Looks like a Miura fold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miura_fold.
When going to theme parks and the like, I love folding the physical maps like this. It's nice that the maps stay rigid when fully open, and the single-motion for opening and closing is glorious.
That whole video is really neat, love the guy teaching!
I think I spent too much time watching the video of it folding and unfolding.
Same :)
I hope my brain stows your comment safely away until the next opportunity.
I'm reminded of similarly useless "sustainable cardboard furniture" that came out about a decade ago.
On the positive side, kudos to whomever in marketing/pr at the design firm got this useless product so much press.
This is just the sort of "win" that a design consulting shop loves to have for actual briefs that lead to real moving-the-needle revenue. One example would be SmartDesign's modular slip-on "S-Grips" that led to the iconic vegetable peeler that then bled into the "design language" of every product at OXO.
Didn't know about the SmartDesign/OXO vegetable peeler, very interesting rabbit hole to go down.
I liked the part where they were looking for someone to manufacture the handles, and the Japanese machinist said "If he could make it, I can make it!".
Indeed, having gone down the rabbit hole of machining (both to see if it would be a viable hobby and if it could even be a career), this was the attitude of the shop teacher: "if you can think it, you can probably make it". I am far more surprised that neither the American nor the Taiwanese manufacturers said this. Then again, perhaps it was because management didn't talk to the guys who made things!
(Now that I think of it, had they done that, perhaps they would have gotten the answer "We can do it, but the fins will wear down the tool too fast, at least until we can figure out a better material for the tools!" instead of "Nope, we can't do that!")
Why are they peeling those beautiful golden potatoes? Skin is the best part.
Brilliant write up. I remember using the old ones, and only last year found the oxo model. truly amazing. Many important lessons in product design in that article; with the most important in the last sentence - it has to work!
I've tried swivelling peelers a few times and every time I return to my forty year old Lancashire peeler with its blade held on the plastic handle with tightly wrapped cotton string. A bit like this one: https://www.pattersons.co.uk/lancashire-peeler.html
0.96 GBP including VAT.
I had to replace the string this year though.
that's something i never understood: why do they sell peelers with a movable part? like we are meant to peel in curves and expect the knife to follow the curve beautifully? the fixed ones are easier to use and easier to clean!
The hinge allows you to peel in both directions (i.e. forwards and backwards across your potato/carrot/etc. without lifting the peeler.) It also means it can track a rough surface more easily. I haven't had any issues with the hinge, and I use a dishwasher for cleaning - what issues have you run into?
i'm almost never using a movable one but:
- on the practicity: i can do exactly what i want with a fixed one, without risk for the blade to slip
- small dust and bits tend to gather at the junctions and sit there
Which also makes it usable for left-handers.
The movable blade makes peeling oddly shaped veggies or fruits so much smoother
I find the movable ones cut a thinner peel, probably the blade is held at a more optimal angle if it can find its own position, or maybe my particular movable one is just better-made than my fixed one.
For produce with a tougher skin than innards, the blade will deflect off the inside of the skin and steer itself along that interface.
Fair enough, I don't usually encounter that. I'd probably use a regular knife in that case.
The ikea one mentions peeling asparagus. Is that a thing?
Yes, sometimes, especially on larger spears. The skin can get tough and/or stringy and some folks really don't like it.
Yes, not the wild asparagus but the ones you can shop have thick hard stalks at the base!
Expressing patronage of sustainability is emotionally equivalent to expressing patronage of artistry. Functionally a $10 chair from Goodwill will support a person equally well (and also be an expression of patronage for a person with options).
> I'm reminded of similarly useless "sustainable cardboard furniture" that came out about a decade ago.
Apparently no one learned their lesson, because the cardboard olympic village beds were also (allegedly) pretty terrible.
Some say Teenage Engineering products are mostly PR to promote their design studio (which is contracted by e.g. Ikea). Because indeed, value for money is not there. Or the product itself is preposterous (like their voice recorder).
MUJI used to have lots of that (20-25yrs ago). Shelves made from cardboard tubes, etc... You could tell, one bump and it would be destroyed. I think they got rid of most of them.
Only way to get cardboard to work in furniture and such is to laminate all sides... And even then it is only acceptable. Albeit very light.
I had a log seat style cardboard furniture for years, it was great when I needed something light but capable to hold stuff.
indeed useless, you can use arbitrary anything - a book, a notebook, the earpods, the wallet -> all work. besides the thing blowing wind does not make much real difference it seems.
I liked the stacked cardboard computer cases. Remember those?
60 or 70 years ago.
LoL.
Not only useless but also uncomfortable. My wrists get itchy when looking at those zigzag bevels...
The Bett 2.0 was one of the most comfortable things I’ve ever slept on. The Grid Bed was useless and fell apart.
Have one for several years. The main problem is cleaning it. Good luck cleaning the dust and spider webs from hundreds of individual holes. But otherwise, it's extremely sturdy and stable.
The article is seemingly outdated. The cheapest one I could find in the store was 29 USD. In Euros, it’s 36.37. And of course, you still have to pay for shipping. From Korea.
This seems quite absurd. Whatever good you do the planet by using something out of recycled paper (thumbs up on the idea) will surely be offset by all the logistics of the shipping.
This should have been a tutorial, not a product.
I often see "recycled" or similar as a signal for more expensive.
My favorite was when I saw a jam that touted "upcycled" strawberries. When I looked into it, it basically meant that it was made from beat up ugly strawberries that would have been used for animal feed. Surely there would be cost savings in using reject fruit, right? No, an 8oz jar retails for over $8 compared to about half that to an organic no sugar added alternative (I think its cheaper since I last looked though)
They even get certified that they use the most undesirable fruit that they can find!
>When I looked into it, it basically meant that it was made from beat up ugly strawberries
That's true for basically all processed food that contains fruit or vegetables, for obvious economic reasons. The stuff that looks good goes to the supermarkets who care very much about shelf appeal, the rest goes to the processors who absolutely don't.
Stuff like Pringles are made from the nastiest rotting potatoes in the planet. It's been 20 years since the last time I set foot in a potato plant, I can still smell it.
Good. That means they're reducing food waste.
A big problem with the food market is that people shop with their eyes, which leads to stupid amount of waste on fruit&vegetables section, as people prefer to go to another store than to buy veggies that look anything less than perfect.
In a lot of cases, that's how it works in nature too though. Visual appeal on the tree/bush is a big part of what attracts an animal to a fruit. It's just how we're built.
Right, but animals aren't as picky as humans - they'll eat anything that isn't rotten (and then some animals actually prefer rotten stuff). Meanwhile people will avoid buying veggies that look off even if there's no risk to health or taste involved.
I suppose this is because most animals in the wild are always couple hours away from starvation and just can't afford being picky eaters.
I think we've had the luxury of training ourselves to only identify the best looking produce as safe/tasty. I doubt it's ingrained in our nature, which is to say, if you're raised in a situation where you can't be as selective, I suspect you'll see a lot more produce as perfectly fine.
We definitely don't (generally) turn our noses up at various forms of rotten milk or the liquids of fruits rotten enough to be alcoholic.
it isn't as if the grocer gives us a discount for the "worse looking" produce. so why would anyone prefer it?
Yeah elks love to get drunk on rotten apples. Humans prefer rotten grapes.
Some humans prefer rotten apples.
I find dangerous red berries and colored frogs very attractive.
Oddly enough it now means that canned tomatoes are better than fresh.
Part of that is you can can a tomato right when it is most ripe and ready to be eaten, whereas if you're shipping it to a store, you ship it unripe and hope it ripens somewhat on the way.
Indeed, and they also grow different varieties. The ones destined for the store are bred for shipment and long term storage -- the so called "cardboard tomato."
Exactly, which is why I found it so entertaining. The idea that the Smuckers CEO is paying extra for beautiful fruit right before it get pulverized into jam is laughable. It's the market and price system taking care of the problem and opportunistic brands making up a problem that doesn't exist and charging users a premium to solve the non-existent problem
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Sometimes it's a marketing stunt, but often recycling is more expensive. I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one. The unfortunate reality of our financial system is that it often rewards people for doing the wrong thing.
If recycling is more expensive, isn't recycling the wrong thing?
The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
Recycling is more expensive, it likely means that there are associated costs (e.g. transportation, sorting, cleaning, processing, etc) that make it less economical than just throwing it in a landfill. And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources
> The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
It doesn't capture all of the costs. Key term here is "externalities", which are things that should be priced into a transaction, but currently aren't. Like the environmental impact of manufacturing process.
If all major externalities were priced in, and recycling would still be more expensive, then we could confidently say that it's the wrong thing to do.
Your way of thinking definitely isn't entirely incorrect, and I think a lot of times people forget that prices, while they can certainly have an arbitrary component, are largely driven by market forces, which at the very least will tell you something about the supply and demand of a product. However, I disagree with this:
> And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources
I think this doesn't often hold true, yes, an efficient market begets economically efficient resource allocation, but there's more to environmentalism than efficient resource allocation. Your example is good, it's certainly more economically efficient to use less petroleum when transporting goods, and that efficiency can be reflected in final costs. But let's look at another example:
Say you're buying lumber to build a house. There's a local lumber farm that sustainably grows and cuts down trees. Since its close, transportation costs (and associated emissions) are low - largely coming from amortized land costs and labor. However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.
>However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.
How does this apply to recycling though? Landfills in developed countries have little, if any externalities, because they're engineered to contain waste.
Largely I agree - landfills are not nearly as bad as people assume based on aesthetics and history. In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration. I just disagree with the logic of "If recycling is more expensive, isn't recycling the wrong thing". There's many situations where prices do not correlate with environmental impact. In the case of recycling, I haven't done the research to be certain either way. I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.
> I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.
That's the same thing I've seen demonstrated. It's really too bad that the plastics industry seized on the opportunity to greenwash wasteful amounts of plastic packaging by giving people a recycling bin that claims to do something useful with that discarded plastic, when in reality it's rare for post-consumer plastic to make any rational sense (other than those things like we're discussing, where people in practice waste even more resources in the recycling process just to feel good that the plastic material itself was technically not 'wasted').
>In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration.
Only if it doesn't offgas. Or leech.
They are engineered to contain solid waste, but often pollute the air and water, because the externality is cheaper than containing that waste.
“Costs” often ignore externalities like environmental damage and inequality. Landfilling or dumping plastic may be cheaper now, but it shifts the true cost — centuries of pollution —onto vulnerable communities today. There is a reason the clothing dumps are in Ghana and Chile, rather than wealthier nations like the US or Germany.
If the price to companies profiting from plastics included exteralities I could possibly agree with you but as it stands these costs are normally paid by disadvantaged individuals or marginalized ecosystems.
