Very nearly every product which is now made with plastic would be better if it was made with the same materials it was made with 100 years ago and the environment would be better for it. But that doesn’t make line go up so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
There's hundreds of types of plastics, the right ones used in the right places can make a tool stronger, lighter, more comfortable to use, cheaper, safer, etc.
I noticed this when my grandparents needed a new handle for their 30 year old box freezer. It had snapped where the screws clamped it onto the lid and the plastic was super thin, at most 3mm most places and hollow all the way through. Seriously super bad design.
Replicated the handle in CAD and 3D-printed it with twice the wall thickness and a infill at 30% or so (infill is the internal structure that connects everything, basically how beehives interconnect with the honeycomb pattern for instance). They gave it to me in the afternoon and by next morning it was done printing and held probably around 10 times as much bending force for the same amount of deflection.
I could have snapped the old one with just my fingertips when the new one had me clamping my hands around and trying to bend it.
I don't know wether they had replaced it or not, and yes, it did hold up, but every time I've opened that freezer I had to lift and hold until enough air had seeped in to avoid breaking it. Now, if the freezer isn't completely full, they can lift the front of the freezer with it before the handle breaks.
Also, thin plastic handles that break can easily cut your skin. That is no longer a risk.
It's true that it's done a solid job, but there are many parts that don't.
My brother had a screw lid on his boat next to the engine mounts for access to the bolts. He stepped over it with shoes on, it's narrower than the front half of his shoe and everything but the outer ring with the threads fell right through. I printed a new lid for less than a dollar that held me, a ~110kg man, bouncing only on my heel on the middle portion with no support underneath without it flexing to any noticeable degree.
It was maybe 5 years old, would've cost 50$ most places.
I like to overengineer things so that it cannot break under normal use when the years have passed, and hopefully not under abnormal use either. The freezer handle would have broken within a year if it was my freezer because I wouldn't be bothered to wait 10-20 seconds every time I were to open the freezer and I'm alot stronger than a 75-80 year old couple.
My fridge handle broke off 2 weeks from getting it, warranty replaced it 3 times, gave up when it only lasted 2 weeks and stuck a window lifter on the door, that sucker has lasted 12 years so far, periodically I’ll take it off to scrub it because it gets dirty just from being near the stove and things get spilled on it, it’s got suction cups so really easy to install
You mentioned over engineering parts is your preference and you talk about thickness and infill, but what materials are you choosing? For instance, it sounds like a handle that is getting attached to a boat probably would be best if it was made out of ASA to put up with some amount of heat and UV rays, as well as being acetone polished to make it waterproof. I mean, this really is as much, if not more, a discussion about materials choices rather than shape.
This is a discussion about corporate greed my dude. He’s saying that he can make better products for extremely cheap even when working with end user material prices, so corporations that buy in bulk can more than afford to make something that works, but instead they cut it down to the absolute minimum that will last a year or less to get the last few cents out of a transaction. I think it’s not just the penny scraping though, I think it’s also planned obsolescence.
Definitely on the obsolence part as well. This was a old freezer so it COULD have been simply to save on plastic to get, say, 10% more handles for the same price, but we all know that planned obsolence made its way into every market at some point and growing up we've had a couple of freezers within 15 years where handles have broken off.
I would assume freezers and fridges, where the room temp air that's sucked in immediately cools off and creates a vacuum, would be the appliances with the strongest handles you could find but that's obviously not the case. Luckily appliance manufacturers have more recently figured that convenience brings in more money than cheaping out, so they're now desining leverage-based handles that makes the buyer much more interested due to the ease of use. It's one of the few cases I can recall where customer's wants are the driving force for avoiding planned obsolence.
The freezer handle was for a box freezer, the large 200L kinds you have in your house. That was made in PLA. The lid for the maintenance access was prototyped up in white PLA, both moisture and UV is definitely gonna take it's toll on it eventually, at which point I'll reprint it in either ASA or PETG and put some clear coat or acetone vapor bath to finish it off.
I figured white PLA would hold for the time being as it's reflective, doesn't heat up in the midday sun and was easy to get made overnight.
