Originally Posted by
conspiratemus1
I'm aghast that anyone, never mind a whole lot of people, would throw away a perfectly good tube just because it had an easily patchable (and patched) leak. Honestly, the patched tube is as good as new. It's just gratuitously wasteful to toss them. Eventually tubes will leak at the valve stem -- only then do they get repurposed for non-air-holding tasks (although I admit I don't have a lot of such uses so usually put them in the trash....but never tossed on the side of the road, right?)
Dead tubes have a lot of uses. I cut strips from them to wrap around handlebars for lights, computers, etc. (And forks and seat/chainstays for speed/cadence sensors.) They work better than bungee cord in a lot of places (and tie far more secure knots). I did a carbon fiber wrap of a broken frame, had the epoxy setting before I was ready and was struggling to get the fabric to stay down. Hastily cut innertube strips and wrapped the whole mess tightly. A lot of resin squeezed out. Next day I approached the mess with trepidation, figuring I had probably trashed the (sweet riding!) $20 frame. Unwrapped the inner tube and behold! the job looked professional like it had been vacuumed bagged. 8000 miles later I retired the frame because sooner or later it was going to break elsewhere. (It had been hit hard by an SUV.) That repair was the strong point of the bike.
I rode a charity ride where a young woman had made a rather stylish vest of interwoven innertubes.
Edit: patches do get in the way of many post-mortem uses. Fortunately I've bought enough lesser tubes to have good patch free lengths.
Ben