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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

> A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted

I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be the norm in the near future.

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I have become more and more convinced that recycling is overhyped. Not that we shouldn't do it (except in the documented cases where it's actually not accomplishing anything), but there's a reason it's at the end of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

Hoping we can push more and more towards reduce and reuse.

Recycling is a big lie, and I don't understand why we still validate this concept. Most things can be recycled only once (paper and glass being the exception), and eventually they go to trash.

Also, the resources used to recycle are important, and recycling can have damaging effect on nature.

Metals are also recyclable as many times as you want.

Recycling is not perfect but I don’t understand the negativity. Do you really think it would be preferable to just send everything straight to landfills instead of trying to recycle what we can, even if only once?

No, I'm saying recycling gives a false sense of security, when in reality it's a very very imperfect system with flaws people are not aware of

Nothing should be sent to trash When creating a new thing, vendors should make an end-of-life impact study, with the aim of 0% waste, ie make the thing with non polluting materials (wood?) and infinitely recyclable materials

Recycling is overhyped because its a very difficult process that also consumes large amounts of time and energy. For very little purpose.

I wish I could buy things that are expected to last a lifetime. The only things I've purchased in recent months that fall into that category are my cast iron pan and some hardcover books.

There are a lot of things but they are always very very expensive. It’s almost not worth it when functionally many times they perform about as well as something a tenth of its price.

And if we’re talking electronics, 100x worse than what will be on the Market in 10 years.

10 years ago you could buy a core i5 2500 for ~$200. Quad core, 3.7GHz max. Seem to be half the perf of a current i5 on 4threads benchmarks. Of course phones have progressed faster but will they for the next 10 years? Probably not in terms of utility.

That seems rather reductionist.

It’s not about one single synthetic benchmark.

A 10 year old system is going to be much worse - slower RAM, worse GPU, much slower disks (and almost certainly disks, not SSD)

Just so you know, the glue used in most hard- and soft- cover books since the 1970's is more worm-resistant but less time-resistant than earlier organic formulations. You'll find books bound in the 18th century that can still have the pages turned today, but thirty- or forty- year old books typically fall apart, especially in dry conditions.

I do not know if there is an economical way to repair them, I'd never thought about it until now.

What kind of books are we talking here? Could be survivorship bias, but my experience (in Europe) is nothing like this, plenty of old books in every household and second hand shops are buying them en masse as well.

That is a terrific question, and I don't know.

I actually happen to work in a printing house, but what I stated is something that was explained to me years ago. I'm in the software development department, but I'll ask around in the printing department and see if I can get any clarification. I do wonder if that information is local to our country, or to specific books, it was explained to me in the context of a hardcopy of Journey to the Center of the Earth falling apart. The book was likely printed locally as it is in our local language, not French.

Rebinding is a thing. I saw a machine in a library once. It kind of sands off the old hardened glue and then dips the spine in some sort of hot-glue.

To extend further, very few items will run flawlessly for decades or more without some kind of maintenance.

Durable doesn't necessarily mean the product will last eternally as built.

Books usually need to be re-bound and re-covered, pieces of furniture need to be repainted/revarnished, Electronic appliances may need component replacement (capacitors, belts, etc), etc

Yes,this represent some efforts and still have some ecological impact, but being able to maintain an item that, at its core, is still original is a far cry from producing a brand new one.

But to do so, the product needs to be designed as maintainable and reparable, preferably even beyond the manufacturer support period (by using generic and easily obtainable components for example).

Books dont last that long anymore... Maybe a lifetime if you never use them and keep them sealed in a temperature and humidity controlled environment

Well, scratch that one off the list too then. But that's my point. Very few things are made to last anymore, and that makes me sad.

I do believe that culture might even have started before ww2 when engineers produced too long lasting ladies stockings for the management and were asked to go back to the drawing board with stockings that did last forever (I do not have a source for that story but I've heard it multiple times from different groups of friends).

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