Making an outdoor-rated device with a radio, plastic is a hard material to ignore. Given that there’s little else that has the right characteristics at anywhere near the right price, I’ve done a lot of searching for easily recyclable plastics (ABS ain’t one of them). Most of those are not right for the product and would only doom it to the landfill quicker when they failed. So I focused on plastics that would keep the product in use as long as possible. For recycling, we’re going to experiment with doing it ourselves—take used product back, and have our injection molder regrind it for a future batch (this is why I picked a local partner, they’re down for it).
Given that all the real waste is produced by single-use plastics, I think this exercise has been the commercial equivalent of washing and sorting all my food packaging.