Tools to fight against single-use plastic

Imagine for a moment that you design products for a living. But you can't design everything, so you have to buy some of your stuff from big box stores just to go about your daily business. That's more or less what happened to [Eric Strebel], who recently bought a bathroom faucet from IKEA. This particular flat faucet comes with a single use plastic nut driver to use to assemble the faucet. Since there is no marking indicating the type of plastic, it cannot be easily recycled. Even the size of the company is not indicated. So between the shoddy plastic construction and the lack of information, most people will just throw this thing away. And it's terrible.

So what? Other than boycotting IKEA (which [Eric] might do in the future as far as we know), there's not much we can do but offer solutions on a public platform and see what happens. To that end, [Eric] came up with five different ways to make this nut driver that are arguably more durable than mystery single-use plastic.

Say what you will about the sustainability of using metals, which have to be mined, versus plastic: many of these methods don't use any tooling, so that's something. The nut drivers made by [Eric] would instead be laser cut from flat material and either bent and welded or assembled from a multi-piece cut into a one-piece tool via perpendicular elements that fit together . Or as [Eric] points out, the design could stay exactly the same as the plastic original and be die-cast instead.

It's definitely an interesting design exercise, and it's really cool to see a bit of [Eric's] thought process when it comes to improving existing things. Be sure to check back after the break and let us know how you could have done better.