The reason the clothing dumps exist is greenwashing. If we weren't pretending that reusing clothing is meaningful to the environment, we'd just burn the clothing locally.
You'd think that cotton could be upcycled - the Soviet Union notably upcycled cotton, by turning it into the duraplast (made of compressed heated old cotton and plastic resin) that made up the body panels of their Trabant cars.
Of course, the Soviet Union doing something doesn't automatically mean it's economical or sensible, but at least in premise it should be useful for something.
Why don't the greenwashers greenwash burning clothes locally?
I can't stop my wife from cleaning everything we put in recycling. Not just a rinse-off, but completely and immaculately cleaning them. Sometimes in the dishwasher. I think the net environmental benefit of our recycling may be below zero.
I couldn't convince my mom to stop washing the recyclables. Fortunately, our municipal sanitation department recently published an informational video on proper recycling procedures, in which they explicitly tell people to stop wasting water on cleaning the trash.
I always clean ours, with the water left over after I have cleaned the dishes. As far as I can see it has zero environmental issues and means the bin doesn't smell.
In terms of something like paper, you're likely right. There's a weird popular perception that when you go to the grocery store and get 4 paper bags, somewhere a logger fells a beautiful 1000-year-old sequoia to grind into paper pulp, when the reality is that the same managed forest land is replanted over and over with fast-growing trees and harvested and replanted as soon as they're ready. The more demand for paper, the more tree farms there will be, and i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees. If the paper ends up in a landfill, that's fine. It's not toxic.
Or we could use a ton of energy and chemicals to recycle paper (and also to clean it since all consumer recycling in the US is "mixed stream" meaning someone's used dirty yogurt container and beer bottles are all over the paper), and produce much worse paper.
But all "recycling" is too valuable to helping people feel good about consumption, for us to be honest with ourselves about how pointless most of it is besides aluminum and glass, and maybe steel.
That’s not the panacea you make it out to be. Tree monocultures significantly impact the environment, wreck the soil, harm biodiversity, increase forest vulnerabilities…
> i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees
This does not have the effect on atmospheric CO2 that you implying, unless the resulting paper is deeply buried - not incinerated, or left to rot, or biodegraded in any way.
Most of the toothbrushes we've owned in our lives still exist. What is the cost of having them around still? I don't know, but I know it wasn't factored in at all when we bought them.
Really it depends where they end up. If you drop them on the street, that incurs a greater cost than landfill, which probably is less economic than incineration (plastic contains a lot of energy).
Honest question (no agenda): How does burning plastic interact with the environment in terms of producing pollution and/or CO2, I guess compared with putting it in a landfill?
I'm fine with stipulations like using some kind of (economically-viable) filter on the resulting smoke.
All that I "know" about it is only based on vibes so that's why I'm asking.
I do know PVC can produce dioxin if the combustion isn't exactly right. Definitely there are some pitfalls with incinerating plastic! They could in theory capture the CO2 but nobody seems to do that. Probably not economical. It's basically an alternative to burning fossil fuel, still not great for the environment but at least you're not digging it up and it's disposed of. Recycling works okay for some plastics e.g PET.
Plastic is made from fossil fuels. You are digging it up. It's not an alternative, it's just a longer way around.
Taking a bunch of waste plastic and burning it does not cause a proportional increase in oil/gas extraction. The partial derivative is going to be pretty low.
Huh? It's already extracted. Burning it causes a precisely proportional increase in the amount of fossil carbon that ends up in the atmosphere. It is exactly the same environmentally as burning gasoline, except even dirtier.
Better to bury it. Put it back in the ground, where it came from.
The price rarely captures all the costs.
If stealing from a factory and selling their products makes you more money than owning the factory and making the product, then doesn't it mean that stealing is the right thing?
The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one.
Collect enough, and you can melt them into solid blocks that could be used like this laptop stand. Recycling common plastic of the same type (PE, PP) is actually easily done with commonly available equipment, unlike paper.
Likely depends on system. In multi-stream system I think paper is likely economically net positive in recycling. It scales well enough to large plants to reasonably complete with pristine material. Also many use case like cardboard for shipping is suitable use cases.
Recycling a plastic bag is not necessarily better for the environment than burning it.
good point, and countries that do this on a massive (clean) scale count it (probably correctly) in their efficiency and non-fossil fuel stats.
We really under-report the cost ($$$ and energy) of the full recycling chain, both complicated parts like plastics that should probably be burned and capture/treat the results, and simple things like glass; other than reuse it should NOT be recycled.
I have concluded, as a general rule of thumb, that if something costs more to recycle than to produce naturally, it is probably more harmful to the environment to recycle it than to create it fresh and dispose of it properly.
There are certain exceptions to this -- nickel cadmium batteries come to mind -- but for things like this, the question isn't "is it more economic to produce it new than to recycle it?" so much as it's "is it more economic to recycle it than to dispose of it properly?"
I think 'dispose of it properly' is doing a lot work there. I understand that for something like plastic, properly disposing it would be to chemically render it down to it's constituents rather than just landfilling it. If the thought was to burn it, well then how are you properly disposing the released greenhouse gases?
On the other hand if a pound of plastic being burned offsets a pound of coal then that is probably better for the environment. We are nowhere near not burning anything so I'm largely OK with incinerators.
That might be true. I guess the point I was thinking of was more related to the cost of producing new vs recycling or disposing of. I think that in a lot of cases,the cost of producing new does not take into account the lifecycle of the product - it does not factor in the cost to retrieve it to be burnt, it does not factor in the cost to develop and implement technology like carbon capture. It seems that the industry that creates plastic does not pay for its proper disposal, which is why it is so cheap to make new plastic.
That probably means that recycling is not worth it, so the only responsible way is to reduce its usage as much as possible (reusing or replacing with better solutions)
> Sometimes it's a marketing stunt, but often recycling is more expensive. I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one.
Depends on the price of oil. Metal recycling is far more cost effective that extracting from ore. Glass, too, is very economical to recycle.
Plastic recycling was never about recycling, it was to convince people to use plastics.
Glass can be economical to re-use, but I thought recycling it uses nearly as much energy as producing it in the first place.
It prioritizes short-term cost efficiency over long-term sustainability
not really for paper though... We've largely solved efficient recycling of even complex mixed paper/plastic/coatings, a piece like this should be less expensive, and not shipped 1/2 way around the world to a market that has massive amounts of both new and old paper.
I didn't mean to imply that the price for this specific laptop stand is justified. I read the above comment as a small rant about how expensive recycled things are, and wanted to add that sometimes it is for a good reason. Not always, and like others have mentioned, the plastic bag example might not have been the best one.
I find this particular notion to be rather weird. I cannot see how it's a "waste" if something's fed to animals instead of humans!
It is a horrible waste to produce any strawberries from an environmental perspective compared to the least sensitive feed crops so feeding them to animals is more of a better than nothing while getting someone out of the market for the grades of strawberries that drive production is not. But any mediocre quality strawberry jam probably does that.
Despite the quotes, the person you’re replying to didn’t use the word “waste” nor have they claimed using that fruit to feed animals would be bad. In short, they didn’t make the argument you’re against.
However, in the interest of good faith discussion, I’ll offer a rebuttal to the argument you are making. The logic applies when (and this is very important) that food goes to farm animals which will be slaughtered of humans to eat.
“Waste” isn’t really the right word, more like “inefficient”, in the sense that the amount of food which takes for an animal to mature is orders of magnitude greater than what you take from it. In other words, you could feed significantly more people if they ate what you’re feeding the animal.
When you couple that with the environmental impact of raising animals as food, including deforestation and land use, which in turn affects us as well, it becomes a major issue.
Inefficiency is waste
Potato potáto, that’s not what matters. The whole point of the post was to engage in good faith and see past the exact wording to focus on the argument. Obsessing about the definition is counter productive and an exercise in bad faith and derailing the conversation. That is a waste.
Opportunity cost, mostly.
I often see "recycled" or similar as a signal for more expensive.
That's just because of this new wave of eco-virtue-signaling that's become popular in the past few years. Before that, recycled meant lower quality and cheaper.
See also: "vegan butter" or "plant-based butter" instead of "hydrogenated vegetable oil".
While I get your point, some new plants butters don’t contained hydrogenated oils. See my favorite brand, Flora:
it also seems like a very small savings. the thing sitting on top of it is full of lithium, cobalt, etc. so why should i care if it's sitting on a bit of plastic/aluminum/wood?
that said, a tutorial to turn the shipping box for your laptop (or a flat of diet coke) into a stand would be good. useful in a pinch
edit: keyboard box might be the best box to print the fold lines on. you need that for a minimally ergo laptop setup anyway
For 20 dollars I can buy an aluminium and stainless steel laptop stand that adjusts from a thin wedge up to holding my screen a nearly eye height.
It will outlast me, and folds into a smaller size that fits nicely in my laptop bag.
Laptops will probably go away, but it could be handed down for generations, and when it no longer can be used, the majority of the energy and resources used to make it can be recouped through recycling it’s intrinsically valuable metals.
This 20 dollar piece of paper will last until the first month in a humid environment.
This should be a tutorial on how to reuse discarded material into an improvised, impromptu laptop stand.
If I saw someone pull this out of a box and put their laptop on it, they would lose a great deal of credibility in my estimation. If I saw someone make this out of some waste paper in a coffee shop, I would be intrigued and compelled to seek an opportunity to see if that person was open to making new acquaintances and sharing ideas.
> This should have been a tutorial, not a product.
I love this. More tutorials, fewer products.
All the embellishments on it seem like they probably involved operating imprinting machines or printing ink onto the paper, too.
>Whatever good you do the planet by using something out of recycled paper (thumbs up on the idea) will surely be offset by all the logistics of the shipping.
The plastic laptop stand you by probably also had to be shipped halfway around the world, so this one is probably a wash.
Maybe a hybrid approach (like adding a tutorial) can be valid. Because not everyone has the time to make their own laptop stand
> This should have been a tutorial, not a product.
It doesn't seem too difficult to make something similar.
I mean, it's a good idea, I just wouldn't buy the one in Korea to get shipped over here. I don't get the cynicism, someone in Korea had this idea and made the product, probably intended for other people in Korea where the shipping isn't an issue?
> probably intended for other people in Korea
The seller is called “grape lab”, with a “g” as the logo, and “Sustainable Design Lab” as the tagline. Everything in English. How is that “intended for other people in Korea”?
It's origami, so making it in USA wouldn't fit our racist ideas about what makes a folded-paper design valuable.
USA folded paper is cheap cardboard. Asian folded paper is origami.
