It's much worse than that. There are so many things that are manufactured simply to be discarded it is amazing. 100's of millions of tons of stuff get thrown away every year whose only purpose in life was to be tossed or in the very best of cases to be recycled.
And then there is the endless stream of stuff that people gift each other because they are clueless about what a real gift would be like but they still want to give something. Terrible toys, terrible tools (break on first use) and cargo cult merchandise looking like the real thing but actually being just that: an image of the real thing.
Agree. I really try to just not buy new stuff nowadays.
Food packaging and things like building materials are the most difficult.
There are certain things that I think make sense to buy new or 'lightly used' - if you're going to run a vehicle (bicycle, motorcycle, car, whatever) into the ground then you're getting full use of it; and cars, at least until they're almost completely useless and melted for scrap, have a decent ecosystem for second hand parts.
In some sense I think manufacturing has become too 'good' relative to human labour. We're throwing things away because it "costs more" to repair them.
But it doesn't really cost more - it just costs more in monetary terms because waste (both in manufacturing and disposal) is externalized.
This hit home for me when I was working in a factory that made drinking cups for the fast food industry. Millions of dollars worth of equipment to make plastic cups, and then a huge warehouse to store them. All for a product that has a useful life expectancy somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.
I've always thought it should be illegal or heavily disincentivized to create such throw away products, but have never figured out a good way to actually measure this. No company is going to admit to creating junk.
That's actually how Amazon promotes "Alexa as Xmas gift" here in my city (Germany). For people who don't want anything but you still feel you need to buy them something.
I think we (as a society) urgently need to adjust our "gift giving" culture.
I've finally bought my house, its pretty scary how much is designed to last 10 years. Kitchen Appliances, HW heater, HVAC, matresses, furniture seems normal to have a steady stream of stuff heading to the landfill.
I've been in the Freecycle community for over a decade.
I recently joined the local "Buy Nothing" community.
I am fortunate enough to live a block away from a donation center [though NextDoor members will go out of their way to tell you their opposite opinion].
Yes, I can do more regarding buying less stuff. I am keeping in mind being active on giving "another life" to what I am decluttering both in-house and on to others.
One of the worst gifts that people like to give are surveillance devices that's are at the $20-$30 price point like the Amazon Echo or the Google Home. These are devices that I and others I know wouldn't take for free. So they end up getting regifted or thrown out.
Please don't by technology gifts for people unless you really know what they want.
First of all, there are zero hard numbers here. Are we talking about 50% of returns being sent to landfills, or 1%? How does it compare with unsold merchandise? Or against waste from packaging, or disposible products in general like plastic water bottles? And even if a lot of returns aren't resold -- how many are still donated vs. discarded? It's completely unclear if this is really a priority to focus on or a distraction from bigger problems.
It's certainly not universal because where I shop online, I often see a size+color briefly come "back in stock" because it had sold out but one was returned. I've snagged desired items a few times that way -- and seen it go back out of stock after my order went through because it really was the only one left.
But second... the article isn't suggesting a clear solution here. You can't tell people to just keep the items they don't want, because there's no way to verify they're telling the truth, so you have to make them ship items back. For high-value items that are guaranteed to sell, it always makes economic sense to hire someone to inspect and restock the items. But for low-value items where it actually costs more to inspect and restock than the item is wholesale, it's just rational business.
I don't think the issue here is returns, it's waste period. The full environmental cost of producing and disposing of products needs to be included in original retail prices. Then, companies will be rationally incentivized to re-sell or donate items rather than dispose of them.
In Germany, according to one study, approximately 4% of returns are destroyed. 12 to 16% items are returned in the first place. On the one hand, the resulting overall quota is very low, on the other hand that's still a very large number in absolute terms (19 million items).
"it's just rational business" yes and that's why we need gouvernement to step in and change the cost-benefit equation so that it becomes "just rational business" re-value these items.
I work in returns at a very large e-tail company, and there are a few things that should be mentioned here:
1. Shipping damages are a huge reason why items have to be junked. Cardboard boxes are not meant to last long. Its rare for an item to go through more than a few shipments without needing to be completely re-boxed. I wish everyone could see the boxes that get sent back to our returns warehouses, sometimes you'd think these boxes have been purposefully destroyed.
