the best pieces that deal with this issue. I very much appreciate the amount of nuance that you have managed to fit into this short video. I rarely comment to voice my appreciation, but this video deserves it.
Let me break down the paper bottle at 14:18 and why it _is_ actually a good option:
You can't pack liquids in pure paper/carton, unless you coat it with organic wax, or paraffin wax, or a layer of plastic and/or aluminum foil. The only sustainable option here is a plastic coating made from bioplastic .. but is it? No matter which option you choose, you have to include a step of heavy chemicals to separate plastic and paper, before you can recycle the paper, or compost it or whatever. This one step of chemical separation makes paper bolltes insustainable.
If you go for glass, you have to take it's weight into account and the amount of fuel it takes to transport this extra weight .. not to mention the cleaning and/or melting down of glass for its recycling: not sustainable.
If you go for aluminum, it's light weight, but unlike glass, it corrodes, its corroded layer is abrasive, and aluminum itself is structurally weak and vulnerable to abrasion. Then there is the immense environmental damage caused by aluminum production (bauxite mining, electrolysis) and aluminum recycling (smelting with production of .5 t of toxic slag per 1 t of recycled aluminum). .. not sustainable ..
Then there's plastics, which combine the advantages of glass with the advantages of aluminum. Biodegrad plastic isn't available in sufficient amounts, so let's stick with fossil plastic. You can't reduce the amount of plastic you use for a bottle arbitrarily, because thin plastic is either too brittle or too soft, and either way it becomes permeable to light, gases and vulnerable to temperature change, mechanical stress etc.
Now consider the "paper bottle" in the video .. it combines the advantages of an actual paper bottle with the advantages of a plastic bottle. You get the strength and shock-absorption and temperature-insulation and UV-protection of paper, and you get the chemical resistance of plastic, and you get the light weight from both.
But unlike with a paper-bottle layered with wax or plastic, you need no chemical separation step .. all you need is a human who recycles responsibly and separates the paper and plastic.
With that low amount of plastic needed with this combo, a switch from fossil plastic to bioplastic becomes possible, even with the relatively low amounts of bioplastic that can be produced.
Yeah I know the paper bottle grossly oversimplifies the concept. That's pretty much what the whole video is explaining. But you need to get people to click somehow before you can educate them on the nuances.
_"aluminum recycling (smelting with production of .5 t of toxic slag per 1 t of recycled aluminum)"_ - I have never heard anything like that.
I could be wrong here, but to my knowledge aluminium recycling has very little loss, certainly not 33%. Maybe you made a mistake with the numbers? Also, not sure why the slag would be particularly toxic, it should be mostly just aluminium oxide, which is harmless, shouldn't it?
@@Basement-Science Austrian ministry for environment: Udo Boin, Thomas Linsmeyer, Franz Neubacher, Brigitte Winter: Stand der Technik in der Sekundäraluminiumerzeugung im Hinblick auf die IPPC-Richtlinie. (Österreichisches) Umweltbundesamt
@@Basement-Science and I should add that the slag isn't loss of aluminium. The regain acutally is 90%, but the problem is all the chemistry it takes to get there.
Starting with: "aluminium" we use typically isn't pure Al but some type of alloy with another metal (tin, iron, manganese, magnesium), because aluminium alone can't withstand much heat or mechanical stress. This is why the first step of aluminium recycling involves chemistry & sometimes electrolysis to remove the other metals, producing one big portion of that toxic slag I mentioned. This is also the step that causes those 10% loss in aluminium.
Next is: now you have regained your pure aluminium .. first you need to replenish those 10% aluminium you lost with primary aluminium which comes with the disadvantages I mentioned already. Then you can work it or re-alloy it with something, and then process it into some shape. These processes use certain inorganic salts that cover the metal without mixing with it, which prevents the aluminium from oxidizing too much. When finished, these salts are rinsed off .. and you have another portion of toxic slag.
@@augustaseptemberova5664 I'll have to look into it in more detail, thanks.
I knew that aluminium is always in various alloys, but I would have assumed that they would mostly get the right alloys out by mixing in the right types of recycleables. I know many scrapyards differentiate between several types of it, for example extruded aluminium. But I could also see that you cant always get the right mix since it's not going to be as easy as adding or removing carbon in steel.
Electrical engineer here
Wanted to mention that at 8:37, there was a mention of most electronics using leaded solder. For the most part, leaded solder has disappeared ( not completely, but mostly) in nearly all electronics. Especially anything sold in the EU, it’s illegal to use leaded solder. RoHS compliance is huge, and the compliance refers to environmentally safer materials in electronics. Whether it is ICs, solder, connectors, etc., it is pretty much the default at this point. The US still does allow leaded solder, but it’s not used as often because of global requirements. But there is also other solders that are not mainly tin, such as low temperature solder (about 52% bismuth, 47% tin, and a little amount of gold). I’ve been using it lately as it makes soldering and removing components much easier and given bismuth is close to lead but not toxic (as far as we know), it shares some similar properties. Curious to see if we find other solders that replace the 95% tin solders. Though there are tons of other solder alloys too, but I don’t work with them so I can’t comment on it.
Just out of curiosity
How you find the cost compares to old lead solder
And do you know much about the recycling of the low temp solder
Back in my day, we learned Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in that order for greatest effect. Reduce the things you own/buy, reuse what you own for other purposes, and when you can't anymore, recycle them. That simplicity made sense to me, so I have been living my life by it and aside from the hopeful environmental benefits, it made my life much simpler and enjoyable (especially finding reuse examples). Challenge of course is, over time humanity has gravitated towards the opposite (increasing consumption, throwing away things that can be reused for other purposes, and not recycling) so how do we deal with either reversing that back or dealing with the complex effects which are much harder? The video of course gives some ideas on the latter, but could the former still be explored as a viable option?