Last time I checked 1 usd = 1 eur
A couple of points.
It is not aesthetically pleasing at all, which is important to me, for whatever neurological reason. Also, I consider a laptop stand as just a device to raise the screen to a better ergonomic level on the understanding that an external keyboard and mouse will be used to operate the device.
Otherwise, in a laptop stand, ergonomic keyboard use requirements pull the incline towards level, and ergonomic monitor height requirements pull the incline upwards, so there is no healthy angle for a laptop stand.
As already mentioned by andrei_says_, typing fingers should be below the wrist (as correct piano playing has proved for centuries).
Stands like this have to be paired with an external keyboard.
Raising the monitor so that the top is as close to eye level as possible (while maintaining a straight back) is better orthopedicly.
It's impossible to achieve this and a good keyboard posture, so you must introduce an external keyboard.
Without an external keyboard, there is no value in using a stand, you might as well just keep the laptop in a neutral position.
I use my glasses case to raise the back of the computer.
It adds a gap between table and computer. The rubber nobben on the underside of the laptop prevent the glasses case from slipping.
This raises the notebook to a nice angle and the keyboard is still usable for me.
Shouldn’t the monitor be centered at eye level? Or is it worse to look a little bit up than down?
I have had office desks professional adjusted by an occupational safety orthopedic person and that has always been the advice I was told.
Another piece of advice was that on a standing desk your forearms should not be parallel to the ground but slightly below your elbow.
You can't get ergonomics with a (modern) laptop keyboard. Reaching over the touchpad is at best, a compromise. Unfortunately keyboard at the edge + sidemounted trackball is long dead, and keyboard at the edge + pointing stick didn't last a lot longer.
Last I used a laptop at a desk on the regular, state of the art laptop stands were reams of printer paper. Worst case, you need to actually use the paper in the printer and you're out a stand until you restock.
I often observe people at my office using the laptop keyboard and monitor exclusively, while sitting at their desks, even though we are all given external monitors, keyboards and mice.
I guess they are young and their bodies don't hurt yet.
I've been doing that for the last 18 years and I started when I was older than most people here. I never liked the mandatory external monitor and keyboard at the company I was working for before becoming self employed: I preferred to look down to a screen, not up or level.
That does not look in any way equivalent to the stand in the article.
Huh, it looks very similar. Smaller in size, it fits a phone but otherwise very similar in my opinion.
A notebook would need a much larger and thicker sheet I guess.
On top of all of the other criticisms, this isn’t functionally what I want. I still would end up looking down to see the laptop.
I guess it’s better for people who only work on laptops and don’t want to have separate keyboards and pointing devices.
I got a roost when they launched, still have it, practical and durable, I imagine I'll always have it.
The problem with this paper one is that the paper will wear within a couple of years, and if you spill your coffee on it or anything like that or put it down on a coffee-ring stain, it's straight in the bin.
I fail to see the value in something made from recyclable that is essentially disposable rather than a roost which can be made from recycled plastic and last forever.
The roost also only cost about double to triple this to buy.
EDIT: I see the roost is quite a bit more expensive now, but longevity and ergonomics wise I'd say still well worth it.
Why is it so expensive? It looks and functions exactly like a dozen other similar stands on aliexpress.
I’m not going to buy a knock off good from Aliexpress for a product that I have used everyday for the past two years across over two dozen cities.
The Nexstand is the most popular alternative, it's around 30 dollars.
Honestly, I don't know, I bought it a decade ago when it launched.
It was a fair bit cheaper, I want to say more like $60, I suppose "inflation" is the reason.
EDIT: 2016 I bought my roost stand, it's still good as new.
A single (very large) sheet of (unusually thick) paper.
made from many sheets of recycled paper! agree that the description is a stretch.
It blows my mind that stands like this one as well as keyboards are designed with an incline requiring constant tension in the wrists.
The natural position of the fingers when typing is below the wrist not above it.
They are meant to be used with an external keyboard and mouse, you don't need a stand to use a laptop normally.
Except in the 5th photo they show someone using the laptop's touchpad while on the stand.
This seems very uncomfortable to me as resting your hands on the pointed edges of the folded paper seems like an awful user experience.
Technically, yes, but a large number of people are working on tables that are already too high, so positive tilt is required to keep their wrists in line with their forearms.
A laptop stand that elevates the laptop, placed on a table that is already too high, requires even more positive tilt.
And don't forget the large number of people who don't know how to touch-type and need clear visibility of all the keycaps.
Yeah it's weird, I have a static wooden one similar to this. Looked good but the incline was so sharp that it was just awkward to use.
Not sure what the thought process is behind the design of most of these things.
I don't see much point to this, it barely props up your laptop at all. You're still going to get tech neck. I recently got a nexstand, external keyboard, and mouse and it has been amazing.
Nexstand is the way, I got one and never looked back. I use a touchpad instead of a mouse though.
Or buy the OG, the Roost.
It's pricier but lighter and more compact.
Looks like NEX stand made a new version, K1 Carbon Fiber, which is lighter than og roost.
However, more expensive than it so depends if shredding those grams is worth it or not
Never heard of nexstand but it looks suboptimal for keeping the small laptop screen as close as possible to your eyes
My preferred design is like https://amzn.eu/d/0KB8nGM (2x U shapes of metal), which lets you have the keyboard underneath the laptop , so the laptop is as close to the edge of the desk as if you weren’t using an external keyboard
If you need the laptop screen to be that close, maybe you need glasses.
I have a Roost stand and with my keyboard in front of it, the distance is mostly right (13” screen and it’s more comfortable if I scale fonts up by 20% or so). It’s actually closer to my eyes than my desktop setup (24” screen mounted on monitor arm)
You don't want a small laptop screen as close as possible to your eyes. That's asking for eyestrain and problems in the long-term.
If you're having trouble seeing clearly, you should use glasses and/or increase the system-wide font size (or decrease the "resolution").
Thanks, I keep all monitors (laptop or not) at arms length for work/reading, but for gaming or other immersive activities a 13in screen needs to be closer to match the experience of a full size monitor
Those are kind of ugly, at least for MacBooks.
Rain Design's mStand is my favorite, blends in perfectly.
They are, but they're portable. They collapse and you throw it in your bag.
The mStand is beautiful, but it's not portable.
I love my Rain mStand. It's made of cast aluminum, looks great, works great, and I've had it for....15 years?
At some point I'm sure I could easily recycle it.
Very nice, just not very portable, but definitely recyclable.
They have the foldable mBar Pro now.
Does anyone remember when standing desks started taking off…maybe 2016ish and there was that company making cardboard props to convert your desk into a standing desk. Amazing how well those worked for being cardboard.
Terrible for your wrists though
That's why I rarely use my laptop's keyboard. Always use an external keyboard, and also an external monitor. That way you can look forward and not hurt your neck while also not having to hold your arms in a very high and uncomfortable position. Oh and don't rest your wrists while typing. Also learn to type correctly, and/or use sticky keys (the accessibility feature). Right, then you don't need this stand, though since traveling with a monitor is not practical, an stand that raises the laptop's display is a great thing, so... sold!
yes, it looks very uncomfortable.
They do have a spiky edition tho, too, so maybe that's something
Also terrible for the environment.
The energy cost of buying this online, the carbon cost behind the $22 + shipping, the actual carbon cost of shipping this crap.
We are truly living in the most idiotic timeline.
What's the carbon cost of shipping a plastic stand?
Fwiw I do think that non-consumtion is a more 'real' protest than buying recycled but if you _have_ to get something
> but if you _have_ to get something
You don’t have to get it shipped, most of the time. Whenever you next go to town, go into any hardware shop and buy whatever they have.
Heck, hop on freecycle and you’re bound to see someone giving away one of these that you can pick up for free, in person.
Or buy one second hand.
Or use a large book.
Or, or, or…
Hey yeah I agree, I just thought OP was being over the top with the moralizing. Like, OK its a bit virtue signal-y but so is complaining about it. And its still better than plastic.
I'm not sure that being shipped is much worse than buying from a store that also gets it shipped and wrapped in as much plastic. And if its a town over, you're driving there which is CO2 as well.
Using nothing at all is better for sure and I said as much. Second hand stuff rules.
All in all though, this sort of individual choice is peanuts compared to taking a single plane ride which is itself peanuts compared to what corporations get away with. So imo. having any sort of strong opinion on this is silly.
Fair, I agree with most of what you wrote.
However, advertising yourself as sustainable (like this store does) is also a marketing move which caters to a specific type of audience. If your products aren’t actually sustainable, it is valid criticism to point that out.
Imagine having two companies selling candy. One says their sweets not only taste good but are good for you, while the other doesn’t make any kind of health claim. Both are bad, but one of them is outright tricking you, which feels worse.
Note I’m not claiming this is what this seller is doing. Maybe they think what they’re doing is sustainable when it’s not. But that’s all the more reason to point it out so they can work of something better.
I'm with you, its corny, and meant to sell product
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I grew in poverty. This looks to me crazy expensive. Sustainability comes second. These things are probably made overseas, shipped in a container and distributed in a small package. Then used few weeks, paper will wear out and then thrown away. But that’s how quick fashion industry works anyway.
Edit: Asus laptop had foldable stand included in the paper packaging.
What would a less idiotic timeline look like?
Reuse the cardboard box your laptop came in.
Stick a book under your laptop.
What's the carbon cost behind buying and shipping the book, or cutting down the tree to make the book?
Use whatever's lying around. Some more ideas:
- A shoebox
- An old binder
- A food container
- Some coasters
- Egg carton
- Jenga blocks
- Cereal box
- Legos
- Picture frame
- Tennis ball (cut it in half)
- Door stoppers
- Cake pan
- A screwdriver box
- A few junk mailer magazines
- Crumple up a couple newspaper pages
Or better yet, order one of these and make 3 more with the shipping box it came in. That'll help once it wears out, or you accidentally sit on it.
Not sure how many cereal boxes can hold a laptop... unless you're stacking them flattened, and then you need to eat a lot of cereal, but you can adjust height very precisely. :)
A cereal box is likely thicker than the material used in the product this article talks about. It wouldn't take very many folds to prop up a notebook.
They didn't say to buy a book just for this.
Assuming you don't have a book in your possession?
I'm old enough to have owned a lot of paper books at one point, but as a Kindle owner and person who moves every few years, I no longer own any physical books. For fiction and non-fiction prose, I find an e-reader to be strictly superior to the paper version. I've even embraced e-cookbooks. The UX is markedly inferior while cooking, but the convenience of not having to move boxes and boxes of paper around with me is worth it.
this is actually more common place than you might expect. just like wearing tube socks vs ankle socks has become some sort of age delineation, owning books is as well.
