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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

One day I looked around at all the plastics in life - in particular looking at the plastic cases of vintage computers, and I realised that plastics is absolutely incredible. Often really beautiful when you think about it, incredibly precise, with beautiful lines and curves.

I've come to find plastics really quite interesting. It's kind of a magic material.

And at the same time it's a sort of like King Midas in which humanity gets this incredible material but now there's plastic everywhere polluting everything. Everything we touch is turning to plastic.

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I had a different sort of event looking at the plastic in my life. More like, whats the point of this, other than to save the manufacturer costs? I'm convinced there's nothing I own thats made of plastic that my grandparents didn't have a much nicer all metal or wood version. Not to mention its unrepeatable and tends to get brittle with age. So much plastic stuff I have is straight up junk that's just going to fall apart in a few years. Meanwhile you can have a metal can opener thats 80 years old and works as good as new.

> More like, whats the point of this, other than to save the manufacturer costs?

That also translates to customer cost

This is generally an argument that has merit only if you can ignore cost and care completely.

Yes, silk parachutes exist. But there was a reason why nylon was revolutionary - it was orders of magnitude cheaper and required a lot less care.

> Not to mention its unrepeatable and tends to get brittle with age. Meanwhile you can have a metal can opener thats 80 years old and works as good as new.

Plenty of metal can openers that are rusted, bent out of shape, or corroded enough to be unusable.

Plastic only usually gets brittle if it is left in sunlight (and not always then). Not sure what "unrepeatable" means in this context, but plastic is usually at least as repairable as wood or metal by using resin. Indeed, both wood and metal is often repaired by using resin based fillers.

I guess “unrepeatable” was supposed to be “unrepairable”.

IMHO planned obsolescence and shorter design lifetimes is orthogonal to developments in plastics. There's a correlation but not causation.

While metals are known for their strength and temperature resistance, they are also prone to corrosion.

There are plenty of decades-old plastic parts in continued service everywhere, that you just aren't aware of because they haven't alerted you to their presence by failing.

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plastic_(LDPE)_bowl,_by_G...

There's also the metal equivalent of plastic: cast pot metal. Tends to have flaws, very poor resistance to fatigue if it's used in moving parts, pretty much impossible to repair when it inevitably cracks or crumbles.

Pot metal where the alloy is carefully controlled has a long life. However it is often just recycle whatever melts into a pot without a care for quality and then you have no idea if the alloy will last.

> I'm convinced there's nothing I own thats made of plastic that my grandparents didn't have a much nicer all metal or wood version.

Agree mostly unless it's for something that needs to deal with water in some way.

Not a hard fast rule either. Brass hose fittings are superior to the black plastic ones that will inevitably crack with uv damage over the typical life a hose sees. Plastic plumbing seems worse than copper that can last hundreds of years, and we will probably be reading about some unhealthy side effects from it before long.

This may be close to true if you don't have need for much (or any) health care.

A large number of modern medical treatments would be nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive without plastics, mostly for sterile use reasons. These use cases have saved countless lives. I'm not sure how you'd even begin tallying a count.

There's some element of survivor's bias here. You only see the items that survived long enough and draw a conclusion on all the products they had then. Also the price/income ratio for any such item might have been quite different.

Beyond this, metal too has serious resource and energy implications. Think mining, smelting, production of the final shape, treatment against rust, paint, transport, etc. There are many steps, many inputs (notably chemicals and energy), and quite some demanding work going into it.

I have no answer to these questions: is it more or less resource efficient to produce 20 plastic can openers or 1 metal can opener? Is it more/less environmentally harmful? Is it more/less socially harmful?

Don't be so down and depressed. This is not in defense of plastics but flip it around. If we were still making things out of wood and metal the items would be incredibly expensive due to the labor and resource cost.

I equally dislike all the plastic junk that is bought for a couple bucks that are basically use for a moment and become trash. There are also amazingly wonderful things made out of plastic that last a long time when taken care of. Heck I still have toys from 30 years ago that were made out of plastic that are still in pretty good darn shape because they do not hit the sun. My rice cooker has a plastic shell and has lasted a long time. Same with my difference keyboards.

Be aware of your consumption but don't let it drag you down.

The thing is, you can still buy a metal can opener and they really don't cost a ton of money either. You can still produce stuff cheaply en masse with metal parts. I have some wood and bamboo kitchen implements, again about as cheap as the plastic equivalents. Its just probably a few cents cheaper to use plastic that is probably good profit when you are moving thousands of units, all else be damned.

You cherry picked your examples. All of those things are simple to make regardless of material. Certainly you should vote with you dollar there and buy what makes most sense for your situation. I love using metal and wooden cooking utensils and never plastic myself.

If we were to limit ourselves to only wood and metal there would be a lot of products both good and bad, that would most likely never have been invented. Tons of life saving medical devices, items that are hard to shape/mold using metal techniques. Of course everything could be made of wood and I don't know the science but I would think the cost to harvest wood might exceed that of the components of plastic. I might definitely we wrong there too but I just don't think its as easy as saying well we can make can openers and simple wooden implements so therefore its due to corporate greed we use plastic.

Sure, there are purposes where plastic makes the most sense. But I feel that we have walked too far the opposite way when we are detecting these microplastics just about everywhere. That's the nice part of using natural materials like metal and wood, you aren't putting anything into the environment that its not already had strategies to deal with for millions of years.

Happened to me with LEGO.

I’ve been a big fan most of my life and it was / is my favorite toy product by far, but only as I got older, I realized how the whole system is not just brilliantly designed, but the mechanical _execution_ of the parts is at least just as impressive.

…And that it wouldn’t be possible without plastics. No other type of material could ever achieve such durability, flexibility and precision; and that’s not even considering costs – no other materials _period_.

LEGO is a perfect example of a product designed AROUND plastics – not something turned to plastics to lower costs.

> …And that it wouldn’t be possible without plastics. No other type of material could ever achieve such durability, flexibility and precision; and that’s not even considering costs – no other materials _period_.

Mokulock may not be identical or cost the same, but it's basically the same product without plastic. They don't snap together or come apart as easily, but I like the idea of it. I'd love to see LEGO done in metal too.

Is there a lego inspired solution to industrial design, specifically mechanical mechanisms? I have had a product in mind that is quite intricate with several possible configurations. I personally haven't excercised my 3d muscles as much over the years and I find cad with 3d printing to be not as intuitive as snapping parts together.

> no other materials _period_

I wonder if you could do it with horn. I'm not sure how you'd make the hollow bits of blocks. But it has the right sort of properties. Relatedly, see:

https://plastiquarian.com/?page_id=14337

“Just one word - plastics.” https://youtu.be/eaCHH5D74Fs?si=3HsmyLHcDkg2L8d1

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