Perhaps we have progressed too far into consumerism as a backbone of society that it's impossible to reduce our consumption without severe job losses and lower economic growth. It just feels like making everything sustainable is an insurmountable obstacle given human nature, but changing enough minds to reduce consumption of the worst offenders would go a long way with less effort.
Take water bottles for example. I see folks everywhere filling their carts with those 40-packs of water bottles for $5 on their weekly shopping trip. If more people knew how good and inexpensive filters have gotten nowadays and how easy it is to just filter their water, not having to deal with all those plastic bottles and spending $240+ a year on water, more would make the switch, reducing demand and forcing companies to adjust by not making as many bottles and coming up with better solutions, such as making and selling increasingly better filters instead.
Unfortunately people don't want to change. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" had become a shockingly controversial expression now'n days. People dissociate themselves from the system, reject agency so they can reject responsibility.
Now it's all "the companies need to change". And sure that's true. But when that change does happen people complain that their paper straws or simple packaging feels cheap, or that an electronic device doesnt have a new iterations this year for them to buy. I hear it all the time "why am I being punished for THEIR waste".
Nobody wants to change, and nobody wants the natural result of the companies changing for us. Too many only accept environmental measures while they believe the measure in question will have no inconvenience on their life.
@@Ash_Yu Well said. The part that always gets me though, is that following the Reduce > Reuse > Recycle method actually is MORE convenient in most cases. People just don't want to change as you mentioned.
Just like the water example: imagine people that haul that heavy package of 40 water bottles every week, putting into the cart, taking out into the car, and from the car to the home. They can just get a filter and never get water again, but week after week they torture their backs and wallet by buying water.
Another easy example is moving. Most of us have to move to another place at some point in our lives. Having less stuff makes that process way easier and convenient. So many people dread moving and spend weeks stressing over it, packing, hiring movers, etc. because they have too much stuff. If they simply had less stuff (Reduce), the process would be so much easier and stress free.
@@travellingslim What about in a job interview? If two people have similar credentials one has his own clothes the other has obviously adapted second hand, the guy with wardrobe money gets the job.
How about the water bottles youre hung up on?(me too... like wtf its water, why do you need a single packaged serving? cant you just drink some?) Are those purchases of convenience or purchases out of unvalidated fear of the unsanitary natural world? I cant know for certain but i often assume the second one of most folks. Its the same reason people cant buy a whole chicken and quarter it themselves but will for some reason spend that same price on a package of too many drumsticks for "barbeque day". Much like a water filter the whole chicken doesnt come out of a package theres a personal effort step before you get the thing you want.
We have excused convenience that was actually making people lazy and we have lauded people for the very mild effort of showing up to a job. I think weve become detached from reality over it too.
@@zachweyrauch2988 I'm not an extreme hippy or anything like that :) For the clothes, you don't need to have ragged hand-me-downs. I'm not saying don't buy new. My response in an RRR sense would be instead of buying a whole wardrobe of dress clothes, just have one or two white buttoned shirts and a pair or two of nice slacks (or the equivalent for women). Not only would you be able to use it for any job interview, but you can also multi-use it for any other semi-formal event where you need a nice shirt and pants. Sure, if you're going for a job on Wall St. or a law firm or something like that, yeah you'll probably need to buy a nice new suit if you don't have one already, but the RRR takeaways would be to just buy what you need, try and reuse it for other purposes (like a date, funeral, wedding, event, etc), and when you're done with it, you can probably donate it to charity if it's not too rough.
Clothing isn't as much of a pain point anyway in my view compared to other things. There's already a culture of hand-me-downs, donating old clothes to charities, thrift stores, etc. Perhaps a point would be that some people buy clothes that they never wear, so it's wasteful there, but there are certainly bigger fish to fry in the efforts of RRR.
A wood mouse or metal mouse would be amazing, no one is going to make that since it's far more expensive. The feel of metal and rubber or good quality wood is unmatched with anything.
There's also a glass mouse, that'd be cool
Great job pointing out the complexity with figuring out whether a product is sustainable or not - eg when companies deliberately trying to mislead their customers. It's definitely a symptom of our massive appetite for consumption like you mention and we all have the personal responsibility to buy less.
If I could have something repaired as easily and cheaply as buying a new jacket I would. Even a local repair is a lot more expensive than buying something completely new. Cost is the BIGGEST factor to adopting anything progressive.
Try taking a course in sewing or watch some tutorials online. A small hole or a button that's fallen off is relatively easy to learn how to do. Might not be the neatest but you'll get better. Stuff like replacing a zip is more of a sewing-machine job, but a rip, tear, hole etc is very mendable with a needle and thread.
Also there's a saying "A stitch in time saves nine", meaning that taking a couple minutes to sew up a tiny hole would stop it growing and becoming a huge job.
Almost any dry-cleaner also does alterations and repairs on clothing that are more affordable than buying new. Getting a zipper completely replaced or a lining fixed costs less than. $15-20 here in Los Angeles,which is so much cheaper than buying a $60-100 new jacket. The average sewing machine or vaccuum repair costs hundreds of dollars less than purchasing new. It’s just not convenient and might require actually speaking to a human being, which so many of us avoid now. We want to click and receive something in 2 days.
