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I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

sfchronicle.com

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Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#21

Post by atwood22 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #20
atwood22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When mass-produced, the cost per can will drop to an estimated $2,000 to $3,000. I'm sorry, but that is still embarrassing. If the U.S. still had a strong manufacturing base, these things would be trivial to produce cheaply. To start with, certain aspects of the design would be simplified to allow for easier production. Operations and tooling engineers could help with that process, but we barely have any engineers…

> If the U.S. still had a strong manufacturing base What's this "if?" I've worked my entire 30+ year engineering career for companies that manufactured things. From the 6-person company I started at to the $4bn corporation that owned 80% of their market, they've all been based on making things. There's nothing wrong with the US manufacturing base. We just don't focus on low-margin consumer goods. Even the company I w…

Here is an article that quotes Tim Cook on why Apple produces the iPhone in China: https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...

> The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.

Low-margin things used to be farmed out overseas due to cost. Now things are produced overseas because we lack the expertise locally.

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#22

Post by mindslight »

atwood22 wrote: post #19
mindslight wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I went on to address why that is. US labor is expensive, because our currency has been continually hollowed out by the deliberate government policy that prices must always go up, despite continual technological and economic progress trying to make things less expensive. The real cost of producing consumer goods has dropped through the floor, yet nominal prices are a bit higher than they were. Meanwhile domestic…

> Sure, I went on to address exactly why that is. US labor is expensive, because our currency has been continually hollowed out by the deliberate government policy that prices must always go up, despite continual technological and economic progress trying to make things less expensive. Sorry, what policy is that? Are you talking about how the Federal Reserve targets 2% inflation? Every country does that. It's importa…

> Are you talking about how the Federal Reserve targets 2% inflation?

Specifically 2% inflation defined in terms of a consumer price index where the cost to produce manufactured goods is continually dropping. Draw a diagram of the feedback loop, and you'll see that the only way to make that target happen is for the cost of non-offshore-manufactured goods to increase much quicker than 2% to compensate.

Put another way, manufacturing was offshored with the idea it would lead to cheap prices, and then the Federal Reserve went and deliberately stopped those cheaper prices from happening. This left Americans with fewer jobs but also no increased economic power to make up for it.

> It's important that nominal prices increase. Otherwise, people just old on to their money and the economy slows down

I understand the orthodoxy, but the computing industry has had four decades of overwhelming deflation and has been quite vibrant the entire time.

Re: sheet metal, how much is the tooling cost to create a die for 1/4 inch steel? I don't have much experience, but at the relatively low quantity a municipality wants CNC plasma might still make more sense. That seems to be the case for tractor implements.

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#23

Post by cwkoss »

mindslight wrote: post #5
cwkoss wrote: post #2

US citizens need to start feeling embarassed that we can no longer manufacture simple objects cost efficiently. These trash cans should cost $1k max. I wonder if this cost discrepancy is due to pork or too many middle managers. Not even sure why the trash can needs a redesign. Will this increased cost ever give an ROI over a long enough enough time span? Or will some other bureaucrat decide they need to make a name f…

> I wonder if this cost discrepancy is due to pork or too many middle managers. The cost "discrepancy" is due to cheap offshored mass manufacturing for most everything consumers buy, plus social media validating uninformed off-the-cuff opinions. $11,000 is about a month of a welder plus designer. Is it terribly hard to imagine that the process of building a prototype with a few refinements would take $11,000 worth of…

I'm not sure if the article clarified, but I was under the impression the $11-20k was the incremental cost per unit. They said the whole project has spent $550,000. Hopefully they got more than 3 trashcan prototypes and a QR code to an online survey for that.

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#24

Post by sometimesjerks »

atwood22 wrote: post #15
sometimesjerks wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a really interesting topic because there's a surprising amount of consideration that needs to go into something like this. Most people think "oh, a trashcan, how hard can it be to design one?". Here's a list of the requirements of these trashcans, mostly taken from here ( https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/san-francisco-trash-c... ): - Durable: they can't be easily damaged due to physical force, r…

I think this list of requirements ignores the fact that plenty of other cities have trash cans that fulfill their purpose.