This makes me so sad.
I have no books that have any value other than I already own them. After moving across the country a couple of times with them plus all of the other various moves, I have thought about getting rid of them numerous times. The only reason I have not is just sheer laziness on taking them some place. My most recent move left them in boxes and just stored.
What an amazing idea. Carry 2kg book of necessary size instead of foldable cardboard. Truly genius.
Am vaguely reminded of a fancy apple-style aluminum stand I saw in an ad recently. That one is probably a lot more expensive.
This $6 “fancy” cardboard box from Ikea has been doing the same job for me quite well. Can also discretely hide a power strip and hub inside, keeps dust off too. Just cut a small hole in the back.
It's hard to justify $30+ for a sheet of paper, especially considering the fact that condensation from a nearby water bottle will kill this product.
Amplified by my heavily sweating body in full coding focus mode...
It's a wonderful design, but like many recyclable products, the price isn't low enough to convince the average consumer.
Like someone else said, release the instructions.
If you want to make an environmental impact, you have to make something people are willing to buy. That's why Tesla became so successful, no one cared 10 years ago when it was a status symbol. Once it got to like $40k it sold like crack.
I remember the times when my monitor stand was "made" out of yet-to-be-recycled paper books - a few thick java references. Later, when I bought a new monitor I donated them to a library. I hope they got recycled, or at least, garbage-collected. Although I can't imagine anyone finding old java books in the garbage and find them useful for anything.
I used to dumpster dive for old compsci books at the end of semesters. It's how I learned java, c, perl, vim, and SQL.
>I used to dumpster dive for old compsci books at the end of semesters. It's how I learned java, c, perl, vim, and SQL.
I'd always grab old books from school and work, but honestly they are horrible to learn from because things like java and c# have changed so much, you end up teaching yourself outdated stuff and then needing to relearn all of the new ways to do stuff. You're probably safe learning C from an older book though, as long as it's ansi c and not the original k&r book.
There are some languages with books that remain relevant over decades, notably books for any Lisp - Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, also:
- C (post-ANSI) - fundamentals largely unchanged since 1989
- SQL and Erlang - basic concepts stable since 1980s
- Prolog and Forth - core concepts stable since 1970s
Although modern books might cover some improved practices or new tooling, older texts on core concepts remain valuable.
This looks like the kind of thing you get given as a cheap branded gift in a conference and it breaks before the conference is over. As soon as you put enough downward force to damage one of the folds or it gets damp, you're heading directly to rip-city.
Selling a piece of cardboard for $22 is an amazing achievement, recycled or not. It's beyond my comprehension. The world is at the same time much too poor and much too rich. I'm already sensing the throwing away of perfectly good (and forever durable) plastic and metal laptop stands, to be replaced by this glorious virtue signal.
AAaand let the down-voting of my opinion begin....
Anybody has an idea on how the industrial process for this kind of origami works? I've seen videos online and it requires a lot of pinching and folding. I'm very curious to know how a machine could do that.
I like the minimalist design. But the zigzag shape at the bottom seems a bit inconvenient for the wrist area.
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Should be pretty easy to reverse-engineer the crease pattern so people can make this themselves (perhaps adjusting it to more common sizes of paper).
this seems kind of absurd... I have a laptop stand. it collapses into my hand. its made from steel. it cost me $15. it will last much longer than this.
22$ for recycled paper? I bet an origami can be designed to do just the same, then made using free paper lying around.
This is art. Love it.
This is failed design, your wrists will hate you after using this.
Not just design. This whole product is a failure. It does not make sense from any angle. In fact I don’t understand how the website is still up and running.
All of the same vibes I got when I found out some outfit managed to take a cock ring with accelerometers and an associated phone app to production.
It is sort of art. It looks fairly pretty I think, in a sort of everyday manner. But it also looks a little impractical, the part that might touch your wrists is very spiky. Also thought keyboards should be, if anything, tilted in the opposite direction.
It seems like an ok system if you don’t have to interact with your keyboard. But if you want to do away with the need to interact with the keyboard, a much more aggressive tilt could be used, right? This only gets you a couple inches. Ideally the top of the screen is around the top of your head, right? Of course this is for on-the-go use, so we don’t expect ideal.
Overall, it is art; I really do think it looks nice, but it is pretty impractical.
Art of design.
made from a single sheet of recycled paper
Do they mean a single sheet of seriously thick card stock? Sheets of paper do not weigh 45 grams.
It's origami, yes ? Surely someone here at HN can find a folding pattern and an appropriate size & weight of paper.
doesnt look comfy to type on the laptop with that edge at the bottom. My wrists wouldn't like it.
also 22 bucks for a few grams of cardboard? seems excessive. but hey at least it'll break fast, cant handle moisture, and so on.
You would normally use a laptop stand with an external keyboard and mouse, the idea is to raise the height of the monitor to save your neck.
Does it wiggle when you type on it?
This would be better if it was the origami instructions to make it.
Had a very different image in mind of what a sheet of paper looked like.
What about those jaring things touching the palm, don’t look comfortable
I'd only be interested if I can also use it as a Japanese fan.
This is somehow even worse than paper straws.
Oh, I didn't expect that much skepticism. I love the idea and I love companies that are trying to create beautiful and sustainable things. They even try to give people a place that usually don't fit in.
Yes, you can fold one yourself (will it be stable enough though?). Yes, I wouldn't use it for a laptop either. But for a tablet it could work really nice.
Also shipping it around the world is a bit silly, like with most things. Too many people will order on Amazon or buy fruits from the other side of the world without a second thought. Get off your high horse.
Sustaining what?
The profits of those companies making these products.
Wow, such a bad vibe here!
It's foldable. It's light. It's made of recycled material. It's cheap enough.
Seems pretty smart to me.
It does not appeal to me, but each passing year there are fewer and fewer new consumer products that do appeal to me. Actually, I think this product captures the spirit of the times: a $20 piece of paper that presumably falls apart after a year – a 'laptop stand as a service'
It's literally ten times the cost of a plastic stand on Temu ($34 vs $3.35).
Airflow?
Pretty good tool for creating graphs of work to be done and schedule them, but that’s not important now.
It’s surely not what they meant!
Probably not, but don't call me Shirley. :)
I'm sorry you're getting downvoted for your decent Airplane! joke.
What's the benefit of this, compared to using nothing; i.e. laying the laptop flat on the table?
It looks like you're only straining your wrists against the increased keyboard angle.
Where is the tutorial for making this piece of shit, rather than shipping it halfway around the world on an exhaust-spewing, whale-killing freighter? Oh, it's recycled, pardon me.
So they're selling 22$ for a sheet of paper?
It fits perfectly with the $100 piece of aluminium/glass and plastic it's made for. Prices don't reflect the material value of an item
The paper is $.01, it’s the folding you’re paying for.
No you are paying for the story that you’ll be able to smugly tell your colleagues of how much you care about the environment that you’ve purchased a recycled laptop stand, ignoring the fact that this was likely air shipped from Korea and then delivered by multiple trucks to you.
If you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, does it make more or less sense, in terms of environmental impact, to buy the plastic stand over this one?
> ignoring the fact that this was likely air shipped from Korea and then delivered by multiple trucks to you.
This presupposes the economies of scale. One plane is not leaving South Korea laden with just one laptop stand and nothing else, and one delivery truck is not leaving the Fedex or UPS depot almost entirely empty save for one laptop stand destined for the consumer's house.
> One plane is not leaving South Korea laden with just one laptop stand and nothing else, and one delivery truck is not leaving the Fedex or UPS depot almost entirely empty save for one laptop stand destined for the consumer's house.
Who do you imagine thought of it this way, and how does an objection to shipping trash require you to think this way?
What normal people imagine is that a package containing this displaces a package containing something else, and that an collective shipping container of these is a shipping container that wouldn't have been shipped otherwise.
What you seem to be theorizing is that if these weren't being shipped, some other product would have been invented to take up the volume that it uses, or all other products would expand in order to fill the space. That has a burden of proof that the normal people explanation doesn't require.
> Who do you imagine thought of it this way, and how does an objection to shipping trash require you to think this way?
The argument being presented by the person I replied to said verbatim: "ignoring the fact that this was likely air shipped from Korea and then delivered by multiple trucks to you."
> What you seem to be theorizing is that if these weren't being shipped, some other product would have been invented to take up the volume that it uses, or all other products would expand in order to fill the space.
We don't need to theorize or invent, the plastic products already exist. Go to Amazon and search for "laptop stand" and you'll find a glut of them. So I ask again, if you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, is it better, in terms of environmental impact, to buy one of the hundreds of plastic stands shipped from South Korea, or this recycled stand shipped from South Korea?
Plastic which will last 10 times longer and can be reused.
> If you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, does it make more or less sense, in terms of environmental impact, to buy the plastic stand over this one?
I mean, if you expect the cardboard one not to last very long, then yes. Yes it does "make more or less sense".
If I expected that, then I wouldn't order one in the first place; much the same as I wouldn't order cheap plastic junk from Amazon with the expectation that it's just going to break or I'm not even going to get what was pictured in the listing. So at the very least we need to have faith that both are decent quality if we want to have a debate over it.
I think they can just fax it, which saves a lot of the environmental waste you’re talking about.
The stand is crap as the wrists are placed on a serrated looking rim of a stand. As soon as anyone puts their hands on it wrong way it is a goner. And the price is in line with Versace.
Fire hazard
I'm hoping you're wrong. I just made a simplified version, which is just the concertina-ed paper without the parallel reverse folds to angle the keyboard up. Its made from a 96gsm a3 sheet.
My reasoning for thinking it's safe is that 451F/230C would probably damage/burn/melt the cheap plastic table it normally sits on.
Why the heck is there a beer in the background of pics? Lol
If whoever did this cared about recycling they would just tell people how to do this.
If the people who bought this cared about recycling rather than having a virtue signaling conversation starter they wouldn’t have bought it.
This is insane, the carbon value of $22 is high enough without the garbage of shipping this crap all over the country and possibly the world.
Whoever did this doesn’t even clean their computer, it’s disgusting!
Looks like a Miura fold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miura_fold. When going to theme parks and the like, I love folding the physical maps like this. It's nice that the maps stay rigid when fully open, and the single-motion for opening and closing is glorious.
Miura-ori fold covered very nicely in this video at timestamp 34:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p02DtmyQhU
That whole video is really neat, love the guy teaching!
I think I spent too much time watching the video of it folding and unfolding.
Same :)
I hope my brain stows your comment safely away until the next opportunity.
I'm reminded of similarly useless "sustainable cardboard furniture" that came out about a decade ago.