@@Hippidippimahm i think assuming that most are buying the $60-$100 jacket is the issue. most (american) people can’t even afford that. the rare times i buy myself clothes, i head straight to walmart since it’s all that i can afford. i’ve tried thrifting but i can’t always find things that fit me or prices have been driven up by the thrifting trend. it makes way more sense to the average minimum wage worker to go buy another $15 jacket than it is to spend that on material or service to repair an older jacket. especially when you factor in time. most working people spend most of their time working and it’s much easier to make a 5 minute stop to buy another jacket than to have to wait for a repair or do the repair yourself (plus the amount of time it may take to learn how to do the repair). while i’ve said that it’s “easier” multiple times, some people just don’t have a choice
If you use Google and go into a shop tailored (haha) for tailoring repairing and sewing, of course its going to be expensive. You are walking into the place design for it. But instead if you have a good social network, you can find people who repair holes, buttons, tears etc much much cheaper! Because to them it's a side hustle for some cash not a major business model. Better yet learn to do basic clothing repair at least if it's too far gone you cant fix it, you have the option to recycle it
One issue is that with technical and material evolution, we've become accustomed to certain standards in products, and products that consist of so many materials that make them impossible to separate and recycle - even if the infrastructure to recycle the materials would be present (which it sorely isn't).
It is also incredibly difficult to design and develop certain products made with only one material. Sure, t-shirts can be made entirely of cotton, but when you reach performancewear or outerwear, it becomes a serious challenge.
Where I work, we tried to redevelop what we perceive as one of our simplest technical garments that we currently sell into a mono-material product for the sake of recyclability. We realised at the early stages of development that certain material swap-outs simply don't exist yet, and removing technical components reduces the function drastically.
I believe that many industries like the textile and apparel industries are hoping and waiting for technocentric innovation to save us, but sadly innovation and commercialisation of it are outpaced by the consumerism that is happening now.
If you look around you, you'll likely see that most of the items surrounding you contain a mix of materials that can't be separated for recycling even if you tried.
It is miraculous what we can create by combining materials - what is not fantastic is that most products aren't built to last.
Why can't mixed fabric be used to make matted felt, stuffing, quilts, ribbons, small items, or rags? Or donated for people to use for diy.
@@user-gu9yq5sj7cMixed fabric can indeed be used for certain things like stuffing and sometimes rags as you say, however, it's downcycling rather than recycling. Currently, more things can be downcycled rather than recycled, and there is only so much demand for scraps or downcycled materials.
Hey cool, just discovered another super-quality channel! Whilst the images shown in the video may not always directly correlate to what you are saying, the script is absolutely bonkers. You definitely put immense time of research and thinking into that video. It basically feels like a mixture between podcast and video, with the topic being shown extremely well, with all aspects worth knowing explained easily understandable. I'm impressed!
I have been saying this for years. Has a huge emvormentalist and also a business owner. This dynamic is huge!
I have a childish fascination watching the funny robot arms move things around.
The big problem with electronics isn't that the circuits can't be repaired, but that the software itself is designed to not be updateable by anyone but the manufacturer. Many manufacturers these days only support devices for several years. For example, the Pixel 3a by Google was released 2019 and will reach end-of-life in May 2022. What this means is that there will be no more security updates, so once a sufficiently severe vulnerability has been found, you can't use your phone safely anymore.
Yes, there exist third-party projects like LineageOS, but whether or not a specific phone will be supported is up to luck. While the Pixel3a *is* supported, the Pixel C tablet is not.
its the other way around isnt it. Security updates are pushed through android long after devices reach end of life. Regular updates are stopped, but security updates for most devices are shipped even to EoL devices.
In this case it's through the Android OS, not through googles fork of android being used on Pixel.
@@wafu6058 except that most Android phones never receive those updates unless the manufacturer and/or service provider decides to, unlike iPhones which Apple will send to all (supporting) devices.
I'm nowhere near 0 waste or anything like that, I have really tried over the past year to abandon that consumer mindset though, rather my motto is buy it once, buy it right. I have started to extend this to some of the areas I struggle with most like clothes. I found my style and build my wardrobe with a lot of care and concern, making sure that they wont just fall apart, I've completely abandoned fast fashion after lots of disappointment.
I've gotten a lot more serious about making things too, I have been building up my knitting skills and making my own wool sweaters, the wool I buy is made it the same province and sold at the dollar store so I feel really happy about that.
Repairing clothes too, I bought a moth eaten cashmere sweater from the thrift store and embroidered patches over every hole.
The less we support this model, the more self sustaining we can become and the more we learn to reject consumerism, the better we can be.
That’s awesome! I think people being thrifty is important too, and I haven’t seen that advertised a lot. If people put enough thought into it, they can reduce their own waste a lot, even other people’s waste too. There’s all kinds of ways to repurpose packaging and such.
I’m a pretty big eco-brick maker. (If y’all haven’t heard of it, feel free to look it up, it’s pretty neat) I don’t save just my plastics for them, but friend’s plastic too. I’ve even had people see me making them at church and leave plastic for me instead of tossing it. I also pick up plastic from sides of roads because there’s a place for it to be contained and serve a purpose too (you make a different kind of eco-bottle to contain dirty plastic)
There’s no recycling program here, so I save every can we get too. I use them to start seeds, washing them nicely between uses so they last longer. Idk about the recycling rate for cans anyway? Like, how many of them get recycled versus just going to a landfill.
By no means will this alone save the world or anything and it’d be cool for packaging to become biodegradable and everything, but these materials already exist now, and I like using them. Idk if that mindset makes any sense, I’m just a crafty and poor urban kid where recycling programs don’t exist djfjfhffhcj
@@LightlessLunala but does it all work in the grand scheme of things??
