#and the plastic to make them is not recyclable

[beardedmrbean]

Legislation under the moniker “right to repair” has now been introduced in all 50 states, marking a major milestone in this grassroots consumer movement.

GNN has reported on the march of right to repair laws across the US, but also the kind of entrepreneurialism they engender: like an aftermarket auto parts company that makes replacements for well-known faulty components in automobiles.

Passed in New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon, Wisconsin just became the final US state to introduce some sort of right to repair laws.

In broad terms, all of these bills would generally guarantee a consumer’s right to access replacement parts for devices and machines, repair manuals or other relevant documents for expensive products, diagnostics data from original manufacturers, and even in some cases, such as automobiles, appropriate tools necessary for maintenance.

They may also ban the use of technological protection measures, sometimes called “software locks” that are designed to restrict repair only to authorized repair technicians.

“Americans are fed up with all the ways in which manufacturers of everything from toasters to tractors frustrate or block repairs, and lawmakers are hearing that frustration and taking action,” Nathan Proctor, right to repair director for consumer rights group PIRG, told 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, who has been tracking right to repair legislation for 10 years.

OF A SIMILAR SPIRIT: 580 Repair Shops Form a Flourishing Subculture Fixing Toasters, Electronics, Coffee Makers and Lamps

He details that at first, big tech and big engineering, such as Apple, John Deere, and others, ardently lobbied against these bills, saying that trade secrets protections would be violated if they were forced to turn over diagnostics, telemetry, or other insider data to non-company actors.

The progressive difficulty with which modern products, particularly electronics, are designed prevents most amateurs from being able to repair them if they break.

MORE RIGHT TO REPAIR NEWS: EU Approves Groundbreaking New ‘Right to Repair’ Laws Requiring Appliances to Be Easier to Fix

Screws are forsaken in favor of plastic locking toggles which break if removed, fuse or wire cover panels are replaced with jointless polymer molded covers, both of which and many more examples besides are designed to deter the fix-it-minded folks enough so that they will just throw the product away and buy a new one.

Electronic waste is one of the largest sources of non-recyclable landfill waste, and hopefully enough of these right to repair bills pass that some of these millions of powerstrips, lamps, phones, computers, and televisions can be kept out of the ground.

[mindblowingscience]

A team of materials scientists and engineers at ETH Zurich has developed a light-triggered chemical process for breaking down certain polymers into their constituent monomers. The paper is published in the journal Science. In recent years, scientists have become aware of new problems associated with the mass production of polymers—microplastics can now be found on every part of the Earth, including inside virtually every person on the planet. Part of the problem is the difficulty and expense involved in recycling plastics, which makes it easier to throw them in the trash or the ocean.

Continue Reading.

[heresiae]

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A post shared by Brian Moller | B Mo the Prince (@bmotheprince)

guys, wtf is this shit? are you kidding me?

NO.

put that away and leave it in the past.

first of all, where would you record your cassettes? do you want to buy a bulky stereo, turn on the radio and painfully wait for the song you want to record only to it to be cut by few seconds at the beginning and the end by the DJ talk?

do you want to directly buy official cassettes only for them to melt the first time you left them in your car (and lose the cover immediately btw).

or do you want to buy a bunch of CDs only to record them on cassettes? (because good luck in finding a pc with still a CD burner).

do you want to bring with you a bunch of them while traveling or just walking around because we are so used now to listen to very diverse music for a very long time? (you'll literally have to walk with a bag pack half filled with those to have the same variety)

do you want to experience the the "joy" of finding the magnetic tape all twisted by the gears or the slowing down of the music while your battery dies?

do you want to be constantly careful on how you handle the player because as soon as it get its first damage it's just downhill from there? (buttons and the door will be the firsts to go).

do you really want to incentive another useless exploitation of not recyclable plastic?

if you don't want to stream just get mp3. they're still an option you know?

now, mp3 players I'm all for it, go nuts.

[foxcassius]

nvm i went on the plant milk person's blog and theyre too annoying for me to justify keeping their post rbed

[otteroflore]

I watched a video by a guy who made a dupe of a very expensive all-plastic chair and had done one other video and he was like "guys i am NOT providing the file i do NOT want them to sue me"

and i thought that was pretty funny cause

1. as people pointed out in the comments the design was very easy to replicate in almost any 3D modeling program. The guy kind of struggled with it because he was new to 3D modeling (no shame! we all start somewhere) but... yeahhhh an experienced artist could make that fairly easily.