Other cities have functional trash cans, but every city is unique and the set of problems they solve will be different. In SF the biggest issue is that people are constantly getting into the trash and creating a huge mess, so the cans that NYC or Seattle use won't work because they have an open top design. Many of the cans in London are the BigBelly or bomb-proof variety, but we already ruled that out because of the $3k per year lease fee.

From what I can tell most cities don't have a custom design: they just use whatever commercially available thing is available. SF is hoping this design will be better than those, and that they will be able to sell the design to other cities. I'd love to see how other cities address this issue though... I know that Amsterdam has a fancy underground trash system!

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#25

Post by hobo_in_library »

klyrs wrote: post #11

TFA only seems to have pictures of the one trash can. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article... These designs are all bad. The recycling space is uselessly small. The middle one won't accept an empty takeout container. The one on the right has moving parts that people need to touch to use. Most people don't want to touch a damned trashcan downtown, what are you even thinking?! People are focused…

Just imagine how much work those slats will be to keep clean!

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#26

Post by iancmceachern »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #20
atwood22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When mass-produced, the cost per can will drop to an estimated $2,000 to $3,000. I'm sorry, but that is still embarrassing. If the U.S. still had a strong manufacturing base, these things would be trivial to produce cheaply. To start with, certain aspects of the design would be simplified to allow for easier production. Operations and tooling engineers could help with that process, but we barely have any engineers…

> If the U.S. still had a strong manufacturing base What's this "if?" I've worked my entire 30+ year engineering career for companies that manufactured things. From the 6-person company I started at to the $4bn corporation that owned 80% of their market, they've all been based on making things. There's nothing wrong with the US manufacturing base. We just don't focus on low-margin consumer goods. Even the company I w…

This, I'm I the same boat and have the same opinion. The US and Europe are both still top in manufacturing complex new things. Simple commodity stuff that's a race to the bottom like low end consumer tech and objects like trash cans are outsourced because cost.

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#27

Post by iancmceachern »

atwood22 wrote: post #21
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the U.S. still had a strong manufacturing base What's this "if?" I've worked my entire 30+ year engineering career for companies that manufactured things. From the 6-person company I started at to the $4bn corporation that owned 80% of their market, they've all been based on making things. There's nothing wrong with the US manufacturing base. We just don't focus on low-margin consumer goods. Even the company I w…

Here is an article that quotes Tim Cook on why Apple produces the iPhone in China: https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-... > The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers an…

That's not the correct interpretation of his quote.

Tooling engineering is a commodity thing, not a tech leadership thing.

Apple products are designed in the US, because the same problem, you couldn't find 1000 engineers able to design an iPhone all in one place anywhere else. Yes, the Tooling engineers are in the lower cost to manufacture countries we export the manufacturing to, but the designers of the product are in the US, bay area specifically. Often tunes tooling engineers assemble production lines, molding stations, etc. From components and tools designed and built in the US and Europe. I.e a tooling engineer will design an automated work cell with a robot arm and an injection molding machine. The robot and injection molding machine are designed and built by a us, Japanese or European company, and the rest is sourced locally and then assembled together.

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#28

Post by metadat »

klyrs wrote: post #11

TFA only seems to have pictures of the one trash can. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article... These designs are all bad. The recycling space is uselessly small. The middle one won't accept an empty takeout container. The one on the right has moving parts that people need to touch to use. Most people don't want to touch a damned trashcan downtown, what are you even thinking?! People are focused…

Direct link to image:

https://archive.ph/LC3PF/87a04d67bf1d6574004d2f931dc1085afe8...

I didn't realize this article was more than 10 months old.

Re: I reviewed the $20k trash cans SF is testing. Here’s what I found

#30

Post by iancmceachern »

jerlam wrote: post #17
nradov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "problems" are not real problems worth wasting money on. Regular trash cans used in other cities are cheap and work fine. SF city leadership is just dysfunctional and over complicating things as usual.

The main competitor for these trash cans is the BigBelly, which cost $3,000 a year to lease. They've already been deployed in some parts of SF and surrounding cities. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ci...

Not true. The main competitor is a regular dumb trash can you can buy from home depot for $50.

Edited to say $50 not $10 per below comment.

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