Benzene is carcinogenic, but it is like a mother of all organic compounds in a way and CAN NEVER be avoided and NEED NOT BE - it's like a railway terminus. It's just that you've to make sure that the end products are purified enough to not have residual benzene above safe limits.
Also, one of the biggest things required is localization of processes. Like the saying goes, if everyone had to do everything, everything would become automated in days. So, also, if everything is done locally, and in a distributed manner, not only would customization, maintenance, and even, need based production be easier, but also, will things have less environmental impact. And it does need lots of social and technological change, one of them being people ditching new age and old age religion/superstition, for practising STEM, the other being throwing out the casteist division of labour and lack of dignity of some labour, and finally, an economy based around needs, using mutual-aid (sharing), over trading & speculative accumulation. ;)
Yup. Localization is a big aspect of it that unfortunately didn't make the final cut of the video. Thanks for providing additional context.
@@Design.Theory You're welcome. No worries.
New and old age religion: "Don't study STEM." appearently.
"Like the saying goes, if everyone had to do everything, everything would become automated in days."
If everyone had to do everything, we would revert back to living as subsistence farmers, after a short and chaotic bout of mass violence where the vast majority of the population dies fighting over the now much less productive land. A small fertilizer factory simply can't create the same amount of fertilizers with the same cost (in other words, the same amount of inputs) as a large one. This is called economies of scale. By building larger, we can build more efficiently, using less resources to make more. It's not just a matter of wanting to build bigger. The laws of physics dictate it. When we stop doing that, we will either need to give up our standard of living and reduce our population, or use significantly **more** natural resources than we do today.
You know Benzene is bad when even the most crooked chemical and industrial corporations willingly acknowledge that the stuff is nasty.
Man it is really refreshing to hear takes like this. You rarely see sustainability videos that are at all pleasant to watch, typically they use guilt or insults to just bully viewers into agreement. It is nice to see a guy being reasonable and enjoyable to watch. Subscribed.
Buy products with repair programs and make sure to use them. I had a Jansport framed pack that lost a large irregular thumb screw. Over a decade later I emailed about if they has any, they asked for a picture and Machined me a bunch of extras and mailed them out. I still use that pack and since it has been everywhere with me it means a lot to me now.
it's also be possible to plan the economy in such a way as to disincentivize planned obsolescence and single use unrepairable products on both the corporate end and the consumer end. for example: getting my car fixed shouldn't cost more than buying a new car
I really love your emphasis on actually looking at the consequences of eco-focused policies. I feel like so often people will support some supposed eco-friendly product or law without thinking it through. It's important to recognize that a label isn't reality and we always have to look more closely at the true effects to determine whether something is actually doing what it claims
Well, there is tin already in leaded solder. It is typically 60% tin, 40% lead. Lead-free solder has about the same amount of tin (typically), but it has other additives instead of lead (silver, copper, antimony, bismuth, cobalt, etc.)
Most lead-free solder is 99% tin. The only somewhat common exception is Bismuth-Tin solder with around 40% tin, but it's very specialized and not used in manufacturing to my knowledge.
It's worth a mention that you don't necessarily have to ship things away for repair. If you have a local Patagonia store you can just drop it off there. Ofc it does take time, and still ends up shipped somewhere else, but I don't find it terribly inconvenient compared to printing off return labels etc
0:16 "[you'll be able to] make better decisions around how we might design a more sustainable future."
okay, here's my question:
*the majority of people watching this won't be "designing" anything but rather, likely, consuming. so what should we take from this then?*
and I don't wanna hear "vote with your wallet" or anything similar. that's the obvious answer most commonly given but without any thinking ahead. more "sustainable" products are only environmentally sustainable. which is obviously good & should be strived for by all. the problem is that they often cost more for less than what you get otherwise, especially up front, and there are still too many people who cannot afford it.
Great video ❤️
One note:
At some point you mention digital solutions as a sustainable alternative. Even though I think that is true in some cases, we should stay concious of data centers. They use huge amounts of energy and also emmit a lot if heat.
Digital solutions still use resources ;).
Besides that awesome video!!
Great tip! Thanks for checking out the video
This is very true. However, they are better primed for future sustainability. As using something “on the grid” largely uses resources that are consumed more efficiently. It also allows for a larger solution to be handled and upgraded easier. It’s far more affordable for a ton of people to have a small tax hike and cover an electric conversion of an existing plant than it is for each one of those same individuals to install windmills, solar panels, or another form of green energy generators at their homes and also deal with the yearly financial upkeep.
The heat is a very good point, as data centers do generate a TON of heat. However, there are data centers out there which use the waste heat to cut their heating costs by pumping the heat into their offices and surrounding communities, and some are even testing the use of a heat capture device to turn it into straight up usable energy (which helps keep it more sustainable in the summer when hot air isn’t needed.)
@@benjaminorr1823 interesting, you seem to know a lot more than me!
I think its great to hear, and not unsurprising, that people are already improving these systems.
I just wanted to highlight that nothing is for free and we always impacting the planet in some way.
Thanks Benjamin ;)
Waste heat from datacenters can be used for municipal hot water. They can also be powered by low emission energy sources.
More importantly, digital solutions must be decoupled from the digital lifestyle. More digital management of services, less screens on at a given time
Yes, it is a complicated topic. One that is easy to get overwhelmed in trying to figure out the right things to do. The current model of more is probably the worst thing that the consumer and the manufacturers embrace
13:00 no, truth is that there just is not enough time in the day to waste on such things. Perhaps if we weren't forced into working so many hours by wider society there would be more time for activities like clothing repair, but do you really think anybody is going to bother with it when there is about 3 hours of free time to spend on a weekday?
