Originally Posted by
Maelochs
I have been using the same Cannondale panniers since 1989. I have a couple other sets, and I have had to pretty much completely rebuild the Cannondales ... but I love them. Even when they really showed their age .... after 15 years of daily use ... they still worked fine. When the zippers busted I attached velcro tabs and also bungeed them shut. They never let me down. I rebuilt them because I wanted to.
What are they made of, and have they never leaked? Also, they are panniers so they don't get the same wear as something like a rain suit, poncho, or tarp.
For a tree-lover, I am surprised you are so cavalier with your treatment of petroleum products.
You should avoid saying provocative nonsense. There is no connection between trees and petroleum products. It might be good to mine/pump less petroleum, but that is a separate issue from deforestation and the lack of shade in places where people are walking and biking.
Plastic bags are a potential part of the picture, but they are not at all durable ... unless protected. I can use the panniers to hold the plastic bags and the bags last a long, long time.
Isn't the waterproof fabric/coating on your panniers made of petroleum in some way? If not, what? Bees wax?
My latest solution is to buy lightweight dry-bags---more reliable waterproofing, much more durable, and inside the panniers they should last past the end of my life. I am not a fan of disposable ... but it is built into modern life, and if you give trash bags one more use than they would have gotten, that is one step forward.
Yes, I use anything as long as possible before throwing it away. Recycling wastes energy when re-use could extend the functionality of a product without any industrial processing.
Believe me I would love it if there was an inexpensive way to use carbon fiber or some other organic product that brought petroleum that much closer to redundancy as a mineral. Still, I think too many assumptions fly around in discussion like these and it might be, for example, that using a certain amount of petroleum is more sustainable than trying to expand agriculture to make more products out of natural fibers.
Ultimately, you have to look at the specific consequences of things. E.g. driving creates demand for pavement and parking, which necessarily displaces trees unless infrastructure is all built in a way that shades the pavement by allowing tree roots to grow up under pavement without being crushed/hindered. This is possible, and I've seen special under-pavement soil-protecting structures, but they are expensive and the person I spoke with at the municipal level about the possibility of installing such root-protecting structures under roads basically said the cost would be too high. So you have to look at the big picture of how likely reforestation is with everyone driving everywhere, and then how likely it is if driving would become a much smaller share of multi-modalism.
With plastic bags, though, what really improves if everyone stops using them? Does petroleum mining stop? No, so reducing driving is a more concrete environmental goal than stopping the use of plastic bags.