2. Luxury brands are very strict about re-sale of items on discount sites. The explicitly prevent companies from re-selling their items on clearance.
3. Items do get sent to charity.
4. There is a huge cost involved in processing returns which means that items that could be re-sold often get junked or liquidated. Its great in theory to talk about re-selling used jackets, but someone has to process that item, ship that item, and buy that item at a cost that makes it worth it. Warehouse space is limited. Why would I use that space to keep used goods, when I can keep items that will make me more profit.
As for variously damaged boxes in transit, there are two reasons:
1) many logistics processes (even inside e-retail companies) are designed around packaging that should survive being sent through normal post/package service (ie. "fragile" means "may not survive fall from 3 means, but should survive fall from 1 meters", "this way up" markings are ignored, etc.) and not around generally more fragile retail-level single item packages.
2) Even if retailer repacks the products into reasonably sturdy transport packaging, often there is either insufficient (usually due to operator error/inexperience) or outright none (in some cases by design of the process) inner padding.
This comes from the fact that packing everything completely correctly is expensive, both financially and in terms of the environmental cost (all the packaging material will be thrown away, period) so it tends to done in terms of experience with how bad the packaging can be before the amount of returns due to shipping damage out-weights the savings in packaging costs.
Re #1: I've bought electronics like this on eBay for 1/3 the price of a new one. The box looks like someone tried to play hockey with it but the item inside is perfectly fine. If electronics can survive, clothing and other items certainly can.
#2 sounds plausible, but there are only so many luxury brands in the world. I bet lots of companies want to believe that they're luxury brands, and destroy returned merchandise to attempt to maintain this, but really aren't.
Re #4: How can we make it worth it? Couldn't they just drop a bunch of returned products on a pallet, and sell the lot for a fixed price? There's plenty of sellers on eBay/Craigslist with seemingly infinite time to sort and resell items like this. I bet if any clothing store in the city posted "$250 for 1 cubic meter of the latest returned clothing items from the internet, unspecified quality/quantity, you pick up", it'd be gone in an hour, every time.
Worn Wear is Patagonia's hub for keeping gear in play.
Why extend the life of gear? Because the best thing we can do for the planet is cut down on consumption and get more use out of stuff we already own.
Join us to repair, share and recycle your gear.
AIUI, online returns that are slightly mangled and in store returns that aren’t quite like-new are also sold here, as well as serviceable but old clothes you can exchange.
NB you can also perpetually repair most patagonia clothes, for free. They do most repairs in contract with local tailors, and have a central repair shop for bigger jobs, so they keep money in the neighborhood and also cut way down on shipping emissions.
There are others that do a good job on clothes. Not for returns maybe, but long term support.
Nudie Jeans have repair shops in quite a few cities. The repairs are free. If you don’t like to keep your jeans then they give you a discount (20%?) if you trade your old Nudies in. The sell them second hand after they fix them up. I got a recent pair repaired (unusable before the repair) and bought a second hand pair for $50. So effectively I got two pairs for $25 each. Never buying any other brand jeans again I think. https://www.nudiejeans.com/repair-spots#stores
Trippen shoes in German repair their shoes. I have had shoes from them for at least 20 years. I wore some for 12-15 years with a good refurbishment in between. They are not cheap, but comfortable, sturdy and refurbishable. They mailed them back to me when done.
https://en.trippen.com/reparaturen
So, these aren't really "worn" correct? At first, I assumed the inventory was thrift and my jaw dropped when I saw the prices. They should consider rebranding...
In the 80's, stores like TJ Maxx would have branded items for very cheap, but the branding was cut off. Like Levi's jeans with the pocket tag and little brown rectangle cut off. I suppose that was for the same reason.
Like this is anything new. Monte Testaccio is an artificial hill in Rome composed almost entirely of broken and abandoned pottery. A huge amount of effort and cost went into creating amphorae elsewhere to ship stuff in (often olive oil) which was then worthless for reuse so it was tossed out. Today we have a lot more things to toss out, but the economics is similar. It's often cheaper to throw away than to ship it elsewhere. I always wonder how much packing material alone is tossed out.
Clothing - I'm not getting excited about this. Every year, every big game, there're T-shirts printed with the winning team, before the game. So they print two versions. The team that doesn't win, their T-shirt is bundled up and put on a cargo ship in enormous bales and sent to someplace overseas where they sell for a penny or two. Or for fuel, or for the cotton to recycle.