The effort this guy is putting in the extra mile of explaining basic business strategies such as for example fooling your customers and the "concept" of cause and effect in for example legislation is amazing me
Thank you for some even more insight on this issue. Something a lot of people don't actually know about me is that multiple professionals in the design field actually wanted me on the industrial design track in college. I declined and went with architecture (which still does have its problems) primarily due to that feeling of impending doom. People like you do give me some hope in the field of design, especially as someone looking to enter the field.
I really like how you've got both sides of the argument in one video, most of the ones I've come across are very "don't do this because it's bad for the environment, end of story" or "do this because its the best material, end of story".
Great video, well done!
He's limiting his analysis to a capitalist-market frame of reference which imposes some (I'd argue) insurmountable constraints on the problem of creating a sustainable economy AND a desirable society, but for confining oneself to that frame, he did a pretty good job.
I think the part about scale is interesting. I've seen some LCA's that show that huge companies on the other side of the world can make products with less carbon footprint even considering logistics. That's because scale makes things efficient. Sure a big ship runs on lots of fossil fuel, but they carry millions of products and always fill up their vehicles so split up on each product it's not much. Compare that to a small, local company that runs half filled cars to the postal office and you'll be a lot worse off. And in both cases the biggest output of carbon is likely the trip to the store to buy the thing if you run a fossil fueled car.
That artisanal cloth in the beginning of your video that took 2 weeks to produce is likely worse for the environment than a thousand cloths in an automated factory where each cloth takes 60 seconds. At least if it's people with equal standard of living producing the cloths.
And for Patagonia and their repair-scheme, I assume their production is really efficient. How much carbon is put out by shipping the garment to a repair shop, a person working on it for a while and then shipping it back? Single part handling is a lot less efficient, both for economy and sustainability, compared to full scale efficiency.
Yes, excellent thoughts in here. Thank you for pointing them out. I think they are important to take into account when trying to design a circular economy or a more sustainable system.
One of the problems of scale is just that: Scale. I agree with what you are saying, but it relies on the consumption that we have. Many products would just not exist were it not for the wasteful way that we rigged our system. However, these products help push scale in many ways - if we removed 90% of the ships on the world's oceans, the ships would be harder to fill, the companies would be smaller and probably forced to having more, smaller, less efficient ships, and so on.
I would agree with you to some extent, but also point out that a large part of the problem is in over-consumption, not in the efficiency of manufacturing. Much of what we do, we could continue doing it, if we just did 10 times less of it.
@@arildedvardbasmo490 The thing about over-consumption though, is how can we say what is "just right" consumption? What most people 50-100 years ago would call over-consumption is the base level of life quality we expect today.
I don't believe that lowering consumption is the right way to handle the future. I don't even think it's feasible. People wouldn't accept it, there would be too much pushback. I believe that if we want the future to be sustainable we need to keep improving life quality while making things more efficient and cleaner.
When the more sustainable thing gives a better quality of life than the less sustainable thing, that's when we make real progress.
Logistics can be made carbon neutral, at least in theory. There is no way to make sourcing the materials for everything we currently manufacture entirely sustainable - producing and using less is worth pursuing, even if it makes the logistics less efficient.
full scale efficiency is the enemy of sustainability. Jevon's paradox perfectly explains why this is the case. The planet does not care what the carbon emission is per capita. The planet only cares what the total carbon emission is. Like it or not, learning to consume less collectively is the way moving forward.
The simple fact is we need to make education accessible to everyone, making manufacting sustainable and progress takes knowledge, and channels like this show people like to learn, but education needs to become free and open to all so we can make more jobs that keep things sustainable and take advantage of automation
“Free”. Not necessarily against what you are saying but it would be nice if we could reach this new open utopia you mention by being honest about what “free” programs are. There is not free lunch just trade offs and many of the of the great “free” stuff introduced prior is a handicapping the youth today with obligations we never benefited from.
@@cendrizzi universally accessible* it would pay for itself exponentially because of reasons explained in the comment. People would be able to take jobs and expand the economy rather than syphon it like it does now.
Of all the useless stuff we learn at school, we could have at least have teachers who studied economics and ecology or similar, to open up a new school subject.
I don't know where you live but education is already accessible here in the US. Every child up to about the age of 18 can go to a free government run school. After that it's up to the person to decide if they want to invest in their education.
@@agisler87 you already acknowledged that you know I'm talking about university level education so you can drop the intentionally misinterpreting my points act. But, as you know, we already made public school available (and all but mandatory) for everyone, the same should apply to university/college level. Student debt can be canceled any time, with the only consequences being republicans doing whatever they can to stop it and then make all college free and open to everyone who meets educational requirements (and can if they need to through free GED programs etc) and then it will pay for itself almost immediately and return the investment exponentially through a highly educated workforce and job creation
8:40 correction: solder is made up of a 60/40 mixture of tin and lead. In lead-free solder, it is normally made up of a lower conc. of gold or copper (normally 99.3% tin, 0.7% copper)
*AT TIMESTAMP [**19:24**]:*
If rules are too vague, people will inevitably exploit loopholes.
I'm not yet a designer... but it feels as if sustainability, quality and affordability are in some form of triangle where you can only truly acomplish 2 objectives in a design. I would for the benafit of the environment personally value quality and sustainability over affordability although I feel most other consumers wouldn't, so would it be fair to argue this is a social issue, as much as a greed driven, issue caused by large organisation? Perhaps environmental issues are moreso influenced by the demand of consumers and for a change to truly be made an international shift in mindset must be made? I'm sure large organisations are also a massive driving factor, just thought I'd share my unexperienced outlook !