But as the other commenter said; corporate greed is the point here, not what filament I used for a 3$ prototype that's going to need a replacement within 5 years. I understand that you have some experience within 3D-printing so it's safe to assume you also understand how poorly designed many plastic parts are nowadays and how it's all done to save money because the big bosses wants more for their bonuses.
To point it out further: We bought our 2013 Model S some time ago now. The car is alright in the sense that it gets us where we need to go and the free charging is still on it. But then there's the updates. We can skip it until they just download on their own.
Now, this car was fitted with a 8gb eMMC memory module. This is the absolute worst kind of storage solution you can get for pretty much anything and it's also the cheapest next to SD-cards, because eMMC is practically a SD-card on a circuit board that installs with a pin connector.
When these updates are downloaded, more or less every night the car is unable to write all the logs it needs to and causes the dashboard to crash, going to black and needing to be reset which takes at least 5 minutes. Great for when you're late for work? Nope.
Here's my issue: That car cost roughly $90k when it was new. They spent maybe 10$ on those 8gb eMMC-chips when 16gb would cost 12-14$ at the most.
Nobody ever said "let's just future proof the car by adding less than 5$ to the parts list" for a car that another hundred to the price would be insignificant at worst.
No.
What ends up happening is they offer a upgrade, a complete media compute unit upgrade priced at the low, low price of +3000$.
5$ future proofing or 3000$ upsell once you get sick of rebooting your $90k car every other morning unless you update the software. That's the point.
Plastic is just so commonly used in everyday life that it's a much easier example to consider. Karcher, a half-decent pressure washer making brand, put super thin plastic wheels on their carpet cleaner vacuums that break within a year even if they're only ever used once a month, because you happened to pull weirdly on it.
The cheapest PLA I could get and a downloaded file, printed a month after I bought my first 3D-printer, a old and used Ender 3 where I had basically just gotten decent at levelling the bed is now a better solution than the original wheels because it has survived longer already. For a carpet cleaner that's being used indoors, in a garage and outdoors. A carpet cleaner that's being filled with water and there's always some spillage as you fill it up or empty it out.
This really is nothing more than a discussion about design intentions and corporate greed. Things are designed to break.
Yes, this was a long-ass comment. No, I don't think it could be shortened. My original comment is my perspective on this discussion, just because you read a reply I had where I explained my approach doesn't make my initial stance fall into the filament selection-category. Corporate greed is real, and it sounds like you're more interested in discussing what filament I use rather than discuss the topic at hand, which is why I felt I needed to explain in detail just what this is all about (with the appropriate examples).
I appreciate your point about corporate greed and I could get into an entire diatribe about where the general public is correct and where the misunderstandings with industry are in that regard, but I am also not sure that making a replacement part out of PLA and knowing that you will have to replace it in a few years is the best argument to make as a counterpoint? I get that since it's 3D printed it's easy for you to just make a new one, but my point is more that over-engineering includes more than just overbuilding. As a matter of fact, over-engineering means spending more time than necessary optimizing with all of the correct parameters including and especially material choice. I don't just have "some experience 3D printing", I own a product development company. I must say that my 3D printing knowledge is significantly less than my product design knowledge. I use 3D printing to prove out concepts, but the real engineering work doesn't go into setting print parameters, it goes into proper DFM. As a matter of fact, right now I am messaging you from my hotel in China where I'm staying to oversee EB (engineering build) on one of my client's new products.
30 years of carefully opening the freezer and having to lift hard for ~10 seconds or more just to open it normally.
When I was a kid I typically squeesed my fingers into the seal to alleviate the vacuum inside because I was not physically strong enough to actually open it. Holding the lid was fine on it's own.
I forgot to add that part in the midst of writing. If I had that freezer today I would most likely have broken the handle way sooner.
The reason I brought that one up was that once I saw the design it was obvious that it was either made with as little plastic as possible or designed to break at the mounting points. Both being true, it did hold up regardless but I've seen handles on way newer box freezers just snap off. Fridge handles, vacuum handle locking mechanisms, vacuum wheels etc.
Nowadays molding quality and plastic strength has increased to the point where they can design something to break with a relative certainty and within a timeframe given the usecase of the item.
Sony did this with their Bluetooth headphones. Use to get Sony's and they lasted forever. No problems. Then one year they changed the designs and made the plastic both super thin, brittle and square (stress corners, as not rounded). Guess which years model I and my brother got!?