On the positive side, kudos to whomever in marketing/pr at the design firm got this useless product so much press.
This is just the sort of "win" that a design consulting shop loves to have for actual briefs that lead to real moving-the-needle revenue. One example would be SmartDesign's modular slip-on "S-Grips" that led to the iconic vegetable peeler that then bled into the "design language" of every product at OXO.
Didn't know about the SmartDesign/OXO vegetable peeler, very interesting rabbit hole to go down.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90239156/the-untold-story-of-the...
Indeed, it's an interesting rabbit hole!
I liked the part where they were looking for someone to manufacture the handles, and the Japanese machinist said "If he could make it, I can make it!".
Indeed, having gone down the rabbit hole of machining (both to see if it would be a viable hobby and if it could even be a career), this was the attitude of the shop teacher: "if you can think it, you can probably make it". I am far more surprised that neither the American nor the Taiwanese manufacturers said this. Then again, perhaps it was because management didn't talk to the guys who made things!
(Now that I think of it, had they done that, perhaps they would have gotten the answer "We can do it, but the fins will wear down the tool too fast, at least until we can figure out a better material for the tools!" instead of "Nope, we can't do that!")
This is a bit of a random place to mention it, but while I very much like OXO goods, IKEA makes the best (in my opinion) potato peeler for $5 - cheaper than anything OXO makes: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-potato-peel...
Why are they peeling those beautiful golden potatoes? Skin is the best part.
Brilliant write up. I remember using the old ones, and only last year found the oxo model. truly amazing. Many important lessons in product design in that article; with the most important in the last sentence - it has to work!
I think you meant to respond to your grandparent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42686370, not your parent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42686583.
I've tried swivelling peelers a few times and every time I return to my forty year old Lancashire peeler with its blade held on the plastic handle with tightly wrapped cotton string. A bit like this one: https://www.pattersons.co.uk/lancashire-peeler.html
0.96 GBP including VAT.
I had to replace the string this year though.
that's something i never understood: why do they sell peelers with a movable part? like we are meant to peel in curves and expect the knife to follow the curve beautifully? the fixed ones are easier to use and easier to clean!
The hinge allows you to peel in both directions (i.e. forwards and backwards across your potato/carrot/etc. without lifting the peeler.) It also means it can track a rough surface more easily. I haven't had any issues with the hinge, and I use a dishwasher for cleaning - what issues have you run into?
i'm almost never using a movable one but:
- on the practicity: i can do exactly what i want with a fixed one, without risk for the blade to slip
- small dust and bits tend to gather at the junctions and sit there
Which also makes it usable for left-handers.
The movable blade makes peeling oddly shaped veggies or fruits so much smoother
I find the movable ones cut a thinner peel, probably the blade is held at a more optimal angle if it can find its own position, or maybe my particular movable one is just better-made than my fixed one.
For produce with a tougher skin than innards, the blade will deflect off the inside of the skin and steer itself along that interface.
Fair enough, I don't usually encounter that. I'd probably use a regular knife in that case.
The ikea one mentions peeling asparagus. Is that a thing?
Yes, sometimes, especially on larger spears. The skin can get tough and/or stringy and some folks really don't like it.
Yes, not the wild asparagus but the ones you can shop have thick hard stalks at the base!
Cardboard furniture brought to mind Frank Gehry:
https://www.vitra.com/en-us/product/wiggle?srsltid=AfmBOooT-...
Expressing patronage of sustainability is emotionally equivalent to expressing patronage of artistry. Functionally a $10 chair from Goodwill will support a person equally well (and also be an expression of patronage for a person with options).
> I'm reminded of similarly useless "sustainable cardboard furniture" that came out about a decade ago.
Apparently no one learned their lesson, because the cardboard olympic village beds were also (allegedly) pretty terrible.
Some say Teenage Engineering products are mostly PR to promote their design studio (which is contracted by e.g. Ikea). Because indeed, value for money is not there. Or the product itself is preposterous (like their voice recorder).
MUJI used to have lots of that (20-25yrs ago). Shelves made from cardboard tubes, etc... You could tell, one bump and it would be destroyed. I think they got rid of most of them.
Only way to get cardboard to work in furniture and such is to laminate all sides... And even then it is only acceptable. Albeit very light.
I had a log seat style cardboard furniture for years, it was great when I needed something light but capable to hold stuff.
indeed useless, you can use arbitrary anything - a book, a notebook, the earpods, the wallet -> all work. besides the thing blowing wind does not make much real difference it seems.
I liked the stacked cardboard computer cases. Remember those?
60 or 70 years ago.
LoL.
Not only useless but also uncomfortable. My wrists get itchy when looking at those zigzag bevels...
https://roominabox.de/
The Bett 2.0 was one of the most comfortable things I’ve ever slept on. The Grid Bed was useless and fell apart.
Have one for several years. The main problem is cleaning it. Good luck cleaning the dust and spider webs from hundreds of individual holes. But otherwise, it's extremely sturdy and stable.
The article is seemingly outdated. The cheapest one I could find in the store was 29 USD. In Euros, it’s 36.37. And of course, you still have to pay for shipping. From Korea.
This seems quite absurd. Whatever good you do the planet by using something out of recycled paper (thumbs up on the idea) will surely be offset by all the logistics of the shipping.
This should have been a tutorial, not a product.
I often see "recycled" or similar as a signal for more expensive.
My favorite was when I saw a jam that touted "upcycled" strawberries. When I looked into it, it basically meant that it was made from beat up ugly strawberries that would have been used for animal feed. Surely there would be cost savings in using reject fruit, right? No, an 8oz jar retails for over $8 compared to about half that to an organic no sugar added alternative (I think its cheaper since I last looked though)
They even get certified that they use the most undesirable fruit that they can find!
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-are-upcycled-strawb...
>When I looked into it, it basically meant that it was made from beat up ugly strawberries
That's true for basically all processed food that contains fruit or vegetables, for obvious economic reasons. The stuff that looks good goes to the supermarkets who care very much about shelf appeal, the rest goes to the processors who absolutely don't.
Stuff like Pringles are made from the nastiest rotting potatoes in the planet. It's been 20 years since the last time I set foot in a potato plant, I can still smell it.
Good. That means they're reducing food waste.
A big problem with the food market is that people shop with their eyes, which leads to stupid amount of waste on fruit&vegetables section, as people prefer to go to another store than to buy veggies that look anything less than perfect.
In a lot of cases, that's how it works in nature too though. Visual appeal on the tree/bush is a big part of what attracts an animal to a fruit. It's just how we're built.
Right, but animals aren't as picky as humans - they'll eat anything that isn't rotten (and then some animals actually prefer rotten stuff). Meanwhile people will avoid buying veggies that look off even if there's no risk to health or taste involved.
I suppose this is because most animals in the wild are always couple hours away from starvation and just can't afford being picky eaters.
I think we've had the luxury of training ourselves to only identify the best looking produce as safe/tasty. I doubt it's ingrained in our nature, which is to say, if you're raised in a situation where you can't be as selective, I suspect you'll see a lot more produce as perfectly fine.
We definitely don't (generally) turn our noses up at various forms of rotten milk or the liquids of fruits rotten enough to be alcoholic.
it isn't as if the grocer gives us a discount for the "worse looking" produce. so why would anyone prefer it?
Yeah elks love to get drunk on rotten apples. Humans prefer rotten grapes.
Some humans prefer rotten apples.
I find dangerous red berries and colored frogs very attractive.
Oddly enough it now means that canned tomatoes are better than fresh.
Part of that is you can can a tomato right when it is most ripe and ready to be eaten, whereas if you're shipping it to a store, you ship it unripe and hope it ripens somewhat on the way.
Indeed, and they also grow different varieties. The ones destined for the store are bred for shipment and long term storage -- the so called "cardboard tomato."
Exactly, which is why I found it so entertaining. The idea that the Smuckers CEO is paying extra for beautiful fruit right before it get pulverized into jam is laughable. It's the market and price system taking care of the problem and opportunistic brands making up a problem that doesn't exist and charging users a premium to solve the non-existent problem
Sometimes it's a marketing stunt, but often recycling is more expensive. I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one. The unfortunate reality of our financial system is that it often rewards people for doing the wrong thing.
If recycling is more expensive, isn't recycling the wrong thing?
The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
Recycling is more expensive, it likely means that there are associated costs (e.g. transportation, sorting, cleaning, processing, etc) that make it less economical than just throwing it in a landfill. And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources
> The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
It doesn't capture all of the costs. Key term here is "externalities", which are things that should be priced into a transaction, but currently aren't. Like the environmental impact of manufacturing process.
If all major externalities were priced in, and recycling would still be more expensive, then we could confidently say that it's the wrong thing to do.
Your way of thinking definitely isn't entirely incorrect, and I think a lot of times people forget that prices, while they can certainly have an arbitrary component, are largely driven by market forces, which at the very least will tell you something about the supply and demand of a product. However, I disagree with this:
> And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources
I think this doesn't often hold true, yes, an efficient market begets economically efficient resource allocation, but there's more to environmentalism than efficient resource allocation. Your example is good, it's certainly more economically efficient to use less petroleum when transporting goods, and that efficiency can be reflected in final costs. But let's look at another example:
Say you're buying lumber to build a house. There's a local lumber farm that sustainably grows and cuts down trees. Since its close, transportation costs (and associated emissions) are low - largely coming from amortized land costs and labor. However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.
>However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.
How does this apply to recycling though? Landfills in developed countries have little, if any externalities, because they're engineered to contain waste.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/9/3/the-hidden-engin...
Largely I agree - landfills are not nearly as bad as people assume based on aesthetics and history. In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration. I just disagree with the logic of "If recycling is more expensive, isn't recycling the wrong thing". There's many situations where prices do not correlate with environmental impact. In the case of recycling, I haven't done the research to be certain either way. I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.
> I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.
That's the same thing I've seen demonstrated. It's really too bad that the plastics industry seized on the opportunity to greenwash wasteful amounts of plastic packaging by giving people a recycling bin that claims to do something useful with that discarded plastic, when in reality it's rare for post-consumer plastic to make any rational sense (other than those things like we're discussing, where people in practice waste even more resources in the recycling process just to feel good that the plastic material itself was technically not 'wasted').
>In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration.
Only if it doesn't offgas. Or leech.
They are engineered to contain solid waste, but often pollute the air and water, because the externality is cheaper than containing that waste.
“Costs” often ignore externalities like environmental damage and inequality. Landfilling or dumping plastic may be cheaper now, but it shifts the true cost — centuries of pollution —onto vulnerable communities today. There is a reason the clothing dumps are in Ghana and Chile, rather than wealthier nations like the US or Germany.