Clothes are often made in large automated factories. Insisting some human beings manually examine, clean, press and repackage clothing to avoid 'waste' is the opposite of a good idea. Its enormous cost to the economy, and indirectly to the environment.
“Clothes are often made in large automated factories” <- are you sure about this? Normally clothes for all brands are manufactured manually in cheap labor countries ignoring all safety and environmental factors except few luxury local brands.
Individuals duplicating content without taking from the creator is viewed less acceptable than manufacturers, or more accurately, retailers, deliberately destroying perfectly serviceable physical product.
We, as a society, really need to stop being so laissez-faire when it comes to unnecessary waste. Laws might be required for actual change to happen. Like French grocery stores having to donate excess food rather than throwing it away.
Yup - that's why I try to shop on Amazon's warehouse/open box site first. 90% of the time it's brand new stuff anyway that someone sent back on a whim.
Manufacturer's perspective. If you're looking for business opportunities, something with a huge schlep blindness quotient[1], if you love adversarial thinking, then you'll love 'Reverse Logistics'. Also maybe if you're a politician looking to score some jobs for your district.
The basic economic lever is simple with implications that go far: it costs more to process a returned good than the value one could accrue from reselling it because returned goods need to be processed three times while regular goods only need to be processed once. If 3% of your shipped goods are returned you are making a healthy profit. If 10% are returned you are breaking even. If 20% are returned you are going under. Goods are usually manufactured at 25% their retail cost and businesses have overhead that profit needs to cover.
A lot of the return cost is additional labor and shipping. If you can minimize transport (sort returns at local factories/DCs rather than shipping back to China) and minimize cost of processing returns with low-skill labor (say supplementing with high resolution cameras/scales/machine learning inspection by comparing your 'returned' good against thousands of known good versions of your good) one could tackle this. Laws would help in that they would force product designers to push to more assembly and less fabrication steps and fewer steps overall.
The entire story fits in the subhead: Cheaper for businesses to just toss returns than check if they can be resold.
The easiest way to change that would be to make disposal more expensive. Start a land filling tax (and/or a carbon tax, which would hit incinerators), and suddenly a lot of these businesses would run the numbers and say “never mind, let’s actually process the returns.” Or alternatively they’d say, “hmm we can’t make free shipping free returns work anymore,” which I think is also fine.
This is simply an extension of the current "a company exists only to bring shareholders profit" viewpoint. Why resell returned purchases when it's cheaper to destroy them and claim a tax break on them?
Why sell robust toys, tools, clothing, etc. when it's cheaper to sell expensive pieces of "minimum viable product" that needs to be replaced every year.
Even when the cost is an unsustainable long-term business (not to mention long-term environmental and social impact), so long as the executives and shareholders profit from their short-term investment in the company they all shrug their shoulders and move on to the next ephemeral business.
Do you remember when you were regarded as a customer by a big brand - as an equal who had a relationship with that brand - instead of a consumer? It's been a long time for me.
The core problem here is really "free" returns. There's a nasty feedback loop: consumers return things more often, so sellers make items junkier and junkier because their margins keep shrinking.
The amount of wastage I see in online store returns is mind boggling.
I recently ordered something from a manufacturer on Amazon. After couple of days, they dropped price on product by $20. So I called up Amazon for price adjustment. I was politely asked to return it to manufacturer and order a new one.
Seriously, Amazon cannot work with manufacturers to just refund price difference instead of returning the product and ordering it again. It is wasteful at so many levels.
Just to point out, all the technology needed to do something better is already worked out. We just need social/political will (or whatever) to fully implement it. We have e.g. biodegradable or reusable plastic, etc., and could make all these items in a sustainable way.
The bigger challenge is converting our systems. E.g. Here in San Francisco our water comes from Hetch Hetchy about 200 miles away. There is very little public awareness (yet) that this is the kind of thing that will have to change if we're going to live in harmony with Nature.
I've been toying with the idea of trying to create a new town somewhere along holistic lines but personally I'm a recluse and I don't actually want to deal with the social stuff that would entail.