Would love for there to just be high quality sustainable products but indeed it isn't that simple. Price is one of the most important factors unfortunately. Even though lot's of the time cheap means there will be higher costs long term. Much like the environmental issue itself, short term it works and is cheap, but long term it will cost.
You're right. Corporations only value the high output of cheap products because that's what makes them the most profit today. If Consumers changed their priorities, then corporations would be incentivized to make stuff that matches those priorities. If we're willing to pay more for sustainably produced products, they'll make more sustainable products. This gets complicated by many things such as deceptive marketing like that 'paper' bottle in the thumbnail, but is still something we can move toward. Vote with your wallet.
@@syndaquil4838 going forward as a consumer I think I'd value sustainability even more so, I think another way the consumer can have in impact moreso than the supplier is in resale where people could choose to buy pre owned clothes over fast fashion or donate their old clothes etc. Perhaps more important than buying more but environmentally consciously is to buy less and make more of what we already have.
One way some countries address the issue is having the companies take back the product at end of life. If they are then responsible for dealing with the waste (note the country also puts a cost on waste) then the situation improves as it adjusts the equation if waste is included In It by default. I was thinking about Germany in this instance, they are fairly progressive with this. Not ideal as I don’t think it applies with good sold outside the country, but certainly a concerted try to fix the issue.
I personally found the title of this video either clickbait or misleading. To say they “can’t” is to give an out in a situation where they do have some control. Some go as far as to distort social discussion though ads and lobbying to a degree that is generally considered perverse. The ‘recycling’ of plastic has been one. Downcycling is usually the best case scenario for plastics and that’s if they even get reprocessed as it appears to have been a crock in most cases. So in these cases the plastic producers and petro chemical companies have gone out of their way at great expense to obfuscate the situation. Sure it may be true a usable solution may cost more, but to willingly drive the discussion in a way that actively thwarts it solving is something a number of companies/industries have done is just gross and needs to be addressed.
I think about these systems like a tug of war. Initially designers make many simple decisions that are always good. Use recycled aluminum instead of virgin aluminum because it's cheaper and more energy efficient to produce than mining ore. Easy win. That's the part of a tug of war where the lines are getting pulled tight. But then we run out of easy decisions and we start fighting on every decision. Do we use durable but toxic lead solder or safe but fragile tin solder? It's not an easy choice anymore, we've already made all the easy decisions where everybody wins. Now we need to decide if we want to use more expensive materials and manufacturing techniques in order to make expensive but less polluting products, or if we prioritize getting our products into more people's hands.
Getting cheaper products into more people's hands sounds like simple greed in the context of luxury items like phones and clothes, but what about food? There are a lot of people who don't have the resources to eat organic and fair trade with every meal. So is a farmer who uses lots of glyphosate in RoundUp Ready fields instead of hiring teams of laborers to hoe the field really making a bad decision when it allows him to sell his products for cheaper, allowing poor families to buy more food for their limited income?
I do enjoy Mexico's concept to re-use 2 litter coca cola bottle's as well as glass soda bottles of any brand. The same would be so useful for various products such as refillable soap/shampoo stations the way we have the 5 gallon water refill stations. I imagine the same could apply to other items such as expensive perfumes where you bring in your glass container & get it refilled for a lower price. While the company may lose the initial price of a full sale, they'd gain a number of reoccurring customers that enjoy the scent and aren't as inclined to buy a new brand/container from someone else for more than they have to pay for the refill.
Perfume is luxury, so they have to be expensive and differentiate from common item.
"Refilling perfume is for pleb. Our perfume is sold in single use bottles."
Different example - clothes are clothes, they should keep you covered. So why buy 100, 200, 500 dollar designer t-shirt over 5 dollar one? There's no increase in quality that justifies the purchase. It's a status symbol, that's it.
Most poor people don't want to seem poor so they will do and buy what elites buy.
Solution: make elites live like normal people, so there's no difference between upper and lower class.
Unfortunately this goes against human nature and humanity itself, so it will never happen.
I think the obvious answer to striking a balance between our "need for the new" and the need to take care of our planet is an intense but casual customization. I don't want to replace my computer sooner than I have to, because I've customized certain aspects of it to my liking, and I'll have to recustomize whatever I replace it with. I don't want to throw out my wardrobe and start anew, because I've selected pieces that suit my specific aesthetic, and I've tailored them to better fit me.
If you're attached to it, and it's serviceable, you're less inclined to just toss it in the bin. And if you want "new," then you can just alter what you already have.
You would have to replace your computer, because new one is faster, has larger RAM and in general is better. Same applies to everything else - fashion changes.
@@ceu160193 no.
At most, 80% of users will only need a new CPU over a period of decades. And most them not even that.
For most you replace your PC when it breaks in a way you cant fix.
Although fashion can and does change that’s societal fashion and an individual may find a style and stick with to the grave.
@@randombrit13 Then that individual becomes outcast. Social norms demand you to wear clothes up to current fashion.
As for PC - mine is self-assembled, but enough people do not have expertise in that area.
@@ceu160193 what type of 2012 Disney channel high school do you think we’re living in? Societal norm in the developed is to embrace and celebrate individuality including unique style.
And no I don’t believe you made your own pc when you can make comments like above that blatantly display your ignorance of PC building norms and culture.
@@randombrit13 There is no PC culture in my country, luckily. And I did assemble my computer myself, because it's cheaper, than paying specialised firms.