If the price to companies profiting from plastics included exteralities I could possibly agree with you but as it stands these costs are normally paid by disadvantaged individuals or marginalized ecosystems.
The reason the clothing dumps exist is greenwashing. If we weren't pretending that reusing clothing is meaningful to the environment, we'd just burn the clothing locally.
You'd think that cotton could be upcycled - the Soviet Union notably upcycled cotton, by turning it into the duraplast (made of compressed heated old cotton and plastic resin) that made up the body panels of their Trabant cars.
Of course, the Soviet Union doing something doesn't automatically mean it's economical or sensible, but at least in premise it should be useful for something.
Why don't the greenwashers greenwash burning clothes locally?
I can't stop my wife from cleaning everything we put in recycling. Not just a rinse-off, but completely and immaculately cleaning them. Sometimes in the dishwasher. I think the net environmental benefit of our recycling may be below zero.
I couldn't convince my mom to stop washing the recyclables. Fortunately, our municipal sanitation department recently published an informational video on proper recycling procedures, in which they explicitly tell people to stop wasting water on cleaning the trash.
I always clean ours, with the water left over after I have cleaned the dishes. As far as I can see it has zero environmental issues and means the bin doesn't smell.
In terms of something like paper, you're likely right. There's a weird popular perception that when you go to the grocery store and get 4 paper bags, somewhere a logger fells a beautiful 1000-year-old sequoia to grind into paper pulp, when the reality is that the same managed forest land is replanted over and over with fast-growing trees and harvested and replanted as soon as they're ready. The more demand for paper, the more tree farms there will be, and i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees. If the paper ends up in a landfill, that's fine. It's not toxic.
Or we could use a ton of energy and chemicals to recycle paper (and also to clean it since all consumer recycling in the US is "mixed stream" meaning someone's used dirty yogurt container and beer bottles are all over the paper), and produce much worse paper.
But all "recycling" is too valuable to helping people feel good about consumption, for us to be honest with ourselves about how pointless most of it is besides aluminum and glass, and maybe steel.
That’s not the panacea you make it out to be. Tree monocultures significantly impact the environment, wreck the soil, harm biodiversity, increase forest vulnerabilities…
> i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees
This does not have the effect on atmospheric CO2 that you implying, unless the resulting paper is deeply buried - not incinerated, or left to rot, or biodegraded in any way.
Most of the toothbrushes we've owned in our lives still exist. What is the cost of having them around still? I don't know, but I know it wasn't factored in at all when we bought them.
Really it depends where they end up. If you drop them on the street, that incurs a greater cost than landfill, which probably is less economic than incineration (plastic contains a lot of energy).
Honest question (no agenda): How does burning plastic interact with the environment in terms of producing pollution and/or CO2, I guess compared with putting it in a landfill?
I'm fine with stipulations like using some kind of (economically-viable) filter on the resulting smoke.
All that I "know" about it is only based on vibes so that's why I'm asking.
I do know PVC can produce dioxin if the combustion isn't exactly right. Definitely there are some pitfalls with incinerating plastic! They could in theory capture the CO2 but nobody seems to do that. Probably not economical. It's basically an alternative to burning fossil fuel, still not great for the environment but at least you're not digging it up and it's disposed of. Recycling works okay for some plastics e.g PET.
Plastic is made from fossil fuels. You are digging it up. It's not an alternative, it's just a longer way around.
Taking a bunch of waste plastic and burning it does not cause a proportional increase in oil/gas extraction. The partial derivative is going to be pretty low.
Huh? It's already extracted. Burning it causes a precisely proportional increase in the amount of fossil carbon that ends up in the atmosphere. It is exactly the same environmentally as burning gasoline, except even dirtier.
Better to bury it. Put it back in the ground, where it came from.
The price rarely captures all the costs.
If stealing from a factory and selling their products makes you more money than owning the factory and making the product, then doesn't it mean that stealing is the right thing?
The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one.
Collect enough, and you can melt them into solid blocks that could be used like this laptop stand. Recycling common plastic of the same type (PE, PP) is actually easily done with commonly available equipment, unlike paper.
Likely depends on system. In multi-stream system I think paper is likely economically net positive in recycling. It scales well enough to large plants to reasonably complete with pristine material. Also many use case like cardboard for shipping is suitable use cases.
Recycling a plastic bag is not necessarily better for the environment than burning it.
good point, and countries that do this on a massive (clean) scale count it (probably correctly) in their efficiency and non-fossil fuel stats. We really under-report the cost ($$$ and energy) of the full recycling chain, both complicated parts like plastics that should probably be burned and capture/treat the results, and simple things like glass; other than reuse it should NOT be recycled.
I have concluded, as a general rule of thumb, that if something costs more to recycle than to produce naturally, it is probably more harmful to the environment to recycle it than to create it fresh and dispose of it properly.
There are certain exceptions to this -- nickel cadmium batteries come to mind -- but for things like this, the question isn't "is it more economic to produce it new than to recycle it?" so much as it's "is it more economic to recycle it than to dispose of it properly?"
I think 'dispose of it properly' is doing a lot work there. I understand that for something like plastic, properly disposing it would be to chemically render it down to it's constituents rather than just landfilling it. If the thought was to burn it, well then how are you properly disposing the released greenhouse gases?
On the other hand if a pound of plastic being burned offsets a pound of coal then that is probably better for the environment. We are nowhere near not burning anything so I'm largely OK with incinerators.
That might be true. I guess the point I was thinking of was more related to the cost of producing new vs recycling or disposing of. I think that in a lot of cases,the cost of producing new does not take into account the lifecycle of the product - it does not factor in the cost to retrieve it to be burnt, it does not factor in the cost to develop and implement technology like carbon capture. It seems that the industry that creates plastic does not pay for its proper disposal, which is why it is so cheap to make new plastic.
That probably means that recycling is not worth it, so the only responsible way is to reduce its usage as much as possible (reusing or replacing with better solutions)
> Sometimes it's a marketing stunt, but often recycling is more expensive. I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one.
Depends on the price of oil. Metal recycling is far more cost effective that extracting from ore. Glass, too, is very economical to recycle.
Plastic recycling was never about recycling, it was to convince people to use plastics.
Glass can be economical to re-use, but I thought recycling it uses nearly as much energy as producing it in the first place.
It prioritizes short-term cost efficiency over long-term sustainability
not really for paper though... We've largely solved efficient recycling of even complex mixed paper/plastic/coatings, a piece like this should be less expensive, and not shipped 1/2 way around the world to a market that has massive amounts of both new and old paper.
I didn't mean to imply that the price for this specific laptop stand is justified. I read the above comment as a small rant about how expensive recycled things are, and wanted to add that sometimes it is for a good reason. Not always, and like others have mentioned, the plastic bag example might not have been the best one.
I find this particular notion to be rather weird. I cannot see how it's a "waste" if something's fed to animals instead of humans!
It is a horrible waste to produce any strawberries from an environmental perspective compared to the least sensitive feed crops so feeding them to animals is more of a better than nothing while getting someone out of the market for the grades of strawberries that drive production is not. But any mediocre quality strawberry jam probably does that.
Despite the quotes, the person you’re replying to didn’t use the word “waste” nor have they claimed using that fruit to feed animals would be bad. In short, they didn’t make the argument you’re against.
However, in the interest of good faith discussion, I’ll offer a rebuttal to the argument you are making. The logic applies when (and this is very important) that food goes to farm animals which will be slaughtered of humans to eat.
“Waste” isn’t really the right word, more like “inefficient”, in the sense that the amount of food which takes for an animal to mature is orders of magnitude greater than what you take from it. In other words, you could feed significantly more people if they ate what you’re feeding the animal.
When you couple that with the environmental impact of raising animals as food, including deforestation and land use, which in turn affects us as well, it becomes a major issue.
Inefficiency is waste
Potato potáto, that’s not what matters. The whole point of the post was to engage in good faith and see past the exact wording to focus on the argument. Obsessing about the definition is counter productive and an exercise in bad faith and derailing the conversation. That is a waste.
Opportunity cost, mostly.
I often see "recycled" or similar as a signal for more expensive.
That's just because of this new wave of eco-virtue-signaling that's become popular in the past few years. Before that, recycled meant lower quality and cheaper.
See also: "vegan butter" or "plant-based butter" instead of "hydrogenated vegetable oil".
While I get your point, some new plants butters don’t contained hydrogenated oils. See my favorite brand, Flora:
https://www.flora.com/en-us/floraplant/our-products/salted-p...
it also seems like a very small savings. the thing sitting on top of it is full of lithium, cobalt, etc. so why should i care if it's sitting on a bit of plastic/aluminum/wood?
that said, a tutorial to turn the shipping box for your laptop (or a flat of diet coke) into a stand would be good. useful in a pinch
edit: keyboard box might be the best box to print the fold lines on. you need that for a minimally ergo laptop setup anyway
For 20 dollars I can buy an aluminium and stainless steel laptop stand that adjusts from a thin wedge up to holding my screen a nearly eye height.
It will outlast me, and folds into a smaller size that fits nicely in my laptop bag.
Laptops will probably go away, but it could be handed down for generations, and when it no longer can be used, the majority of the energy and resources used to make it can be recouped through recycling it’s intrinsically valuable metals.
This 20 dollar piece of paper will last until the first month in a humid environment.
This should be a tutorial on how to reuse discarded material into an improvised, impromptu laptop stand.
If I saw someone pull this out of a box and put their laptop on it, they would lose a great deal of credibility in my estimation. If I saw someone make this out of some waste paper in a coffee shop, I would be intrigued and compelled to seek an opportunity to see if that person was open to making new acquaintances and sharing ideas.
> This should have been a tutorial, not a product.
I love this. More tutorials, fewer products.
All the embellishments on it seem like they probably involved operating imprinting machines or printing ink onto the paper, too.
>Whatever good you do the planet by using something out of recycled paper (thumbs up on the idea) will surely be offset by all the logistics of the shipping.
The plastic laptop stand you by probably also had to be shipped halfway around the world, so this one is probably a wash.
Maybe a hybrid approach (like adding a tutorial) can be valid. Because not everyone has the time to make their own laptop stand
> This should have been a tutorial, not a product.
It doesn't seem too difficult to make something similar.
I mean, it's a good idea, I just wouldn't buy the one in Korea to get shipped over here. I don't get the cynicism, someone in Korea had this idea and made the product, probably intended for other people in Korea where the shipping isn't an issue?
> probably intended for other people in Korea
The seller is called “grape lab”, with a “g” as the logo, and “Sustainable Design Lab” as the tagline. Everything in English. How is that “intended for other people in Korea”?
