Product & Packaging: Which Plastics & Metals To Use

Worldchanging have a couple of detailed articles on what plastics and metals companies should try to use in their products.

On plastics they say:

Almost everything you buy these days is injection-molded out of plastic. That’s because plastic is amazingly useful. It’s not going to go away. (The Environmental Literacy Council has a nice little history of plastic on their site.) And for most products it’s environmentally better than using aluminum or other metals, and unfeasible to replace it with wood or other fibers. The ideal would be to find a material with the useful properties of plastic with none of the downsides. We’re not there yet, but we’re farther than you think.

On metals they say:

Almost all consumer electronic devices which use extrusions are made out of aluminum. The ecological advantages of aluminum are that it’s a very common material (the most common metal in the Earth’s crust), it’s not toxic, and it’s very recyclable–according to the US Geological Survey, 44% of aluminum production in the US is recycled material (the industry calls it “secondary” production as opposed to “primary” production.) The disadvantage of aluminum is that extracting and refining it is enormously energy-intensive–so much so that it’s often called “solidified electricity”.

Links via nickbaum.com