A laptop stand made from a single sheet of recycled paper

i'm almost never using a movable one but:

- on the practicity: i can do exactly what i want with a fixed one, without risk for the blade to slip

- small dust and bits tend to gather at the junctions and sit there

Which also makes it usable for left-handers.

For produce with a tougher skin than innards, the blade will deflect off the inside of the skin and steer itself along that interface.

The price rarely captures all the costs.

“Costs” often ignore externalities like environmental damage and inequality. Landfilling or dumping plastic may be cheaper now, but it shifts the true cost — centuries of pollution —onto vulnerable communities today. There is a reason the clothing dumps are in Ghana and Chile, rather than wealthier nations like the US or Germany.

If the price to companies profiting from plastics included exteralities I could possibly agree with you but as it stands these costs are normally paid by disadvantaged individuals or marginalized ecosystems.

Your way of thinking definitely isn't entirely incorrect, and I think a lot of times people forget that prices, while they can certainly have an arbitrary component, are largely driven by market forces, which at the very least will tell you something about the supply and demand of a product. However, I disagree with this:

> And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources

I think this doesn't often hold true, yes, an efficient market begets economically efficient resource allocation, but there's more to environmentalism than efficient resource allocation. Your example is good, it's certainly more economically efficient to use less petroleum when transporting goods, and that efficiency can be reflected in final costs. But let's look at another example:

Say you're buying lumber to build a house. There's a local lumber farm that sustainably grows and cuts down trees. Since its close, transportation costs (and associated emissions) are low - largely coming from amortized land costs and labor. However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.

Most of the toothbrushes we've owned in our lives still exist. What is the cost of having them around still? I don't know, but I know it wasn't factored in at all when we bought them.

If stealing from a factory and selling their products makes you more money than owning the factory and making the product, then doesn't it mean that stealing is the right thing?

The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.

I can't stop my wife from cleaning everything we put in recycling. Not just a rinse-off, but completely and immaculately cleaning them. Sometimes in the dishwasher. I think the net environmental benefit of our recycling may be below zero.

> The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.

It doesn't capture all of the costs. Key term here is "externalities", which are things that should be priced into a transaction, but currently aren't. Like the environmental impact of manufacturing process.

If all major externalities were priced in, and recycling would still be more expensive, then we could confidently say that it's the wrong thing to do.

In terms of something like paper, you're likely right. There's a weird popular perception that when you go to the grocery store and get 4 paper bags, somewhere a logger fells a beautiful 1000-year-old sequoia to grind into paper pulp, when the reality is that the same managed forest land is replanted over and over with fast-growing trees and harvested and replanted as soon as they're ready. The more demand for paper, the more tree farms there will be, and i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees. If the paper ends up in a landfill, that's fine. It's not toxic.

Or we could use a ton of energy and chemicals to recycle paper (and also to clean it since all consumer recycling in the US is "mixed stream" meaning someone's used dirty yogurt container and beer bottles are all over the paper), and produce much worse paper.

But all "recycling" is too valuable to helping people feel good about consumption, for us to be honest with ourselves about how pointless most of it is besides aluminum and glass, and maybe steel.

good point, and countries that do this on a massive (clean) scale count it (probably correctly) in their efficiency and non-fossil fuel stats. We really under-report the cost ($$$ and energy) of the full recycling chain, both complicated parts like plastics that should probably be burned and capture/treat the results, and simple things like glass; other than reuse it should NOT be recycled.

I didn't mean to imply that the price for this specific laptop stand is justified. I read the above comment as a small rant about how expensive recycled things are, and wanted to add that sometimes it is for a good reason. Not always, and like others have mentioned, the plastic bag example might not have been the best one.

Glass can be economical to re-use, but I thought recycling it uses nearly as much energy as producing it in the first place.

Likely depends on system. In multi-stream system I think paper is likely economically net positive in recycling. It scales well enough to large plants to reasonably complete with pristine material. Also many use case like cardboard for shipping is suitable use cases.

Good. That means they're reducing food waste.

A big problem with the food market is that people shop with their eyes, which leads to stupid amount of waste on fruit&vegetables section, as people prefer to go to another store than to buy veggies that look anything less than perfect.

Part of that is you can can a tomato right when it is most ripe and ready to be eaten, whereas if you're shipping it to a store, you ship it unripe and hope it ripens somewhat on the way.

Inefficiency is waste

What's the carbon cost behind buying and shipping the book, or cutting down the tree to make the book?

What an amazing idea. Carry 2kg book of necessary size instead of foldable cardboard. Truly genius.

Hey yeah I agree, I just thought OP was being over the top with the moralizing. Like, OK its a bit virtue signal-y but so is complaining about it. And its still better than plastic.

I'm not sure that being shipped is much worse than buying from a store that also gets it shipped and wrapped in as much plastic. And if its a town over, you're driving there which is CO2 as well.

Using nothing at all is better for sure and I said as much. Second hand stuff rules.

All in all though, this sort of individual choice is peanuts compared to taking a single plane ride which is itself peanuts compared to what corporations get away with. So imo. having any sort of strong opinion on this is silly.

> One plane is not leaving South Korea laden with just one laptop stand and nothing else, and one delivery truck is not leaving the Fedex or UPS depot almost entirely empty save for one laptop stand destined for the consumer's house.

Who do you imagine thought of it this way, and how does an objection to shipping trash require you to think this way?

What normal people imagine is that a package containing this displaces a package containing something else, and that an collective shipping container of these is a shipping container that wouldn't have been shipped otherwise.

What you seem to be theorizing is that if these weren't being shipped, some other product would have been invented to take up the volume that it uses, or all other products would expand in order to fill the space. That has a burden of proof that the normal people explanation doesn't require.

> If you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, does it make more or less sense, in terms of environmental impact, to buy the plastic stand over this one?

I mean, if you expect the cardboard one not to last very long, then yes. Yes it does "make more or less sense".