You can actually just look to what people were using before plastic became ubiquitous: wicker, cotton, burlap

Unfortunately if you live in the US you're starting out at about $50 instead of $5. I think that's a little bit of a HCOL price point, though. I picked up a burlap shopping bag in India earlier this year for about the equivalent of five cents, that any store here would have charged a couple of bucks for.

I'm still using the reed clothes baskets I bought 30 years ago...then they were around $10-20 ea

Reed/grass baskets are really old technology. Like, prehistoric. There's no need for newfangled materials developed only in the last several thousand years.

Like I alluded to, some low-cost consumer products that aren't really meant to last forever (like a laundry basket) would be good candidates for bioplastics (some of which do fine with water).

Alternatively, make a laundry basket that is meant to last forever.

That would be ideal, but a lot more difficult to market. Most people just don't care enough when they buy items like this, and/or they don't want to pay a premium because they'll probably be moving soon/etc.

Crap, if people just spotaneously started buying qualty, durable things, and companies actually made them, that would go an enormous way to help the global environmental collapse.

A plastic laundry basket can be made to last forever. That's the point of this post.

But they aren't. This guy got very lucky. Mine never last more than a few years. Most of them inevitably crack somewhere in less than a year. They are made so that you need to keep buying them. I probably buy 3 a year just to replace the ones that break.

You are failing to drill out the ends of the cracks, as the author did, failing to glue, and failing to buy a better quality product, slightly more expensive, that would not demand you return to the dollar store so frequently.

You have anyway lots of company. That should not be reassuring.

(I use "you", here, to denote all readers in the same boat, not any particular individual.)

Avoid hard plastics and square edges/sharp corners.

Notice that the basket from the article has rounded edges, and rounded cutouts. The plastic appears to be thickish and should be very slightly flexible/rubbery (bending because the material is flexible, not merely because it is thin).

These products should (and definitely can) last decades.

what the heck are you doing to your laundry baskets that you break 3 a year??? I don’t think i’ve _ever_ broken a laundry basket.