I just want to point out that at the early beginning of industrialization, mechanized agriculture changed the western world forever.
Most people had been farmers for generations, the occurrence of imported cheap mass produced grain made that way of living very difficult in a lot of European countries, with their tiny subdivided plots it was hard to compete and it drove a lot of people into cities and factories trying to survive.
It also coincides with a lot of famine and emigration out of Europe.
Living and working conditions in those cities were overcrowded, unsanitary unhealthy and miserable.
Child labor, minimal rights, excessive working hours....
It took a long time and a lot of fighting for conditions to actually improve.
They key point here is that it got way worse before getting better, there was no way back to the way of living before industrialization, most people had no choice.
“Companies want to earn money now!”
Not unlike a certain youtuber, who first spams you with a paid by logo, for then to mention his patreon account, and completes the tour de force ad-bombing by cheekily throwing in an ad read before you know what just happened. And let’s not forget the pinned comment under the video.
Chef’s kiss
It all boils down to one thing: money. As long as environmentally friendly methods are more expensive than other legal methods of manufacturing, it will be foolish for any company to use them. They are for profit companies, so wasting money on stuff they don't need to makes no sense. A CEO that wastes millions on having his portrait painted on all walls of the factory by some artist faces criminal charges. Same for a CEO that spends the same amount of money on some not legally mandated pro-environment stuff that cannot be explained as advertising.
This is where laws come into play. Lawmakers can legally make laws that don't care about profits. And when those laws apply the same for all companies, no company will have an advantage or disadvantage. It's only when laws apply unevenly that we see problems. If you make all books more expensive, the competition between publishers won't be affected, but consumers will go to the movies instead, killing the book industry as a whole. And this is why companies spend billions to influence lawmakers wherever they can. (And in countries where political parties have no income other than what companies give them, this effect is see the most. Just compare environmental law making in the US and EU.)
Agree 100%
There is no such thing as an "even" law. All laws create winners and losers. If you require LED lights for example, you just transferred money artificially into companies that make and install LED lights, taking it away from every other company. You've damaged one industry to benefit another. Nothing is free and every government action involves violent transfer of wealth from someone to someone else.
there will always be an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to these kinds of laws. even if these theoretical laws effect all companies equally in their impact on an individual unit of some environmentally unfriendly product, that doesn't mean the overall effect on every company will end up the same. For example if there was a new law making it more costly to run a gas station, companies like Exxon would likely be fine, but a mom and pop gas station may not be able to handle those added costs and would close down. The most common way monopolies form now is through this very same process, by getting their competition effectively outlawed because it is too expensive for anyone to start a competing business. In the end all that will result is that because of less competition the average citizen will be harmed, the big oil companies will be even better off, and the environment will be no healthier.
It's not just laws, even our economic systems are flawed. There are so many different ones, social credit, capitalism, and socialism are just a few. But these do absolutely nothing to help our planet. We have to learn a lot before we can truly fix this situation. And their is just too much to learn and fix.
re: 19:38 Mexico City and unforeseen consequences with laws. The difference between a law on when you can drive and a new public transit system is that a law regulating behavior is immediately enforceable and requires little government investment, basically free for the tax payers and governments; Its just a rule. A robust public transit system costs millions of tax dollars and years to build. It should be done, but there are clear reasons why rules are an easier and perhaps more frequently chosen path. Great video, thanks for sharing it.
I don't agree that scaling up production in ego-driven. As you said, we live under a system that puts profit over everything, large scale production is more efficient and therefore cheaper (per item produced). That in itself is an objective and everpresent reason to scale up. Also due to inflation and competition there are only the two options for companies: actively growing or demishing. Even if most of us are completly aware and willing to do something about the climate crisis it only needs very few that aren't to ruin all the effords made by others. Those that don't care would be able to produce cheaper, make more profits than others and therefore dominate the competition. The only way to get to a completely sustainable mode of production is to completely abolish the profit motive.
The problem with this is that it _simply isn't true_ . Economies of scale do not say that bigger is better; they say they is an optimal size for everything (depending on many global and local variables, of course). When you break those monopolies apart, you'll get _more_ profit out of them, not less. When Standard Oil was forced to break into multiple companies, _each_ of those companies had bigger profits than Standard Oil as a whole. When France started to rebuild after WW2, they went with the "bigger is better" mindset; very soon, they realized how stupid that is - when e.g. a steel mill would be more efficient while it's running... but then racking up loads and loads of waste when it was being maintained, for example. And even worse, the bigger you are, the more power you inevitably get in the government, which allows you to gain unfair advantages, become "too big to fail" and all the good old illnesses.
The whole economic theory the modern world is built on is a bunch of lies made by dishonest academia and happily abused by the people who get to the new money first. Inflation is _not_ a good thing. Deflation is _not_ a bad thing. Prices change because the world changes. Pretending as if that weren't true is a big chunk of how we got where we are today. When the central banks were created to "tame" inflation, sure, they made inflation more incremental. But money lost value year after year, and in a decade... Where does the new money come from? Someone sold the lie that making mortgages "cheap" (i.e. low interest) would make it easier for people to own their homes. But what really happens? Exactly, the prices rise to compensate; the supply isn't very flexible. Low mortgages with high interest rates were exchanged for ridiculously large mortgages with low interest rates. Which means you don't have a chance of buying a home without a mortgage in the west - and you end up paying a mortgage for half of your life. And all that time, that money "created" by those loans slowly filters through society, making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
If the managers really put profits above everything... we would actually often be better off, as awful as that sounds. Sadly, they are even more consumed in the wild consumerism, even more obsessed with their ego and appearances, of _course_ they need a brand new car every two years - that's how everyone knows they're successful, right? It's not really profitable squeezing the last ounce of work out of your employees, but they do it anyway - because they don't care about the company, they care about being able to say "See how I motivated my reports to work extra hours?" I've switched to six hour workdays; I get much more work done in those six hours than I ever did in eight. We need to stop the obsession with "work long and hard". It often hurts productivity. In the end, the managers will always find something to fill your time with, regardless of how stupid or backwards it is.