2. duplicating 3D models and providing the designs to people is what i do. (although tbf a very "fancy" business might be more s.l.a.p. happy than a business who stopped producing those molds ages ago)

3. although i support paying designers/artists well, there is something a touch... say, ironic... about selling something that is just an injection molded plastic lawn chair for $1200

[arctic-hands]

Is it infuriating my disabled, food-allergy having ass who doesn't live near a grocery store within walking distance on a good day has to order groceries from Amazon in order to survive? Yes. Do their new silver-foil insulation bags for frozen things mean I now have free wrapping paper for birthdays and holidays? Also yes

[foxglove-garden]

I went to New Jersey today and decided that I hate it there.

No plastic straws. Anywhere. Just paper straws that melt and feel horrible against my skin.

It's like the entire state hates autistic people. How the hell do you ban plastic straws?

[aliosne]

ADHDcore is clearing your bedside table at 1:30am after ??? months, including clearing half the OTC meds you own, a dozen candies you don’t like that are covered in dust, and like ten unopened pieces of mail

[jazzhaaaands]

The wood is more natural and has a relationship with the ocean

[psychoticallytrans]

Here's something that a lot of thin people don't know about being fat: you have to be very careful, these days, what the weight limit on your furniture is. So much is made of particleboard or even cardboard or flimsy plastic, and it may be great for the environment for things to be made of recycled materials, but it can easily leave fat people in the incredibly humiliating situation of breaking a chair by sitting on it, or a table by leaning on it. It also creates an effective "fat tax" on furniture, since the more solid materials tend to cost more.

When I was looking for loft beds to make my apartment effectively larger, the majority of them had a weight limit of 200 pounds, including the weight of the mattress. That puts a weight limit on the person of roughly 150 pounds, and that presumes a light mattress. That's not taking into account blankets, pillows, and stuffies, which can easily rack up a weight of around ten to twenty pounds without much trouble, bringing the safe weight for a person down to roughly 140 to 130 pounds. The ones that held more than that had a steep increase in price, with ones that held 300 pounds costing roughly 600$ more than the 200 pound ones, and the 400 pound ones, which I wanted for tolerances, ran a good 800$ more on average than the ones for 200 pounds.

More generally, solid wood, metal, tempered glass, and thick, durable plastic cost more than particleboard, cardboard, and flimsy plastic. They are also far more likely to be safe for fat people to use.

If you are a thin person and want fat people to be comfortable when visiting you, invest in furniture that is clearly made with sturdy materials. Having to brush off standing the whole visit is embarrassing both for us and, if you are a host who cares about the comfort of guests, for you.

[teaboot]

I feel like if you're using a lot of disposable plastic bags in your day to day life, you've gotta do something sustainable to make up for it. Like using bamboo toilet paper or eco friendly cat litter or something, yknow

Honestly I exaggerate for comedic effect, while I DO routinely use ziplock bags to hold spaghetti I cook maybe once a month and the bag itself is usually for freezer storage. I actually throw out maybe one bag a week? I DO hate washing plates and tupperware and junk but that usually just means I eat sandwiches without a plate.

I agree though that needless waste should be avoided, and I do avoid it- biodegradable bags and recyclables, empty butter tubs used to store leftovers, etc.

This said, though, not applicable necessarily for myself but for a lot of others- I feel that it's importat to remember that there are many people who legitimately NEED things like plastic straws, or catheters, or pre-packaged foods

And the idea that that's a moral failing that individuals need to personally make up for when a single billionaire blows out more CO2 in a long weekend than I will in my whole life on a superjet meet-cute in the Bolivian rainforest between humvee drag races funded by the river-polluting textiles plants they planted in a third world country to avoid EPA laws and give an entire village stillbirths and stomach cancer is an idea that those very same bigwigs have spent a LOT of time and money investing in planting in the public psyche.

Like- Glass bottles are infinitely recyclable, so why are so many drinks in plastic now? Loads of drinks manufacturers used to buy them back and clean them for re-use, so why did they stop? If they chose to make something out of a limited and environmentally irresponsible material, why is it my failing to track down a correct process of disposal for them? What if there are none in my area? Do I lobby for more recycling plants in my area? Do I set aside some of my limited time outside the pain factory of my job- which I have more than one of, thanks to rising costs of things just like that drink I just emptied- to properly dispose of this company's waste FOR them?

Say coca-cola just rolled up to your town and started dumping millions of empty plastic bottles in the street, going, "wow, you should really think about building and staffing a recycling depot, it would be really shameful of you to just put these in the trash." When companies purposefully use materials with limited lifespans- because yes, even plastic can only be reused so many times- and tell you it's your own fault if it harms the environment- that's essentially what they're doing, just with more steps.

