It is very ironic that they sell it has "eco-compact dishwasher" when it require disposable chunk of plastic to use it. The amount of water saved will really not make up for the amount of plastic thrash created.
From their website: "At Daan Tech, we’ve always believed that a more sustainable and fairer world is possible.", you really have to be cynical to write something like this and then sell a worse washing machine that generate lot of plastic waste.
Permit me to disagree with about all of your conclusions here.
First of all, the cassettes are returnable. This is also mentioned on their website. * https://daan.tech/discover-bob-cassette/
You're also NOT required to use the cassettes. You can just throw standard dishwasher tablets in. This is mentioned in Bob's manual, and probably on the website as well. I've been doing this for years and had no issue. There is no DRM-like aspect to Bob.
And finally, it's not a worse washing machine as you say, it's just smaller and more flexible (wrt plumbing), and as Techmoan mentions in his intro, this is a very strong advantage of Bob for people living in small European apartments.
(source: owner of Bob)
Nj recently banned single use plastic bags. Now instead of people actually reusing the reusable bags forever they just throw them out almost every time. Everyone who buys this machine is not going to go out of their way to return the casettes. America is obsessed with convenience and will continute throwing out perfectly reusable things until we have a massive cultural shift.
Whole point of convenience stores is to be convenient. Carrying a big ass bag with me for the off chance I go to the store is just silly.
We keep reusable bags in the car for every time we go to the grocery store. I think the entire country would only benefit from banning single-use plastic bags nationally, and I'm not sure how you could have an issue with that.
I mostly agree, but here in NYC I don’t have a car to keep the bags in. If I stop at the grocery store on my way home from work, I either have to have planned ahead and put a reusable bag in my work backpack, or I have to buy more reusable bags (which eventually get tossed because we have too many of them).
It’s definitely better to have the bag with me, and just typing this out made me realize I can keep one or two in my backpack at all times.
I personally keep in my daily backpack a reusable Baggu that packs down nicely and doesn’t take up much space. As long as you have a daily bag/purse/whatever and you’re not strapped for space, it’s pretty easily solved, yeah. I live in not-NYC so I also keep a bag in the car.
I have some sympathy if you find yourself on a weekend out and about and needing to spontaneously buy some victuals and don’t have any bag on you - but that’s the cost of us having less litter.
Well, I suppose that’s perfectly fine if you’re the wasteful sort of person who uses a personal vehicle instead of a bike or public transit.
But what about the responsible people who actually care about reducing their carbon footprint by not unnecessarily carrying 3000 lbs of steel everywhere they go?
I live in central Alabama. Would take over 4 hours to walk or bike to get groceries. Not everyone lives in a huge city and the ones in Alabama are too dangerous to walk around in without concealed carrying a firearm (except for Huntsville).
I was confused by this so I looked it up [0]. The point I had missed was that stores and delivery services still provide bags like before, but now they're heavier bags designed for reuse. And people still throw them away like before.
Result: Now there's even more plastic in the waste stream.
[0] https://nyti.ms/3R8lCse
Of the fraction that gets returned, how many are actually reused? It's black plastic with a shine to it and it'll show scratches easily. Does the factory even have the facilities to clean them out and refurbish them for next use?
Yes, tfa shows an excerpt from Bob saying they have the facilities to clean and reuse the cartridges.
tfa?
The f...ine article
I think the abbreviation was (and probably still is) popular on Slashdot
Or, more kindly, the featured article.
It's any acronym that's often used when someone wants to point out that a question could have been answered by reading the fine article that is being discussed. TFA = The F'ing Article.
Yes, in theory, which requires from you the effort of packaging it up, paying postage, plan time to go to the post office, etc - or you could just throw it in the trash for exactly the same visible effect and be done with it. Even if people want to mail them back, this sounds like exactly the kind of task that will perpetually stay on the "I'll look into that when I have time" list, until they finally just want to get rid of it and throw it in the trash.
But it's good for shifting the blame, because then the pollution is not DaanTech's fault but those of individual consumers.
Doesn't this contradict what the article was saying? At least there was a quote from DaanTech somewhere that you have to have a cassette inserted to start a wash.
Even if they ship it back, i'd really doubt the environmental impact of shipping something halfway across the country is less than a few gallons of water per dishwasher load.
You need a cassette inserted, but it can be empty.
What's the carbon footprint of transporting the empty cassettes back for refilling?
What percentage of Bob's customers bother to do that?
Would these people use a cleaner solution anyway? I mean, you can say that of any refilling system, if people don't use it.
It's more difficult if you have lots of special containers (in this case with integrated electronics) that can only be sent back to a specific shop.
My dishwasher uses detergent powder which comes in simple plastic containers that can be dealt with via regular plastic waste collection.
How much fuel needs t be burned to ship these cassettes each way?
I got one because it's the only mini dishwasher that can fit in my kitchen. The cassettes don't clean that thoroughly compared to normal dishwasher tabs, so I just use those instead.
Pretty sure he addresses every one of your criticisms.
These refill packages for dishwasher, printers are just SaaS for products. It is terrible and contain 'dark pattern' to continuously over charge customers. Just also a lazy way to try to make business profitable and doesn't really provide any benefit to the customers.
I tend to assume incompetence rather than malice. The marketing person that wrote that piece of copy never worried about the lifecycle waste analysis of the project they were working on, because they trusted the CEO/founder that hired them, who said it was gonna be good for the environment. They probably aren't the type of person that worries about nor has the skills to do a lifecycle waste analysis.
The issue is that there's no incentive to return the chunks of plastic to them. They need to follow a Sodastream-like model to apply a discount to the next order when returning a unit, especially with such astronomical prices.
It doesn't require the cassettes. You can use regular detergent.