So instead, I'm building robots that can arrange and glue small pieces of material together to create larger laminated/aggregated building material. (Image search "timbrel vault"[1] and imagine little spidery machines making those out of irregular bits of {wood,metal,plastic,etc} placed and aligned with CV+ML. Or consider the agglutinated shells of certain amoebae[2].)
I imagine a sort of distributed inside-out factory that "eats" landfill and "poops" new resources.
I bought a Casper mattress when they first came to market. My SO and I needed a new mattress and decided we would take them up on their 90 day return offer.
After the second night, my SO complained her neck was hurting so we contacted the return people. They said they would send someone to pick up the mattress from us.
Next day a 1800 Junk showed up and the guys threw it in the back. Essentially after two days of use it went in the landfill (I assume). So I learned to be skeptical of offers of free returns on items that touch the body.
In the end we found that the NovaFoam mattress from Costco was better for us and it was less expensive.
Costs of production, for things likes clothes especially, are very cheap; the value is in marketing and branding. With fashion, what you buy is effectively a tag that lets you cash in on some of the cachet of the brand's advertising spend and the image it portrays.
The actual goods are very secondary, and are increasingly poor quality. Designer shirts I buy these days rip in the elbows and fray at the collar in less than 40 wears or so; jeans wear through at the knee at around the 100 day mark.
I would be surprised if materials and labour for production exceeded £10 on a typical £100 shirt or jeans.
Many items in the <$30 price range will cost a lot of money to ship it back, let alone the time and effort to process at both ends. Its more efficient just to give away or even throw away yourself, but returning gives you a credit so that is what most people do.
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
And then there is the endless stream of stuff that people gift each other because they are clueless about what a real gift would be like but they still want to give something. Terrible toys, terrible tools (break on first use) and cargo cult merchandise looking like the real thing but actually being just that: an image of the real thing.
[+] [-] esotericn|6 years ago|reply
Food packaging and things like building materials are the most difficult.
There are certain things that I think make sense to buy new or 'lightly used' - if you're going to run a vehicle (bicycle, motorcycle, car, whatever) into the ground then you're getting full use of it; and cars, at least until they're almost completely useless and melted for scrap, have a decent ecosystem for second hand parts.
In some sense I think manufacturing has become too 'good' relative to human labour. We're throwing things away because it "costs more" to repair them.
But it doesn't really cost more - it just costs more in monetary terms because waste (both in manufacturing and disposal) is externalized.
[+] [-] vidanay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
1. open box, put it on the table
2. put it in the closet
3. move it to the garage
4. move it to the storage unit
5. take it to the dump
He argued that Amazon should offer a shipping option to shortcut all this - just have it shipped directly to the dump!
[+] [-] axaxs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C14L|6 years ago|reply
I think we (as a society) urgently need to adjust our "gift giving" culture.
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdeadringer|6 years ago|reply
I recently joined the local "Buy Nothing" community.
I am fortunate enough to live a block away from a donation center [though NextDoor members will go out of their way to tell you their opposite opinion].
Yes, I can do more regarding buying less stuff. I am keeping in mind being active on giving "another life" to what I am decluttering both in-house and on to others.
[+] [-] choward|6 years ago|reply
Please don't by technology gifts for people unless you really know what they want.
[+] [-] MikusR|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smitty1e|6 years ago|reply
Celebrate the former; be wary of the latter.
[+] [-] juskrey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jodrellblank|6 years ago|reply
What would a real gift be like?
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 years ago|reply
It's certainly not universal because where I shop online, I often see a size+color briefly come "back in stock" because it had sold out but one was returned. I've snagged desired items a few times that way -- and seen it go back out of stock after my order went through because it really was the only one left.
But second... the article isn't suggesting a clear solution here. You can't tell people to just keep the items they don't want, because there's no way to verify they're telling the truth, so you have to make them ship items back. For high-value items that are guaranteed to sell, it always makes economic sense to hire someone to inspect and restock the items. But for low-value items where it actually costs more to inspect and restock than the item is wholesale, it's just rational business.
I don't think the issue here is returns, it's waste period. The full environmental cost of producing and disposing of products needs to be included in original retail prices. Then, companies will be rationally incentivized to re-sell or donate items rather than dispose of them.
[+] [-] morsch|6 years ago|reply
Source: https://www.zeit.de/2019/25/retouren-amazon-onlinehandel-mue...
