OpenEcoGoods
Products

What should we design first?

v0.1 · draft shortlistNot a decision.Propose a productor argue for reordering this list on GitHub.

How we score candidates

  • Environmental impact today

    Weighted heaviest: primarily total annual mass (unit count x average weight), adjusted up where toxicity or ubiquity make raw mass understate the harm (e.g. batteries, cigarette butts).

  • Feasibility of open, distributed manufacture

    Can this realistically be built from open designs in a makerspace or small shop, without heavy capital investment?

  • Ubiquity & replaceability

    How standardized and genericizable is the category?

  • Likely community interest

    Is there existing maker/community expertise to draw on?

Impact and feasibility below are rough 1–5 scores, not precise measurements.

Candidate shortlist

Sorted by impact within each group — highest first. Volume, lifespan, and decomposition figures are rough estimates drawn from public reporting, not primary research — where we couldn't find a credible number, we say so. Better sources welcome via GitHub.

Ready to build now

High feasibility: the manufacturing problem is genuinely tractable for a small shop or maker community today — the gap is that no one's organized it yet.

Flat-pack, repairable furniture

Impact
Feasibility
  • Flat-pack shelving & wardrobes
  • Particleboard desks
  • Big-box dressers
Annual volume
Global furniture market ~$667B/yr (2024); e.g. ~35M sofas sold/yr in the US alone
Time in use
Quality furniture lasts 7–15+ years; low-cost flat-pack pieces are widely reported to fail within a few years, sometimes not surviving a single move
Time to return to nature
Particleboard core: a few years; resin binders, laminate & hardware: decades, don't fully biodegrade

Fast-furniture is a huge, low-durability waste stream — and furniture is one of the easiest categories to open-source.

Plastic bottles

Impact
Feasibility
  • Bottled water
  • Soft drink bottles
Annual volume
480–600 billion PET bottles produced/consumed per year globally; only ~10% recycled
Time in use
Single use, typically minutes to hours
Time to return to nature
~450 years to fully break into microplastic fragments

Hundreds of billions made a year for a few minutes of use each, taking centuries to break down — a mature, easy category to build reusable alternatives for.

Plastic bags

Impact
Feasibility
  • Grocery bags
  • Produce bags
Annual volume
~5 trillion produced per year globally — roughly 700 per person on Earth
Time in use
Average use of about 12 minutes before disposal
Time to return to nature
100–1,000 years

Trillions handed out for a 12-minute average use — real mass too (~25 million tonnes/yr), then centuries in the environment. Reusable bags are one of the simplest fixes on this list.

Disposable coffee cups

Impact
Feasibility
  • Takeaway coffee cups
  • Fast-food soda cups
Annual volume
~500 billion disposable cups produced per year globally
Time in use
Single use, minutes
Time to return to nature
20–450 years — the plastic lining blocks the paper from decomposing normally

Half a trillion cups a year, plastic-lined so they can't fully break down — reusable cups are a straightforward substitute.

Harder, but worth it

Real engineering or systems-design problems — coatings, absorbency, chemistry, distribution — but the impact justifies working on them anyway.

Reusable packaging systems

Impact
Feasibility
  • E-commerce shipping packaging
  • Takeout & delivery containers
  • Plastic film & wrap
Annual volume
~300–350M tonnes of plastic packaging produced per year globally; only ~9% is recycled
Time in use
Single-use by design — discarded within days, often minutes, of first use
Time to return to nature
20–500+ years depending on plastic type

Single-use packaging is one of the largest waste-by-volume categories; a standardized reusable system is a systems-design problem as much as a product one.

Modular, repairable cookware

Impact
Feasibility
  • Non-stick frying pans
  • Ceramic-coated pots
Annual volume
No reliable global unit-sales figure found — but cookware is a near-universal household purchase, repurchased every 1–2 years
Time in use
Most non-stick cookware is discarded within 1–2 years; even well-cared-for ceramic coatings rarely last past 5
Time to return to nature
Non-stick coating (PTFE): doesn't biodegrade, effectively permanent; base metal could last indefinitely if it weren't bonded to the coating

Non-stick coatings and bonded multi-layer pans are replaced constantly and can't be recycled or refinished.

Styrofoam food containers

Impact
Feasibility
  • Foam takeout containers
  • Foam cups & plates
Annual volume
14+ million tonnes of expanded polystyrene produced per year globally
Time in use
Single use, minutes to hours
Time to return to nature
~500 years; never fully biodegrades, only fragments

Bulky, nearly impossible to recycle, and normally thrown out within an hour of use — reusable or molded-fiber containers are a direct swap, but distribution is a systems problem, like packaging generally.

Essential textiles & apparel basics

Impact
Feasibility
  • Basic t-shirts
  • Fast-fashion outerwear
Annual volume
~100 billion garments produced per year globally
Time in use
Average garment worn just 7–10 times before being discarded; ~65% of garments are thrown out within a year of purchase
Time to return to nature
Cotton basics: a few months; synthetic blends: 20–200+ years

Still one of the largest waste-by-mass categories (~28 million tonnes/yr of garments), but open, distributed garment manufacture is genuinely hard.

Not a hardware problem

Huge volume and impact, but the fix isn't a product redesign — it's behavior change, chemistry, or heavy industry. Listed for completeness, not as a roadmap item.

Cigarette butts

Impact
Feasibility
  • Filtered cigarettes
  • Roll-your-own filters
Annual volume
~4.5 trillion discarded per year worldwide
Time in use
Minutes of use per cigarette
Time to return to nature
Filter (cellulose acetate): up to 10 years to fragment, then persists as microplastic indefinitely

The single most littered item on Earth by count — total mass is smaller than the biggest plastic streams, but ubiquity and slow-leaching toxicity keep this near the top. Still no open-source hardware fix for a consumption habit, not a product.

Tires

Impact
Feasibility
  • Passenger car tires
  • Light-truck tires
Annual volume
2.3–2.5 billion produced per year; ~1.5–2.3 billion reach end-of-life annually
Time in use
Typically replaced every 3–5 years, ~25,000–50,000 miles
Time to return to nature
50–80 years typical, some estimates up to 2,000

Billions of tires reach end-of-life every year and shed microplastic particles the whole time they're in use — but rubber manufacturing is far beyond small-scale, open production.

Chewing gum

Impact
Feasibility
  • Stick gum
  • Bubble gum
Annual volume
~1.74 trillion pieces (~2.4M tonnes) produced per year globally
Time in use
Minutes to under an hour of use
Time to return to nature
5–1,000 years, typically 20–25

Trillions of pieces a year, most of it synthetic rubber that persists for decades — but this is a chemistry problem, not something a workshop can redesign.

Disposable vapes

Impact
Feasibility
  • Single-use e-cigarettes
  • Pod vapes
Annual volume
Hundreds of millions discarded per year globally and growing fast; ~1.3 million/week in the UK alone
Time in use
Days to weeks per device
Time to return to nature
Doesn't biodegrade; lithium battery and plastic housing persist indefinitely

A fast-growing e-waste stream — plastic, lithium, and heavy metals fused into something meant to be thrown away within days.