Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
bloomberg.com
Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#2I would've expected people to throw their glasses into a recycling bin, where it's melted down and made into beer bottles.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#3This goes for most (almost all) recycling programs.
Recycling programs are a worse than a waste of money since you are using up some of people’s limited support for environmental causes. This would not matter if we did not have some really huge, long term problems that we need to deal with that we are not doing enough about.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#4I think I read somewhere that it used to be standard practice to go to the eye doctor (or glasses-monger?) and just try on pairs until you found one that worked, rather than getting a laser-precise eye exam. At the time I thought it was a terrible, backwards idea, but it makes sense in this context. Getting an affordable, almost-fit pair of glasses is probably a lot better than no glasses at all.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#5I think I read somewhere that it used to be standard practice to go to the eye doctor (or glasses-monger?) and just try on pairs until you found one that worked, rather than getting a laser-precise eye exam. At the time I thought it was a terrible, backwards idea, but it makes sense in this context. Getting an affordable, almost-fit pair of glasses is probably a lot better than no glasses at all.
That's pretty much what I did. I bought a super cheap pair (0.5 SPH) at $5, split the lenses and placed them over each other until what I saw at a distance was clear enough to read. I added up the SPH (they were 0.5 lenses, I ended up overlaying 4 pieces - so 2.0 total) and bought the resulting glasses. That was about 2 or 3 years ago and those glasses are still perfect for me.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#6This goes for most (almost all) recycling programs. Recycling programs are a worse than a waste of money since you are using up some of people’s limited support for environmental causes. This would not matter if we did not have some really huge, long term problems that we need to deal with that we are not doing enough about.
You could just as easily argue that environmental effort is not a zero-sum game, and that recycling gives people a sense of ownership over the environment and increases their appetite for more important efforts.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#7This goes for most (almost all) recycling programs. Recycling programs are a worse than a waste of money since you are using up some of people’s limited support for environmental causes. This would not matter if we did not have some really huge, long term problems that we need to deal with that we are not doing enough about.
What would you mark as the worthwhile ones?
Personally I place high value on raw material recycling. Even if it's more expensive monetarily, so long as it uses less resources it seems worth it to me.
Aluminum cans are currently recycled more than any other beverage container in the U.S, which is good for business and the environment, says the Aluminum Association, because making a can from recycled aluminum saves not only aluminum but 92 percent of the energy required to make a new can
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#8I think these programs are a legacy of a past era where the costs of manufacturing glasses was relatively high.
But the suggestion that cheap glasses should be just put in racks is simplistic. Getting people sort of okay glasses isn't acceptable. My vision is asymmetrical, and using the same power lenses would leave me with a debilitating headache.
There should be a few standard cheap lens patterns so you can mix and match.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#9This goes for most (almost all) recycling programs. Recycling programs are a worse than a waste of money since you are using up some of people’s limited support for environmental causes. This would not matter if we did not have some really huge, long term problems that we need to deal with that we are not doing enough about.
What would you mark as the worthwhile ones? Personally I place high value on raw material recycling. Even if it's more expensive monetarily, so long as it uses less resources it seems worth it to me. Aluminum cans are currently recycled more than any other beverage container in the U.S, which is good for business and the environment, says the Aluminum Association, because making a can from recycled aluminum saves not…
Costing more money is a measure of how many resources it's using. So more expensive is almost by definition more wasteful. The resource might be more human labor than natural resources but it's still something valuable that could better be used another way if there's a cheaper alternative.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#10Questions unfortunately not answered by the article:
a) Who profits from this recycling program? How many people get a western salary to coordinate all this?
b) Following from (a), how many optometrists and lens makers could make a living in Cambodia if people just put $1 in a collection box each time they'd dump their used glasses in a box?
This suspiciously sounds like the "2nd hand clothes for Africa" scam that only profits the collectors of those in western countries and destroys local tailors' businesses in the target market.