It's origami, so making it in USA wouldn't fit our racist ideas about what makes a folded-paper design valuable.
USA folded paper is cheap cardboard. Asian folded paper is origami.
Last time I checked 1 usd = 1 eur
A couple of points.
It is not aesthetically pleasing at all, which is important to me, for whatever neurological reason. Also, I consider a laptop stand as just a device to raise the screen to a better ergonomic level on the understanding that an external keyboard and mouse will be used to operate the device.
Otherwise, in a laptop stand, ergonomic keyboard use requirements pull the incline towards level, and ergonomic monitor height requirements pull the incline upwards, so there is no healthy angle for a laptop stand.
As already mentioned by andrei_says_, typing fingers should be below the wrist (as correct piano playing has proved for centuries).
Stands like this have to be paired with an external keyboard.
Raising the monitor so that the top is as close to eye level as possible (while maintaining a straight back) is better orthopedicly.
It's impossible to achieve this and a good keyboard posture, so you must introduce an external keyboard.
Without an external keyboard, there is no value in using a stand, you might as well just keep the laptop in a neutral position.
I use my glasses case to raise the back of the computer. It adds a gap between table and computer. The rubber nobben on the underside of the laptop prevent the glasses case from slipping. This raises the notebook to a nice angle and the keyboard is still usable for me.
Shouldn’t the monitor be centered at eye level? Or is it worse to look a little bit up than down?
I have had office desks professional adjusted by an occupational safety orthopedic person and that has always been the advice I was told.
Another piece of advice was that on a standing desk your forearms should not be parallel to the ground but slightly below your elbow.
You can't get ergonomics with a (modern) laptop keyboard. Reaching over the touchpad is at best, a compromise. Unfortunately keyboard at the edge + sidemounted trackball is long dead, and keyboard at the edge + pointing stick didn't last a lot longer.
Last I used a laptop at a desk on the regular, state of the art laptop stands were reams of printer paper. Worst case, you need to actually use the paper in the printer and you're out a stand until you restock.
I often observe people at my office using the laptop keyboard and monitor exclusively, while sitting at their desks, even though we are all given external monitors, keyboards and mice.
I guess they are young and their bodies don't hurt yet.
I've been doing that for the last 18 years and I started when I was older than most people here. I never liked the mandatory external monitor and keyboard at the company I was working for before becoming self employed: I preferred to look down to a screen, not up or level.
I like it because it's ugly.
Vladimir Horiwitz begs to differ.
Or save yourself $22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR5G1HFXY1U
That does not look in any way equivalent to the stand in the article.
Huh, it looks very similar. Smaller in size, it fits a phone but otherwise very similar in my opinion. A notebook would need a much larger and thicker sheet I guess.
On top of all of the other criticisms, this isn’t functionally what I want. I still would end up looking down to see the laptop.
I guess it’s better for people who only work on laptops and don’t want to have separate keyboards and pointing devices.
I travel a lot and I use a Roost laptop stand
https://www.therooststand.com/
A standard Apple keyboard and mouse, and a portable USB powered monitor that gets power and video from one USB cable and monitor stand
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4KH2GH3
I got a roost when they launched, still have it, practical and durable, I imagine I'll always have it.
The problem with this paper one is that the paper will wear within a couple of years, and if you spill your coffee on it or anything like that or put it down on a coffee-ring stain, it's straight in the bin.
I fail to see the value in something made from recyclable that is essentially disposable rather than a roost which can be made from recycled plastic and last forever.
The roost also only cost about double to triple this to buy.
EDIT: I see the roost is quite a bit more expensive now, but longevity and ergonomics wise I'd say still well worth it.
Why is it so expensive? It looks and functions exactly like a dozen other similar stands on aliexpress.
I’m not going to buy a knock off good from Aliexpress for a product that I have used everyday for the past two years across over two dozen cities.
The Nexstand is the most popular alternative, it's around 30 dollars.
Honestly, I don't know, I bought it a decade ago when it launched.
It was a fair bit cheaper, I want to say more like $60, I suppose "inflation" is the reason.
EDIT: 2016 I bought my roost stand, it's still good as new.
A single (very large) sheet of (unusually thick) paper.
made from many sheets of recycled paper! agree that the description is a stretch.
It blows my mind that stands like this one as well as keyboards are designed with an incline requiring constant tension in the wrists.
The natural position of the fingers when typing is below the wrist not above it.
They are meant to be used with an external keyboard and mouse, you don't need a stand to use a laptop normally.
Except in the 5th photo they show someone using the laptop's touchpad while on the stand.
This seems very uncomfortable to me as resting your hands on the pointed edges of the folded paper seems like an awful user experience.
Technically, yes, but a large number of people are working on tables that are already too high, so positive tilt is required to keep their wrists in line with their forearms.
A laptop stand that elevates the laptop, placed on a table that is already too high, requires even more positive tilt.
And don't forget the large number of people who don't know how to touch-type and need clear visibility of all the keycaps.
Yeah it's weird, I have a static wooden one similar to this. Looked good but the incline was so sharp that it was just awkward to use.
Not sure what the thought process is behind the design of most of these things.
I don't see much point to this, it barely props up your laptop at all. You're still going to get tech neck. I recently got a nexstand, external keyboard, and mouse and it has been amazing.
Nexstand is the way, I got one and never looked back. I use a touchpad instead of a mouse though.
Or buy the OG, the Roost.
It's pricier but lighter and more compact.
Looks like NEX stand made a new version, K1 Carbon Fiber, which is lighter than og roost.
However, more expensive than it so depends if shredding those grams is worth it or not
Never heard of nexstand but it looks suboptimal for keeping the small laptop screen as close as possible to your eyes
My preferred design is like https://amzn.eu/d/0KB8nGM (2x U shapes of metal), which lets you have the keyboard underneath the laptop , so the laptop is as close to the edge of the desk as if you weren’t using an external keyboard
If you need the laptop screen to be that close, maybe you need glasses.
I have a Roost stand and with my keyboard in front of it, the distance is mostly right (13” screen and it’s more comfortable if I scale fonts up by 20% or so). It’s actually closer to my eyes than my desktop setup (24” screen mounted on monitor arm)
You don't want a small laptop screen as close as possible to your eyes. That's asking for eyestrain and problems in the long-term.
If you're having trouble seeing clearly, you should use glasses and/or increase the system-wide font size (or decrease the "resolution").
Thanks, I keep all monitors (laptop or not) at arms length for work/reading, but for gaming or other immersive activities a 13in screen needs to be closer to match the experience of a full size monitor
Those are kind of ugly, at least for MacBooks.
Rain Design's mStand is my favorite, blends in perfectly.
They are, but they're portable. They collapse and you throw it in your bag.
The mStand is beautiful, but it's not portable.
I love my Rain mStand. It's made of cast aluminum, looks great, works great, and I've had it for....15 years?
At some point I'm sure I could easily recycle it.
Very nice, just not very portable, but definitely recyclable.
They have the foldable mBar Pro now.
Does anyone remember when standing desks started taking off…maybe 2016ish and there was that company making cardboard props to convert your desk into a standing desk. Amazing how well those worked for being cardboard.
Terrible for your wrists though
That's why I rarely use my laptop's keyboard. Always use an external keyboard, and also an external monitor. That way you can look forward and not hurt your neck while also not having to hold your arms in a very high and uncomfortable position. Oh and don't rest your wrists while typing. Also learn to type correctly, and/or use sticky keys (the accessibility feature). Right, then you don't need this stand, though since traveling with a monitor is not practical, an stand that raises the laptop's display is a great thing, so... sold!
yes, it looks very uncomfortable.
They do have a spiky edition tho, too, so maybe that's something
Also terrible for the environment.
The energy cost of buying this online, the carbon cost behind the $22 + shipping, the actual carbon cost of shipping this crap.
We are truly living in the most idiotic timeline.
What's the carbon cost of shipping a plastic stand?
Fwiw I do think that non-consumtion is a more 'real' protest than buying recycled but if you _have_ to get something
> but if you _have_ to get something
You don’t have to get it shipped, most of the time. Whenever you next go to town, go into any hardware shop and buy whatever they have.
Heck, hop on freecycle and you’re bound to see someone giving away one of these that you can pick up for free, in person.
Or buy one second hand.
Or use a large book.
Or, or, or…
Hey yeah I agree, I just thought OP was being over the top with the moralizing. Like, OK its a bit virtue signal-y but so is complaining about it. And its still better than plastic.
I'm not sure that being shipped is much worse than buying from a store that also gets it shipped and wrapped in as much plastic. And if its a town over, you're driving there which is CO2 as well.
Using nothing at all is better for sure and I said as much. Second hand stuff rules.
All in all though, this sort of individual choice is peanuts compared to taking a single plane ride which is itself peanuts compared to what corporations get away with. So imo. having any sort of strong opinion on this is silly.
Fair, I agree with most of what you wrote.
However, advertising yourself as sustainable (like this store does) is also a marketing move which caters to a specific type of audience. If your products aren’t actually sustainable, it is valid criticism to point that out.
Imagine having two companies selling candy. One says their sweets not only taste good but are good for you, while the other doesn’t make any kind of health claim. Both are bad, but one of them is outright tricking you, which feels worse.
Note I’m not claiming this is what this seller is doing. Maybe they think what they’re doing is sustainable when it’s not. But that’s all the more reason to point it out so they can work of something better.
I'm with you, its corny, and meant to sell product
I grew in poverty. This looks to me crazy expensive. Sustainability comes second. These things are probably made overseas, shipped in a container and distributed in a small package. Then used few weeks, paper will wear out and then thrown away. But that’s how quick fashion industry works anyway.
Edit: Asus laptop had foldable stand included in the paper packaging.
What would a less idiotic timeline look like?
Reuse the cardboard box your laptop came in.
Stick a book under your laptop.
What's the carbon cost behind buying and shipping the book, or cutting down the tree to make the book?
Use whatever's lying around. Some more ideas:
Or better yet, order one of these and make 3 more with the shipping box it came in. That'll help once it wears out, or you accidentally sit on it.Not sure how many cereal boxes can hold a laptop... unless you're stacking them flattened, and then you need to eat a lot of cereal, but you can adjust height very precisely. :)
A cereal box is likely thicker than the material used in the product this article talks about. It wouldn't take very many folds to prop up a notebook.
They didn't say to buy a book just for this.
Assuming you don't have a book in your possession?