Yes, its important to be as environmentally concious as we can in our day to day life, but responsible sustainability is not catholicism. We don't get good boy points from our lord and savior Captain Planet every time the average low-income household gathers together to hold hands and repent for a single-use plastic that allows them to access something they need.

Entire families could eat trees and shit dead lithium batteries for years and still not do as much damage to the planet as an average dye plant or braindead celebrity does in a week just for fun, and I'm mad about it

...this went on longer than intended.

TL/DR: DO recycle and minimize waste, but don't beat yourself up over the little waste you can't avoid, and follow the money.

EDIT: Part 2

[the-simple-diamond-bunny]

I Got about 5 yards of fabric twine in this ball and it’s smaller than a tennis ball. It’s a work in progress, I’m gonna make it as big as a basket ball. Stay tuned.

(Part 2)

[darkspace7]

Confession: Sometimes I take people’s plastic water bottles when they’re not looking and refill them (never all the way though, just enough to slip under the owner’s radar) with tap water.

That way, when they take a swig I get the satisfaction of knowing not only can they not tell the difference between tap and bottled water but the fact they get a little bit of extra hydration to get them through the day.

[libraford]

Thinking about my recycled plastics projects and the face that I can make some of these look like natural stones with enough mixing. Would be kind of funny to market it in the way we sell 'fordite,' which is layers and layers of car paint treated as a real stone. There is one park that I typically find the bottle caps in, but it has a very... boring name which only works if I'm shitposting. But- there is a wetland near that park which sees some damage from all the garbage from that park, which might work better.

Since I plan on selling these at local art fairs. The point is to get people to think about how they leave their trash in public places.

I will get people being like 'its just plastic.'

And its like... if its so easy, you collect over a hundred bottle caps, melt them down to mix them to imitate stone, and then make them into jewelry. Or if you want me to stop, quit throwin' your trash in the parks. Christ, we have over 170 trash cans throughout the city and y'all still somehow manage to MISS.

[3liza]

we gotta figure out the prescription bottle recycling thing man I get like 12 of them every month and it's an enormous amount of single use plastic that is going directly into landfills and the ocean. there's zero reason for pharmacies not to have empty bottle dropoffs, it's dry storage and easy to clean. one problem is plastic gets micro scratches and dings in it that make it difficult or impossible to sanitize to a medical standard, which would be solved by switching to glass bottles, but then glass causes transport problems with weight and fragility. I've researched this and the only way to recycle prescription bottles in my city is to, on your own, mail them somewhere that will do it for you. I think some of the privatized recycling services will do the same thing but I'm deeply suspicious of those services and suspect most of them are not actually recycling anything. the recycling infrastructure is so bad in the USA and the majority of our plastic recycling is not actually happening, it's just fake garbage sorting that ends up in landfills anyway. we HAVE to go back to using glass for everything, plastic recycling is a dead end.

[seat-safety-switch]

Humanity's greatest achievement, the talking cookie jar, was callously discarded by a so-called "advancing civilization." I ask you now, are you happier now than you were when you had a cartoon dolphin in your kitchen? One that made an ear-piercing screech whenever you pulled its head open to retrieve a Famous Amos? It's time to get back to cookie jars.

Invented in 1491 by a rogue team of Chinese scientists who were looking for a place to safely store the cookies that they had invented the year before, the cookie jar promptly became a mainstay of every home. And then pretty much nothing happened for about another five hundred years, until talking cookie jar technology appeared.

It may seem hard to believe now, seated in the immeasurable comfort of modern-day technology like vtubers and even ztubers, but at the time, sticking a greeting-card noisemaker into a novelty piece of plastic was the only way to get a gift for your weird aunt that she wouldn't immediately smash on the floor and call your dad out for his many crimes against humanity. You had to be there, I guess.

Nowadays, scant few of these artifacts still remain, purged in humanity's rush to recycle old electronics. Perhaps there was also an element of fear around the unhealthy nature of leaving a baked good out in the bare air, tempting you to devour them whenever you entered the kitchen. Cookies themselves are as popular as ever, but we prefer to eat them directly from the package, in secret, away from the judgmental eyes of family members.

There is hope, however. With today's technology, cookie jars can once again talk. And not just that: they can feel. We've inserted a bio-synthetic machine sentience into every single one of these Garfield® cookie jars. It knows your schedule. It knows your diet. It passes judgment on you. And, critically, you are not allowed to recycle it under United Nations law, because we programmed it to feel pain. You can pick one up at your local K-Mart for sixty bucks plus tax. Makes a great gift for your weird aunt.