The sometimes high cost of tooling and low cost of materials is a boon for counterfeits...

When I worked on an anti-counterfeiting and supply chain integrity startup, one of the kinds of counterfeits I heard was of factories that make the legitimate product secretly also make the counterfeits. (Sometimes called "third-shift counterfeits".) They'd not only reuse the design and processes, but also reuse the same tooling.

Corner-cutting the design/materials/QA is optional.

There's huge money in counterfeiting (hey, the brand hand counterfeiters their IP and brand-building and even tooling; and counterfeiters just pay materials, labor, and distribution), and some other supply chain shenanigans.

My impression was that besides hurting many businesses large and small (e.g., lost sales, price pressure, brand damage, and support/returns costs), and consumers (e.g., substandard product), it might also be concern for the relative economic power of countries (e.g., interests in one country steal profits from a major company, then that company sometimes also gets bought out by interests in that same country). (Though, bought-out companies still sometimes face supply chain fraud problems, including originating in other countries, so it's just not one single coherent national entity that's the problem.)

Had Covid not hit right after my startup's successful factory launch, and then the subsequent VC skittishness when we really needed a round (to grow our big-ticket enterprise sales/partnership and high-skilled engineering), we might've made bigger dents in the problem.

Third shift counterfeiting has been an endemic problem since the invention of the Gutenberg press. I collect old and rare books going back to the 1500s and printers have been doing it for half a millennia. Once the type is set up for a print run, there’s nothing preventing the printer from running a secret shift to print a bunch more copies just for themselves. They’ll usually use cheaper paper or binding so they’re just different enough from real first editions to be worthless but you won’t know it until it gets to appraisal unless you physically inspect the book yourself and know exactly what to look for.

They are also a sort of first edition, and equally old. It is odd that they are worthless. There probably is an opportunity awaiting the person who formalizes third-shift first editions.

I think it mostly has to do with provenance. The third shift prints usually don’t make it into contemporary bibliographies [1] and since the printer is untrustworthy, you can’t be sure if it’s a real third shift first edition or the tenth impression of some typesetting that the printer forgot to recycle. If we were talking about the Gutenberg Bible or say, Origin of Species, it might be worth doing original research and chemical analyses because even a third shift copy could be worth more than its weight in gold, but for >>99% of books it’d be a losing proposition since few books are worth tens of thousands of dollars.

That said, if the paper and binding quality are the same between shifts and there’s no identifying mark like unique numbering on each copy, there’s no telling how many first editions in circulation are really third shift printings. So few of the books survive the centuries that I’ve never heard of more first editions showing up than the publisher admits to printing to bibliographers.

Edit: They’re not really “worthless” but old and rare books might see one genuine first edition sold every few years to some rich person with a hobby. Many if not most of these books are bought and sold by knowledgeable collectors so if a client is going to drop thousands on a book, they're going to buy the copy that is most likely to be genuine, making any also rans effectively worthless because there’s not enough of a demand to force buyers to settle for riskier copies.

[1] because they’re unauthorized and the publisher doesn’t talk about them to the bibliographers

To be fair, it’s already odd that first editions are worth something. Collectors are just weird persons who will pay extraordinary sum for things of marginal interest. From there, it’s not surprising that the way value is ascribed itself doesn’t make much sense.

Plastic recycling is basically more expensive than creating new plastic, still. Very little plastic actually gets recycled. (Most of what you put in your household bin does not).

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use...

Because new plastic creation doesn’t include the cost of disposal, as the poster above mentioned.

In theory, the cost of manufacture a new piece of plastic should pay for the recycling of that same piece of plastic.

There is an entire waste disposal industry that can economically bury your broken plastic stuff in landfills, and which most people already pay for. This is a perfectly fine solution; we’re at no realistic risk of running out of landfill space. If you live in a particularly corrupt country where your waste disposal industry is run by gangsters who dump your garbage off the coast of Somalia, I would suggest solving the gangster problem.

America exports a lot of plastic to countries that dispose of it problematically. (while pretending it's going to be recycled). Less since China stopped taking it to dispose of much of it problematically.

I agree we should stop. Perhaps we are the corrupt country who exports it's waste to places where disposal is controlled by gangsters. Supply and demand.

Why don't we just put all that garbage into big pits domestically, instead of exporting it? I guess you need to convince voters to like this solution better. I think it's important that we don't just dump the trash in poor and politically unpowerful neighborhoods and regions to (which is kind of what we do now, just internationally).

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/05/h...

I agree that we should stop pretending to recycle plastic. I do my part by throwing my waste plastic into the garbage instead of the recycling bin.

I agree that new plastic sale ought to include the cost of disposal.

I wonder if anyone has calculated approximately what that cost might be. I suspect it would make plastic much less attractive than it currently is. Which would, I guess, result in significantly less plastic use. Which is good, because plastic recycling is not an answer, it's basically a myth, it's not affordable, it's not currently hardly done (which actually makes it hard to estimate what the cost would be to include as a 'tax' in original price -- we don't actually have the infrastructure available to reclaim and sort and do all that recycling. What the cost would be is kind of a guess).

We need to significantly reduce plastic use, recycling isn't really the answer.

Now, if including cost of recycling in all plastic sales also would be likely to result in a giant economic recession, that's a problem to solve too.

(I am not arguing for continued plastic use the way we do now. I agree the cost of recycling should be borne by original sales. I am however saying that this is not in fact a simple fix and recycling is probably not the answer, at least not in the present environment. Perhaps if we invent more recyclable types of plastic, use fewer kinds of plastic to make them easier to reclaim/sort, etc. And use a lot less plastic).

It’s not just the cost of disposal. Recycling aluminum or steel works because the alloys can be separated into their constituent parts and recombined into an alloy of the same or higher quality. That recycling them is cheaper than extracting it from ore is just a nice bonus that obviates the need for political incentives.

Recycling plastics breaks down the polymers into smaller ones which degrades the quality in almost every respect. The cheapest way, for example, is literally just shred the plastic into lower quality injection moulding pellets.

If the laundry basket lasts forever there is no externalized cost of disposal. Like you said, plastic is incredibly cheap, but if it wasn't, we'd use it only for things that are designed to last forever. Plastic is a miracle material. It's a shame we treat it as disposable

The big issue with plastic recycling is getting ‘clean’ plastic.

Both color, and chemically.

If someone leaves their old laundry basket out in the sun, that will degrade the plastic in a way that will make it unusable if recycled, and there is no easy or scalable way to detect it.

Same with it someone spilled a bunch of nasty pesticides on it, or used it to hold some kind of toxic heavy metals.

This is rather different than metals, but a similar problem exists with glass (but less severe), which also makes it hard to effectively recycle.

That the raw new material is dirt cheap doesn’t help.