[+] [-] jpambrun|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjkennedy98|6 years ago|reply
1. Shipping damages are a huge reason why items have to be junked. Cardboard boxes are not meant to last long. Its rare for an item to go through more than a few shipments without needing to be completely re-boxed. I wish everyone could see the boxes that get sent back to our returns warehouses, sometimes you'd think these boxes have been purposefully destroyed.
2. Luxury brands are very strict about re-sale of items on discount sites. The explicitly prevent companies from re-selling their items on clearance.
3. Items do get sent to charity.
4. There is a huge cost involved in processing returns which means that items that could be re-sold often get junked or liquidated. Its great in theory to talk about re-selling used jackets, but someone has to process that item, ship that item, and buy that item at a cost that makes it worth it. Warehouse space is limited. Why would I use that space to keep used goods, when I can keep items that will make me more profit.
[+] [-] dfox|6 years ago|reply
1) many logistics processes (even inside e-retail companies) are designed around packaging that should survive being sent through normal post/package service (ie. "fragile" means "may not survive fall from 3 means, but should survive fall from 1 meters", "this way up" markings are ignored, etc.) and not around generally more fragile retail-level single item packages.
2) Even if retailer repacks the products into reasonably sturdy transport packaging, often there is either insufficient (usually due to operator error/inexperience) or outright none (in some cases by design of the process) inner padding.
This comes from the fact that packing everything completely correctly is expensive, both financially and in terms of the environmental cost (all the packaging material will be thrown away, period) so it tends to done in terms of experience with how bad the packaging can be before the amount of returns due to shipping damage out-weights the savings in packaging costs.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
#2 sounds plausible, but there are only so many luxury brands in the world. I bet lots of companies want to believe that they're luxury brands, and destroy returned merchandise to attempt to maintain this, but really aren't.
Re #4: How can we make it worth it? Couldn't they just drop a bunch of returned products on a pallet, and sell the lot for a fixed price? There's plenty of sellers on eBay/Craigslist with seemingly infinite time to sort and resell items like this. I bet if any clothing store in the city posted "$250 for 1 cubic meter of the latest returned clothing items from the internet, unspecified quality/quantity, you pick up", it'd be gone in an hour, every time.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hprotagonist|6 years ago|reply
Worn Wear is Patagonia's hub for keeping gear in play.
Why extend the life of gear? Because the best thing we can do for the planet is cut down on consumption and get more use out of stuff we already own.
Join us to repair, share and recycle your gear.
AIUI, online returns that are slightly mangled and in store returns that aren’t quite like-new are also sold here, as well as serviceable but old clothes you can exchange.
NB you can also perpetually repair most patagonia clothes, for free. They do most repairs in contract with local tailors, and have a central repair shop for bigger jobs, so they keep money in the neighborhood and also cut way down on shipping emissions.
[+] [-] bjelkeman-again|6 years ago|reply
Nudie Jeans have repair shops in quite a few cities. The repairs are free. If you don’t like to keep your jeans then they give you a discount (20%?) if you trade your old Nudies in. The sell them second hand after they fix them up. I got a recent pair repaired (unusable before the repair) and bought a second hand pair for $50. So effectively I got two pairs for $25 each. Never buying any other brand jeans again I think. https://www.nudiejeans.com/repair-spots#stores
Trippen shoes in German repair their shoes. I have had shoes from them for at least 20 years. I wore some for 12-15 years with a good refurbishment in between. They are not cheap, but comfortable, sturdy and refurbishable. They mailed them back to me when done. https://en.trippen.com/reparaturen
Houdini Sportsware recycle their old clothes. They also buy back used and resell. https://houdinisportswear.com/en-us
[+] [-] fny|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clSTophEjUdRanu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevsim|6 years ago|reply
> It's an image thing. They're trying to maintain exclusivity.
We’ve reached a pretty dismal place as a society where a company would rather burn their wares than to have a person in need get them.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhrkjweh|6 years ago|reply
The only reason to buy a luxury brand is to signal that you are not poor.
[+] [-] shantly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nashashmi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VeninVidiaVicii|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|6 years ago|reply
Clothes are often made in large automated factories. Insisting some human beings manually examine, clean, press and repackage clothing to avoid 'waste' is the opposite of a good idea. Its enormous cost to the economy, and indirectly to the environment.
