that said, a tutorial to turn the shipping box for your laptop (or a flat of diet coke) into a stand would be good. useful in a pinch

edit: keyboard box might be the best box to print the fold lines on. you need that for a minimally ergo laptop setup anyway

It will outlast me, and folds into a smaller size that fits nicely in my laptop bag.

Laptops will probably go away, but it could be handed down for generations, and when it no longer can be used, the majority of the energy and resources used to make it can be recouped through recycling it’s intrinsically valuable metals.

This 20 dollar piece of paper will last until the first month in a humid environment.

This should be a tutorial on how to reuse discarded material into an improvised, impromptu laptop stand.

If I saw someone pull this out of a box and put their laptop on it, they would lose a great deal of credibility in my estimation. If I saw someone make this out of some waste paper in a coffee shop, I would be intrigued and compelled to seek an opportunity to see if that person was open to making new acquaintances and sharing ideas.

My favorite was when I saw a jam that touted "upcycled" strawberries. When I looked into it, it basically meant that it was made from beat up ugly strawberries that would have been used for animal feed. Surely there would be cost savings in using reject fruit, right? No, an 8oz jar retails for over $8 compared to about half that to an organic no sugar added alternative (I think its cheaper since I last looked though)

They even get certified that they use the most undesirable fruit that they can find!

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-are-upcycled-strawb...

That's true for basically all processed food that contains fruit or vegetables, for obvious economic reasons. The stuff that looks good goes to the supermarkets who care very much about shelf appeal, the rest goes to the processors who absolutely don't.

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.

I suppose this is because most animals in the wild are always couple hours away from starvation and just can't afford being picky eaters.

We definitely don't (generally) turn our noses up at various forms of rotten milk or the liquids of fruits rotten enough to be alcoholic.

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.

Recycling is more expensive, it likely means that there are associated costs (e.g. transportation, sorting, cleaning, processing, etc) that make it less economical than just throwing it in a landfill. 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

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.

This does not have the effect on atmospheric CO2 that you implying, unless the resulting paper is deeply buried - not incinerated, or left to rot, or biodegraded in any way.

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.

> 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.

How does this apply to recycling though? Landfills in developed countries have little, if any externalities, because they're engineered to contain waste.

https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/9/3/the-hidden-engin...

That's the same thing I've seen demonstrated. It's really too bad that the plastics industry seized on the opportunity to greenwash wasteful amounts of plastic packaging by giving people a recycling bin that claims to do something useful with that discarded plastic, when in reality it's rare for post-consumer plastic to make any rational sense (other than those things like we're discussing, where people in practice waste even more resources in the recycling process just to feel good that the plastic material itself was technically not 'wasted').

Only if it doesn't offgas. Or leech.

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.

Of course, the Soviet Union doing something doesn't automatically mean it's economical or sensible, but at least in premise it should be useful for something.

I'm fine with stipulations like using some kind of (economically-viable) filter on the resulting smoke.

All that I "know" about it is only based on vibes so that's why I'm asking.

Better to bury it. Put it back in the ground, where it came from.

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.

Depends on the price of oil. Metal recycling is far more cost effective that extracting from ore. Glass, too, is very economical to recycle.

Plastic recycling was never about recycling, it was to convince people to use plastics.

There are certain exceptions to this -- nickel cadmium batteries come to mind -- but for things like this, the question isn't "is it more economic to produce it new than to recycle it?" so much as it's "is it more economic to recycle it than to dispose of it properly?"

Collect enough, and you can melt them into solid blocks that could be used like this laptop stand. Recycling common plastic of the same type (PE, PP) is actually easily done with commonly available equipment, unlike paper.

However, in the interest of good faith discussion, I’ll offer a rebuttal to the argument you are making. The logic applies when (and this is very important) that food goes to farm animals which will be slaughtered of humans to eat.

“Waste” isn’t really the right word, more like “inefficient”, in the sense that the amount of food which takes for an animal to mature is orders of magnitude greater than what you take from it. In other words, you could feed significantly more people if they ate what you’re feeding the animal.

When you couple that with the environmental impact of raising animals as food, including deforestation and land use, which in turn affects us as well, it becomes a major issue.

That's just because of this new wave of eco-virtue-signaling that's become popular in the past few years. Before that, recycled meant lower quality and cheaper.

See also: "vegan butter" or "plant-based butter" instead of "hydrogenated vegetable oil".

https://www.flora.com/en-us/floraplant/our-products/salted-p...

The seller is called “grape lab”, with a “g” as the logo, and “Sustainable Design Lab” as the tagline. Everything in English. How is that “intended for other people in Korea”?

USA folded paper is cheap cardboard. Asian folded paper is origami.

I love this. More tutorials, fewer products.

It doesn't seem too difficult to make something similar.

The plastic laptop stand you by probably also had to be shipped halfway around the world, so this one is probably a wash.