> The price of the physical glasses is minor -- only $1.88 for a new pair of ready-made spectacles.
Sigh. Why is it I can't get a pair of prescription glasses for under $500?
Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#22There are several competing efforts to produce low-cost eyeglasses. Focus On Vision has adjustable eyeglasses.[1] Project Congo has some kind of eyeglass-making kit.[2] Briefcase-sized eyeglass kits used to be popular in India. They contained round frames and several hundred round lenses. The idea is that glasses have three parameters - spherical curvature, elliptical curvature, and axis of the ellipse. The usual options for the first two are only about 100-200 lenses. With a round lens, you can set the axis in any direction. There's a little notching tool in the kit, and once you have the axis set, the plastic lens is notched, then snapped into the frame, where it locks.
Not that they really cost much. The manufacturing cost of eyeglasses is about $2. The insane price of frames comes from a monopoly by Luxottica, which owns most of the retail outlets in malls in the US.
[1] http://www.focus-on-vision.org/ [2] http://projectcongo.org/photocollections/eyeglassmaking.html
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#23This 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…
Battery and fluro tube recycling. These help prevent the contamination of waste dumps with heavy metals although with modern waste dumps that don't leach (as much) this is less of a problem.
The really big environmental issue that is not being tackled is anthropomorphic climate change. Really it is not going to matter how many plastic bottles we recycle if we push CO2 over 1000 ppm and which we are on track to do.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#24> The price of the physical glasses is minor -- only $1.88 for a new pair of ready-made spectacles. Sigh. Why is it I can't get a pair of prescription glasses for under $500?
Monopolies. Why don't we have an eyeglass startup?
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#25> The price of the physical glasses is minor -- only $1.88 for a new pair of ready-made spectacles. Sigh. Why is it I can't get a pair of prescription glasses for under $500?
I'm not sure where you are looking but there are tons of options for $30-$100 glasses out there. In fact I got designer brand frames from my optometrist with upgraded lense material and anti scratch and anti glare coatings for less than $500.
Check out places like America's Best, Warby Parker, or http://www.zennioptical.com
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#26> The price of the physical glasses is minor -- only $1.88 for a new pair of ready-made spectacles. Sigh. Why is it I can't get a pair of prescription glasses for under $500?
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Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#27Questions 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 on…
> scam I'm glad someone makes money off of my old clothes rather than they go in the trash. > destroys local tailors' businesses That's a variation on the broken window fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
> I'm glad someone makes money off of my old clothes rather than they go in the trash.
I don't have a problem with that per se, only that it happens under the pretense of charity and that the model exploits economic inequality in a globalized world on the expense of those the "charity" claims to help.
> That's a variation on the broken window fallacy.
I fail to see the connection because the broken window fallacy is about a coherent economic system, not about a global economy where one can make a profit by exploiting inequalities. The proverb says: Give a man a fish and you feed him for the day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Following that idea, I am much more for transfer of knowledge than for transfer of goods. And in extension also for sourcing urgently required products locally (and if required donating to build the required industry) than just sending products.
One does not have to see that in any ideological way: Just publish all numbers, show me that it's more cost-effective to send assembled products to a place and I won't object. But the article just showed that we again failed to run the numbers, thereby wasting money and potentially harming the local economy in the target country.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> scam I'm glad someone makes money off of my old clothes rather than they go in the trash. > destroys local tailors' businesses That's a variation on the broken window fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
> I'm glad someone makes money off of my old clothes rather than they go in the trash. I don't have a problem with that per se, only that it happens under the pretense of charity and that the model exploits economic inequality in a globalized world on the expense of those the "charity" claims to help. > That's a variation on the broken window fallacy. I fail to see the connection because the broken window fallacy is…
By sheltering tailors, everyone else in the economy pays a higher price and is thereby worse off. It's a net loss. Might as well go around smashing windows so the local glaziers can make money.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#29This 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.
Plastic recycling was a platic-industry PR campaign to make consimers more friendly to buying plastic by assuaging their feelings of guilt. Now it's embedded in our culture as a received truth.
Re: Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Waste of Money
#30> The price of the physical glasses is minor -- only $1.88 for a new pair of ready-made spectacles. Sigh. Why is it I can't get a pair of prescription glasses for under $500?
Monopolies. Why don't we have an eyeglass startup?
I think that's Warby Parker. They're few years in now, but their low-cost acetate frames are pretty much the norm.