It bugs many of us...Seas of plastic, cheap toys, disposable clothes, etc.
It bugs me...And even I'm tempted, with sentiments of good riddance, to focus on stuff that 'matters.'
It's not the cheap crap that matters though, It's the infrastructure behind it. Because behind every cheap consumer existential dalliance into immediate satisfaction lies a complex mass of industry, one that the US has lost its' collective awareness of.
I'm hoping that over the next couple months, I can share a little about the unseen side of US manufacturing, and how our consumer goods come to be. For background: I work, indirectly, in manufacturing.
Follow me after the DDD (DKos Divider Doodle)
Do we really need this? This Happy Meal® toy, and all it represents?
Well, yes. And no. Pictures are fun, so let's see what is behind a happy meal toy:
Happy Meal Toy
Cost: Cents
Service Life: Hours-Days...More if it becomes and under-seat crumb-catcher.
But behind every cheap plastic toy is this:
Mold for plastic things, like the crap above:
Cost: $10,000+
Service life: Months-Years
These molds are high-precision hunks of steel, maybe a few pounds for a cheap plastic part, but several tons for that plastic car bumper, or kid's slide.
So, you take that mold, and put it (and plastic pellets) in a machine like this:
Injection molding machine
Cost: $250,000+
Service life: Years
Plastic parts come out every few seconds, ready for some paint and packaging.
But somewhere, someone has to make a mold, and an injection molding machine.
Machines like this make molds and mold machines. This specific machine is a Haas horizontal machining system, made in Oxnard, California:
Cost: $260,000+
Service life: many years
Most importantly, someone needs to run it all:
Moldmaker/Tool and Die Machinist
Cost: $40,000+/year (starting)
Career: Decades
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Mold Operator
Cost: $25,000+/year (starting)
Career: Decades |
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As cheap plastic crap goes, so go the tools, the labor, and the investment in both. I could care less about the US making one less happy meal toy, but when we make one less mold, it matters. When we make fewer CNC machining centers, it matters a lot.
It isn't that we need to become the dominant exporters to the world again, or be xenophobic in our purchasing, or purchase cheap plastic crap. But we have to ask ourselves what lies beneath our purchases, and what the implication of losing that industry is. After all:
The photos were unabashedly found around flickr. I did not take them, nor do I own them. Any prices are estimates, based on my (somewhat limited) experience with injection molding.
Next in this short little series:
Cheap Plastic Crap Part 2: Travel the world!
(Wherein the maze of global supply chains is explored.)