Honesty. There's where it all starts.
Finally, a video that dosen't berate the viewer and tell them they are evil. A video that doesn't act like "oh it's so easy, just buy and use the more expensive and less reliable products".A video that actually gets how hard it is to be ecofriendly.
13:18 "Repairing an item meant printing out a shipping label, packaging the jacket safely and waiting for UPS to come pick your package..."
Imagine how the other 90% live, there is no UPS to pick up your package you have to wait in line at the post office, shipping is probably not free and most likely costs half the price of the item.
Another great video John. You put a LOT of valuable information into a short video defining this critical feature of design as a mindset. One thing that is clear or should be clear to any designer entering the field is that design is becoming more of a mindset than a profession.
This is how it should be - whereby the thought process, the flow of ideas, and the flexibility to use a wide range of skills and awareness becomes more important than the skill to craft an object - one often predicated on false needs. This is how design was before industrialization; more a philosophy of crafting. Industry triggered mankind's addiction to scale.
As @Quixotic End indicates via new generations. we can make the paradigm shift to new frontiers leveraging other potentially expansive venues with sustainable markets beyond object scaling in the physical space.
Agreed. Thank you for the thoughtful comment as always, Raffi.
The part about designers being at fault is actually the exact same when it comes to software devs and privacy. While we don't want to harm our users by mining all their data, we also really love data and collecting it - not nessecarily for monetary gains, but even just to see how our users use the product we've created.
I love this video. This is an excellent example of tackling an issue and not shying away from all the complexities surrounding the issue. I have been trying to shop truly sustainable, and it is nearly impossible. I think the ultimate solution is decentralization. We need to go back to small thinking, thinking on a micro level, instead of changing the world we would change the world within our reach. If enough people did this, then the world would change.
I don't know if the typo at 14:58 is voluntary or not and I have trouble deciding which would be funnier.
More seriously, this is a great video, but I would like to point out that scale isn't always a bad thing. Large scale production and transportation isn't just a matter of ego or even cost effectiveness. It can actually reduce the environmental cost. Transporting thousands of tons of cargo with one massive ship is way less polluting than doing the same thing with trucks.
Now obviously, overproduction leads to waste and over-consumption and the ease of access and sometimes the necessity of large scale industrial methods to stay competitive can force some companies to overproduce. But for some widely used products and resources, large-scale solutions are beneficial because there are a lot of people on Earth and demand will be high anyway. Basically, we shouldn't make everything big, but we can't equivocate big=bad.
13:00 I once bought a hoodie that came with a warranty that essentially said if it ripped, tore, wore out, etc. I could send it in and they would fix it, free. Well, the REPAIR was free, I'd have to pay for shipping. And if I have to pay $20 to ship a hoodie across the country to get fixed vs pay $30 for a new hoodie you don't have to wonder why that warranty never got used.
Perhaps the reason the repair plan doesn't get used is not because people want to repair their items but because its just not cost effective for the customer. Who is going to pay more than the item is worth to get it repaired?
Cool video in some ways, but presented in an extremely eurocentric, first world view. Kinda crazy to say "quality of life for the average person was improving" during the industrial revolution. Where do you think the materials came from? Who do you think mined or extracted them (and still do)? Who had their quality of life improved? I'm a designer too and love the topic, I just think this video treats sustainability as if it was just ecology and limits it's scope very clearly to North America + Europe's point of view (places that actually benefited from the exploitation and extraction system).
The industrial revolution was indeed build on colonialism and the massive concentration of resources it caused. Despite formal colonialism having (mostly) ended, exploitation of poor nations still happens through economic dependency and political/military intervention, so history continues.
Also, colonialism also kinda happened within Europe, as the workforce for industry was in part created by enclosure of the commons, depriving farmers of their land and forcing them (and craftsmen that relied on them for their earnings) into the cities. I doubt these workers noticed anything from that improvement in average quality of life, not until the early 20th century at least.
Quality of life for the average person was improving. You are really so delusional to think that Africa, china, or any other place for that matter, would be better off without the industrial revolution?
The largest industrial revolution in human history occurred in China
The "Convenience is king" mentality can be overwritten with sentimentality (repair something that's been with you for a long time) plus well with inflation, hopefully repairing something can be cheaper than buying a new one eventually.
Repairing things yourself is usually way cheaper (in fact, surprisingly often even when you have to buy all the tools necessary!). But going to a repairman is an entirely different matter - the only way to make that cheaper than buying new stuff is for wages to go _way_ down.
I think legislation could reduce bottled water consumption if it built more drinking water fountains in public places, there's probably a lot of little direct things that would reduce overconsumption and benefit the average person
while a good idea, I could very easily see disease rates spiking because of people constantly using them, not to mention the additional work required to clean them, the parts required to make them and the piping you would have to install for it, and that's just a few things off the top of my head. It could help in the long run, but it's had to say, and could definetly cause a lot of short-term or even long term problems
8:33 leaded solder has been baaned in commercial production since 2006. It remains only in very specialized applications like space travel, medical devices and military equipment, where other metal alloys aren't as resilient to shock vibration and temperature change.