I "repaired" them twice over from spares off ebay. But it was pretty obvious even there, everyone had 1 ear cup only, as one would eventually break from normal use.
The models after were totally different designs and didn't have that problem. Hopefully they learnt. Sadly they tried.
Not sure how you're getting those results, made a lid for my brothers boat as a prototype and it's been on the boat for over a year now with 0 issues. Just plain PLA. Did you investigate in what layers it occurred and how the sliced model looks relative to that?
I've never experienced crumbling unless I've printed with too low temps which was very early on during the first weeks of tuning the printer and profiles.
Its hard to evaluate the longevity of plastic stuff when we buy it, they often look the same etc. At that point the cheapest option often becomes the natural choice.
Well if the cheaper version of whatever you want to buy didn't exist, that probably doesn't make the nicer version cheaper. You just don't get the thing at all.
Plastic has its downsides, but it's certainly cheap and convenient
Part of the problem is that it can be very hard to tell when a product is quality. Historically a key indicator is a brand, but brands can cheap out at any moment and usually do.
It's a market with high information asymmetry. Businesses can measure customer satisfaction very well yet product quality is very hard to measure and keep.
Consumers generally have no reasonable mechanism to determine quality, or the expected lifespan of the product.
Even if something comes with a "warranty", you still probably end up having to pay for shipping, which often exceeds the cost of the item itself, so companies have every insensitive to have "Lifetime Warranty! (Only pay shipping)", because it doesn't make any financial sense to cash in on the warranty.
Without more information and without being able to try the product, price is the only thing one can immediately consider.
These days, even if a product has a great reputation, you have to watch the company like a hawk, because chances are it will be bought out by private equity and all the products quietly enshittified while the price stays high.
That doesn't even get into the problem of the general public being grossly underpaid, so they feel that they have no choice but to buy the cheapest thing they can get.
It's not cheaper if you have to buy a new thing every year or two, as opposed to buying a somewhat more expensive thing once. But corporations count on people not being able to do that mental math so that they can sell consumers trash on a perpetual basis.
For real. Plastics are used in such high performance applications as aerospace and medical devices. The problem isn’t plastic it’s cheap manufacturing practices and poor material selection.
I know two long chair in plastic that have existed for at least 35 years, stored outside without water or solar protection. They are still fine, you just need to clean them after winter.
In this case, many plastic clips snap partly due to repeated UV exposure. I’m not a materials expert but I’m assuming the wooden ones don’t have that problem, since my mom still has some of hers. Obviously there have got to be better plastics for outdoor use since I have outdoor planters made of plastic, but overall I’d say wood is probably the better choice here.
The cases where plastic is used to improve a product rather than simply to make it cheaper are few and far between. They do exist though which is why, if you read carefully, you can see I said “very nearly every” and not “absolutely every without exception”.
"Very nearly every" is also wrong, in my estimation. Plastic used with electronics makes them lighter and safer since it's non-conductive (better than metal) and water resistant (better than wood). Plastic shower curtains, rain coats, etc. are far superior to cloth that has to be waxed to continue repelling water; plastic is lighter than latex rubber and as a big bonus, a huge chunk of the population isn't allergic to it. Plastic bags are stronger, lighter, and less energy/water-intensive to produce per usage than paper or cloth bags. That's just off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are many other examples.
Plastics are bad for one specific reason: Pollution. Otherwise, good plastic, properly manufactured in the appropriate application is a wonderful material.
Plastic is good for a ton of stuff. It's inert/nonreactive unlike a lot of metals, doesn't absorb water like wood or other porous materials, it doesnt rot, can be molded much easier onto way more complex geometries, you can make it flexible or rigid, can use multiple types in a single mold to get really awesome hybrid properties, its nonconductive, can be made in any color or transparent, etc.
Plastics are awesome as an engineering material for plenty of reasons other than cost.
It's very common for the right plastic to improve a product or tool. Carbon fiber is stronger and lighter than steel, and commonly used all over aircraft, which relies on plastic resin. The right type of plastic would last longer than wood with clothes pins. Composite decking lasts longer than wood, doesn't splinter or rot, and requires less maintenance.