[+] [-] lnsru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21786747
Individuals duplicating content without taking from the creator is viewed less acceptable than manufacturers, or more accurately, retailers, deliberately destroying perfectly serviceable physical product.
[+] [-] acangiano|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
The fact that it's cheaper helps too
[+] [-] paulgerhardt|6 years ago|reply
The basic economic lever is simple with implications that go far: it costs more to process a returned good than the value one could accrue from reselling it because returned goods need to be processed three times while regular goods only need to be processed once. If 3% of your shipped goods are returned you are making a healthy profit. If 10% are returned you are breaking even. If 20% are returned you are going under. Goods are usually manufactured at 25% their retail cost and businesses have overhead that profit needs to cover.
A lot of the return cost is additional labor and shipping. If you can minimize transport (sort returns at local factories/DCs rather than shipping back to China) and minimize cost of processing returns with low-skill labor (say supplementing with high resolution cameras/scales/machine learning inspection by comparing your 'returned' good against thousands of known good versions of your good) one could tackle this. Laws would help in that they would force product designers to push to more assembly and less fabrication steps and fewer steps overall.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
[+] [-] burlesona|6 years ago|reply
The easiest way to change that would be to make disposal more expensive. Start a land filling tax (and/or a carbon tax, which would hit incinerators), and suddenly a lot of these businesses would run the numbers and say “never mind, let’s actually process the returns.” Or alternatively they’d say, “hmm we can’t make free shipping free returns work anymore,” which I think is also fine.
[+] [-] madengr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|6 years ago|reply
This is simply an extension of the current "a company exists only to bring shareholders profit" viewpoint. Why resell returned purchases when it's cheaper to destroy them and claim a tax break on them?
Why sell robust toys, tools, clothing, etc. when it's cheaper to sell expensive pieces of "minimum viable product" that needs to be replaced every year.
Even when the cost is an unsustainable long-term business (not to mention long-term environmental and social impact), so long as the executives and shareholders profit from their short-term investment in the company they all shrug their shoulders and move on to the next ephemeral business.
Do you remember when you were regarded as a customer by a big brand - as an equal who had a relationship with that brand - instead of a consumer? It's been a long time for me.
[+] [-] gok|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acroback|6 years ago|reply
I recently ordered something from a manufacturer on Amazon. After couple of days, they dropped price on product by $20. So I called up Amazon for price adjustment. I was politely asked to return it to manufacturer and order a new one.
Seriously, Amazon cannot work with manufacturers to just refund price difference instead of returning the product and ordering it again. It is wasteful at so many levels.
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
The bigger challenge is converting our systems. E.g. Here in San Francisco our water comes from Hetch Hetchy about 200 miles away. There is very little public awareness (yet) that this is the kind of thing that will have to change if we're going to live in harmony with Nature.
I've been toying with the idea of trying to create a new town somewhere along holistic lines but personally I'm a recluse and I don't actually want to deal with the social stuff that would entail.
So instead, I'm building robots that can arrange and glue small pieces of material together to create larger laminated/aggregated building material. (Image search "timbrel vault"[1] and imagine little spidery machines making those out of irregular bits of {wood,metal,plastic,etc} placed and aligned with CV+ML. Or consider the agglutinated shells of certain amoebae[2].)
I imagine a sort of distributed inside-out factory that "eats" landfill and "poops" new resources.
(I just got my servos yesterday!)
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timbrel+vault&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iax...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testate_amoebae
[+] [-] someonehere|6 years ago|reply
After the second night, my SO complained her neck was hurting so we contacted the return people. They said they would send someone to pick up the mattress from us.
Next day a 1800 Junk showed up and the guys threw it in the back. Essentially after two days of use it went in the landfill (I assume). So I learned to be skeptical of offers of free returns on items that touch the body.
In the end we found that the NovaFoam mattress from Costco was better for us and it was less expensive.
[+] [-] barrkel|6 years ago|reply
The actual goods are very secondary, and are increasingly poor quality. Designer shirts I buy these days rip in the elbows and fray at the collar in less than 40 wears or so; jeans wear through at the knee at around the 100 day mark.
I would be surprised if materials and labour for production exceeded £10 on a typical £100 shirt or jeans.
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply