Shopping carts made of plastic (No joke!)

[matrixmann]

Anyone's already seen the latest craze - shopping carts with the basket area entirely made of plastic?
Only the wheel area and their legs that connect to the basket made of metal?

One of those things which make you ask how much the appeals to you personally to use less plastic in life to go easier on the environment are actually meant seriously...

Comments

[maadmike.livejournal.com]

The most ecological could be the wooden carts as it couldn't be not sounding strange - the wooden - we are wishing lately and going to save the forests so how we could save them doing everything from wood? But to produce any metal – iron for example (not to mention aluminum) we have to burn much more than the forests - we should burn incredible amount of coal which is very dirty and extra amount of carbon oxide in our atmosphere and it is a question what is more harmful for ecology the metals or the plastics cause we have to count the amount of energy we are spending on making them and their time of working after. The metals are wonderful with melt down them again and again while plastic is much cheaper and have many incredibly different capabilities.

[matrixmann]

Over here they had the habit (in GDR times) to radically keep reforesting the woods once they cut anything down, so they could cut trees down again in 30 years (I think they also did research and picked tree sorts which grow big relatively quickly and are modest in cultivation).
And, I guess, this also came after cutting down way too much after the war, after finding the woods empty and gone and no wood available as material to do anything with. So to say, after flat on one's face...

Don't know if any other countries practiced such a model to regrow one's resources, but that could be a model in order to prevent oneself from ecological disaster in this point. (e. g. preventing the spreading of deserts, preventing killing living space of animals, keeping materia alive that produces oxygen to breathe, preventing material to use for human economy from running out)

Plastic, as far as I remember the process of generating it in the first place, is way harder to reuse than metal. Metal - you melt it in a big pot again, do the mixture you want to have and pour it into a new form. Plastic - you need to create a new chain made of monomers via chemical reaction. The latter requiring differing outside circumstances to enforce this process...

[maadmike.livejournal.com]

"Metal - you melt it in a big pot again, do the mixture you want to have and pour it into a new form. "

Yes, but the energy spent on producing metals is tremendously higher than making plastic, I did not research but the price on both shows it well. There are nowadays the ideas to stop using fuel and use more wind and sun energy but people not counting all the circumstances. Using recoverable fuel and material sources as algae, grass, wood for fuel could be much more economically and ecologically effective but oil companies will always saying it is a bullshit and you shouldn't even try but always buy and buy...

[matrixmann]

Hm, prices are a wobbly thing... I don't trust these too much anymore these days.
In practice, I'd think that metal is the thing easier to produce.
You just need to heat something up warm enough, that's literally "all" that there is to do. Ways to generate high temperature I would think you can find a couple, while getting differing hydrocarbon compounds to link each other is a more difficult thing to achieve.

Another thing you can do with plastics, of course, is producing such that last for a longer amount of time. You know, not producing lots of these use&throw-away items...
I know there's a huge difference between household items made of plastic made in GDR compared to such from Western production these days.
GDR buckets made of plastic - or a laundry tub to transport washed clothes -, they can make it to turn 30 and 40 years old without showing those signs of becoming porous from too much sunlight. And the plastic is thick!