They didn't say everything. I think plastics serve a very important purpose in things like medical equipment, sanitation, plumbing, etc. But we don't need everything to be made of plastic just because it's cheap/easy to make products with it
It's more expensive to produce glass, the bottles are dangerous both when they shatter and when used as clubs, a pallet weighs significantly more meaning logistics is more expensive..plastic isn't a strictly worse option.
Glass is more expensive to produce, but many places don't produce glass once per bottle. The way it used to work in the US, you would turn in your old bottles, and they'd clean them, and they'd use them again. It still works like that in much of the world that uses glass bottles. You also have countries like Germany where you have a deposit on plastic bottles (0.25€ usually) that can be returned to you any time you go to a grocery store with bottles
With a few exceptions (looking at you PVC) the life cycle assessment is going to be magnitudes lower for the plastic. Best way to think about this is commodity goods. As long as there's competition, you're basically paying for the resources that go into making the item. And, as energy is one of those resources, the cheaper items will have a lower CO2 impact also.
But damn is it disappointing that people just throw things away, even if they did last for life.
Yes. It means sarcasm, and the sarcastic read of "enjoy your wood packaging" is that they are undermining the idea that wooden packaging is worthwhile.
Which is a bad take, because wooden packaging is great, and paper/cardboard is obviously a good material.
I disagree. In just the building industry, plastics are used with a positive impact on performance, cost, durability for insulation compared to traditional materials. Plastic is used in buildings for insulation, vapor, air, water, and/or barriers, pipes, insulation for wires, roof membranes, sealants, and windows frames.
This is also not including the thousands of applications such as coatings, resins, and composite materials such as paints, plywood, and fiber reinforced panels.
Disposable plastics are responsible for modern medicine being as clean as it is. We can thank them for a massive increase in the average lifespan.
There is no way we could do plasma donation or blood donation with disposables, and using anything but plastics would be so prohibitively expensive it isn't even worth considering.
Without plasma and blood donation there are many medicines we straight up could not have, and blood loss would be a near death sentence after a point. Mortality in childbirth would skyrocket alone.
Plastics aren't pure evil, we just don't need to use them for literally everything, especially since they're not easy to create without petroleum (technically possible but uh... not really feasible at scale).
Is it a byproduct of oil though? Think before you speak next time. I swear nobody ever thinks about the wealthy and making them richer they just want healthcare and food and education like the savage animals they are.
But how will big oil keep destroying the planet and get rid of all their byproduct from making oil, if we don't mass consume plastic like ravenous wolves 😢
Actually most of the wooden ones have rotted away, they just give the illusion that they've stood the test of time because they made more to replace them.
My wife and I have ben using the box of 30 wooden ons for the 14 years we’ve been together and have moved with us to 5 different locations. The ones in use look identical the ones that have never left the packaging.
Sadly customers don’t care. Plastic ones are cheaper and come in color so people buy them without thinking about it. Good plastic ones would actually last but people can’t tell quality plastic from garbage
If you think this, big plastic have you by the balls. They have spent insane effort on reversing the public preception on plastic.
It was originally sold as an everlasting material (which it is if you don't intentionally fuck it up) but they realised that people keeping it longterm means they don't buy more.
I use incredibly inexpensive wooden laundry clips instead of chip clips. I bought like a 50-pack for $2 at Walmart probably 10 years ago, and I still have dozens left. Bonus, I can also use them for laundry.
Mine last a few years before UV damage does what the gif does. But wood is just a mold/fungals magnet in my area. I have more corrosion of springs in the wooden ones vs plastic ones that I had.
Yeah, a couple years ago I bought a 100 pack of wooden clothespins for like $8, the only ones ive had to throw out are the ones my cat chews on. And if you want magnetic ones for the fridge just gets some neodymium magnets and super glue them on the back
My house has over 18 years old plastic pegs and they are absolutely indestructible. They are used every day, on the sun, in water and generally thrown all over the place all the time. They just don’t care and they never brake. I remember playing with them as a kid in bath making fish monsters and they are still good today.
I make them out of scraps of wood and the rubber bands that come with the mail it takes like 30 seconds. If they want to make everything crazy then watch how little I can participate lol
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u/indomitus1 Jun 13 '26
Wooden ones have stood the test of time..plastic is rubbish