> but it's incredibly hard to do right in mass manufacturing.
Any particular reason? From the outside, wood seem easier to use than plastic.
Any particular reason? From the outside, wood seem easier to use than plastic.
There are "manufactured" woods which address many of these issues, but they also tend not to be deemed as beautiful / strong as the real thing.
The future is not made of wood.
One of the good things about wood is you don't have to worry about it sticking around for 1000+ years. The problem with plastics is most of it can't be recycled. Not the way we think of recycling.
Aluminum cans are melted down and turned back into aluminum cans. Polymers are ground up and injection molded into lower grade polymers. Once too many polymer chains get broken the grade is too low to be usable.
The problem with plastics is its cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs. One of the good things about living in a developed country is we sorta manage the disposal costs well. In developing countries they don't manage plastic disposal at all. In all my travels one of the overriding themes I've seen is plastic on the sides of road, in rivers, on the beach.
When I removed the wooden door from a house we didn't need to call the city to send a special truck to dispose of it. We chopped it into pieces and used it for bbq. Then we mixed the ashes into the compost. Disposal was $0.
While plastic is cheap in the short term I think there are a lot of long term costs that get ignored.
Great point. Simple and head-smack obvious when you read it. Hits right at the core.
Immediately after reading, I generalized to "cheap up-front, expensive back-end costs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis#Plastic_waste_disposa...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
(Those processes mostly just mean that it all comes down to whether you want to put energy into something. Whether they are economical today doesn't factor into the usefulness in eliminating mountains of plastic.)
It's quite profitable, just the required amount of upfront investment is high.
- I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
- Yes, sir.
- Are you listening?
- Yes, I am.
- Plastics.I'm only involved in manufacturing as a hobby for my custom keyboard projects. But my bet would be that it's about injection molding [0].
Once you got the molds machined you can mass produce plastic parts extremely cheaply. Need more plastic parts? Get a few more molds made. It scales pretty well because one mold can produce multiple parts at once and the injection molding presses itself are relatively inexpensive and pretty much fully automated.
Wood while being great for prototyping doesn't scale that well in mass production. You would machine it using CNC routers and if you need more produced you need new expensive CNC routers which can only produce one part at a time. Also the CNC routers I know you have to baby sit.
Again: That's only from my limited experience with limited runs (a few thousand pieces at most). Maybe someone who knows more about real mass production can elaborate a little more on this.