I'm old enough to have owned a lot of paper books at one point, but as a Kindle owner and person who moves every few years, I no longer own any physical books. For fiction and non-fiction prose, I find an e-reader to be strictly superior to the paper version. I've even embraced e-cookbooks. The UX is markedly inferior while cooking, but the convenience of not having to move boxes and boxes of paper around with me is worth it.
this is actually more common place than you might expect. just like wearing tube socks vs ankle socks has become some sort of age delineation, owning books is as well.
This makes me so sad.
I have no books that have any value other than I already own them. After moving across the country a couple of times with them plus all of the other various moves, I have thought about getting rid of them numerous times. The only reason I have not is just sheer laziness on taking them some place. My most recent move left them in boxes and just stored.
https://x.com/paulg/status/1860692810279559283
What an amazing idea. Carry 2kg book of necessary size instead of foldable cardboard. Truly genius.
Am vaguely reminded of a fancy apple-style aluminum stand I saw in an ad recently. That one is probably a lot more expensive.
This $6 “fancy” cardboard box from Ikea has been doing the same job for me quite well. Can also discretely hide a power strip and hub inside, keeps dust off too. Just cut a small hole in the back.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/tjena-storage-box-with-lid-blac...
It's hard to justify $30+ for a sheet of paper, especially considering the fact that condensation from a nearby water bottle will kill this product.
Amplified by my heavily sweating body in full coding focus mode...
It's a wonderful design, but like many recyclable products, the price isn't low enough to convince the average consumer.
Like someone else said, release the instructions.
If you want to make an environmental impact, you have to make something people are willing to buy. That's why Tesla became so successful, no one cared 10 years ago when it was a status symbol. Once it got to like $40k it sold like crack.
I remember the times when my monitor stand was "made" out of yet-to-be-recycled paper books - a few thick java references. Later, when I bought a new monitor I donated them to a library. I hope they got recycled, or at least, garbage-collected. Although I can't imagine anyone finding old java books in the garbage and find them useful for anything.
I used to dumpster dive for old compsci books at the end of semesters. It's how I learned java, c, perl, vim, and SQL.
>I used to dumpster dive for old compsci books at the end of semesters. It's how I learned java, c, perl, vim, and SQL.
I'd always grab old books from school and work, but honestly they are horrible to learn from because things like java and c# have changed so much, you end up teaching yourself outdated stuff and then needing to relearn all of the new ways to do stuff. You're probably safe learning C from an older book though, as long as it's ansi c and not the original k&r book.
There are some languages with books that remain relevant over decades, notably books for any Lisp - Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, also:
- C (post-ANSI) - fundamentals largely unchanged since 1989
- SQL and Erlang - basic concepts stable since 1980s
- Prolog and Forth - core concepts stable since 1970s
Although modern books might cover some improved practices or new tooling, older texts on core concepts remain valuable.
This reminds of the fantastic lecture 'A world from a sheet of paper' given by Tadashi Tokieda at Oxford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p02DtmyQhU
Watch specifically from timestamp 38:00-41:30
This looks like the kind of thing you get given as a cheap branded gift in a conference and it breaks before the conference is over. As soon as you put enough downward force to damage one of the folds or it gets damp, you're heading directly to rip-city.
Selling a piece of cardboard for $22 is an amazing achievement, recycled or not. It's beyond my comprehension. The world is at the same time much too poor and much too rich. I'm already sensing the throwing away of perfectly good (and forever durable) plastic and metal laptop stands, to be replaced by this glorious virtue signal.
AAaand let the down-voting of my opinion begin....
Anybody has an idea on how the industrial process for this kind of origami works? I've seen videos online and it requires a lot of pinching and folding. I'm very curious to know how a machine could do that.
I like the minimalist design. But the zigzag shape at the bottom seems a bit inconvenient for the wrist area.
Should be pretty easy to reverse-engineer the crease pattern so people can make this themselves (perhaps adjusting it to more common sizes of paper).
this seems kind of absurd... I have a laptop stand. it collapses into my hand. its made from steel. it cost me $15. it will last much longer than this.
22$ for recycled paper? I bet an origami can be designed to do just the same, then made using free paper lying around.
This is art. Love it.
This is failed design, your wrists will hate you after using this.
Not just design. This whole product is a failure. It does not make sense from any angle. In fact I don’t understand how the website is still up and running.
All of the same vibes I got when I found out some outfit managed to take a cock ring with accelerometers and an associated phone app to production.
It is sort of art. It looks fairly pretty I think, in a sort of everyday manner. But it also looks a little impractical, the part that might touch your wrists is very spiky. Also thought keyboards should be, if anything, tilted in the opposite direction.
It seems like an ok system if you don’t have to interact with your keyboard. But if you want to do away with the need to interact with the keyboard, a much more aggressive tilt could be used, right? This only gets you a couple inches. Ideally the top of the screen is around the top of your head, right? Of course this is for on-the-go use, so we don’t expect ideal.
Overall, it is art; I really do think it looks nice, but it is pretty impractical.
Art of design.
made from a single sheet of recycled paper
Do they mean a single sheet of seriously thick card stock? Sheets of paper do not weigh 45 grams.
It's origami, yes ? Surely someone here at HN can find a folding pattern and an appropriate size & weight of paper.
doesnt look comfy to type on the laptop with that edge at the bottom. My wrists wouldn't like it.
also 22 bucks for a few grams of cardboard? seems excessive. but hey at least it'll break fast, cant handle moisture, and so on.
You would normally use a laptop stand with an external keyboard and mouse, the idea is to raise the height of the monitor to save your neck.
Does it wiggle when you type on it?
This would be better if it was the origami instructions to make it.
Had a very different image in mind of what a sheet of paper looked like.
What about those jaring things touching the palm, don’t look comfortable
I'd only be interested if I can also use it as a Japanese fan.
This is somehow even worse than paper straws.
Oh, I didn't expect that much skepticism. I love the idea and I love companies that are trying to create beautiful and sustainable things. They even try to give people a place that usually don't fit in.
Yes, you can fold one yourself (will it be stable enough though?). Yes, I wouldn't use it for a laptop either. But for a tablet it could work really nice.
Also shipping it around the world is a bit silly, like with most things. Too many people will order on Amazon or buy fruits from the other side of the world without a second thought. Get off your high horse.
Sustaining what?
The profits of those companies making these products.
Wow, such a bad vibe here!
It's foldable. It's light. It's made of recycled material. It's cheap enough.
Seems pretty smart to me.
It does not appeal to me, but each passing year there are fewer and fewer new consumer products that do appeal to me. Actually, I think this product captures the spirit of the times: a $20 piece of paper that presumably falls apart after a year – a 'laptop stand as a service'
It's literally ten times the cost of a plastic stand on Temu ($34 vs $3.35).
Airflow?
Pretty good tool for creating graphs of work to be done and schedule them, but that’s not important now.
It’s surely not what they meant!
Probably not, but don't call me Shirley. :)
I'm sorry you're getting downvoted for your decent Airplane! joke.
What's the benefit of this, compared to using nothing; i.e. laying the laptop flat on the table?
It looks like you're only straining your wrists against the increased keyboard angle.
Where is the tutorial for making this piece of shit, rather than shipping it halfway around the world on an exhaust-spewing, whale-killing freighter? Oh, it's recycled, pardon me.
So they're selling 22$ for a sheet of paper?
It fits perfectly with the $100 piece of aluminium/glass and plastic it's made for. Prices don't reflect the material value of an item
The paper is $.01, it’s the folding you’re paying for.
No you are paying for the story that you’ll be able to smugly tell your colleagues of how much you care about the environment that you’ve purchased a recycled laptop stand, ignoring the fact that this was likely air shipped from Korea and then delivered by multiple trucks to you.
If you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, does it make more or less sense, in terms of environmental impact, to buy the plastic stand over this one?
> ignoring the fact that this was likely air shipped from Korea and then delivered by multiple trucks to you.
This presupposes the economies of scale. One plane is not leaving South Korea laden with just one laptop stand and nothing else, and one delivery truck is not leaving the Fedex or UPS depot almost entirely empty save for one laptop stand destined for the consumer's house.
> One plane is not leaving South Korea laden with just one laptop stand and nothing else, and one delivery truck is not leaving the Fedex or UPS depot almost entirely empty save for one laptop stand destined for the consumer's house.
Who do you imagine thought of it this way, and how does an objection to shipping trash require you to think this way?
What normal people imagine is that a package containing this displaces a package containing something else, and that an collective shipping container of these is a shipping container that wouldn't have been shipped otherwise.
What you seem to be theorizing is that if these weren't being shipped, some other product would have been invented to take up the volume that it uses, or all other products would expand in order to fill the space. That has a burden of proof that the normal people explanation doesn't require.
> Who do you imagine thought of it this way, and how does an objection to shipping trash require you to think this way?
The argument being presented by the person I replied to said verbatim: "ignoring the fact that this was likely air shipped from Korea and then delivered by multiple trucks to you."
> What you seem to be theorizing is that if these weren't being shipped, some other product would have been invented to take up the volume that it uses, or all other products would expand in order to fill the space.
We don't need to theorize or invent, the plastic products already exist. Go to Amazon and search for "laptop stand" and you'll find a glut of them. So I ask again, if you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, is it better, in terms of environmental impact, to buy one of the hundreds of plastic stands shipped from South Korea, or this recycled stand shipped from South Korea?
Plastic which will last 10 times longer and can be reused.
> If you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, does it make more or less sense, in terms of environmental impact, to buy the plastic stand over this one?
I mean, if you expect the cardboard one not to last very long, then yes. Yes it does "make more or less sense".
If I expected that, then I wouldn't order one in the first place; much the same as I wouldn't order cheap plastic junk from Amazon with the expectation that it's just going to break or I'm not even going to get what was pictured in the listing. So at the very least we need to have faith that both are decent quality if we want to have a debate over it.
I think they can just fax it, which saves a lot of the environmental waste you’re talking about.
The stand is crap as the wrists are placed on a serrated looking rim of a stand. As soon as anyone puts their hands on it wrong way it is a goner. And the price is in line with Versace.
Fire hazard
I'm hoping you're wrong. I just made a simplified version, which is just the concertina-ed paper without the parallel reverse folds to angle the keyboard up. Its made from a 96gsm a3 sheet.
My reasoning for thinking it's safe is that 451F/230C would probably damage/burn/melt the cheap plastic table it normally sits on.
Why the heck is there a beer in the background of pics? Lol
If whoever did this cared about recycling they would just tell people how to do this.
If the people who bought this cared about recycling rather than having a virtue signaling conversation starter they wouldn’t have bought it.
This is insane, the carbon value of $22 is high enough without the garbage of shipping this crap all over the country and possibly the world.
Whoever did this doesn’t even clean their computer, it’s disgusting!
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