this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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Yes, every household in the developed world has a drawer like this. It's for things that you hardly need or never need, but might do, one day, probably (not).
Why it bothers me: in a more sane world, this stuff would be shared. Every community would have a junk tool shed - not every household of 4 people, or 2 people, or (increasingly) one person. It's reminiscent of that drill statistic: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its lifetime. This is madness. Our planet is overflowing with junk. As a species we need to be smarter.
This smells like a fact pulled from someone's ass. This article thinks so too.
I use drills everyday for work and have one at home that doesn't get used much because if I want to get handy I don't want to drive to work to get one.
The average person has fuck-all experience with power tools, they don't use them every day. They can pull the trigger and it goes brrrrrrr but they don't know what the options on the rotation piece are, they don't know about different types of chuck, they don't know which gear setting to put their drill in. They use it for the absolute minimum amount of time possible and then put it away. You're clearly a professional if you're using them every day, most people are not.
I don't know whether the 7 minute claim is true or not, but the idea that most drills barely get used and spend most of their time sitting about is not very difficult to believe. I'm quite a handy person, and even my drill spends most of it's time doing nothing because I'm not drilling every single day, just as and when DIY jobs come up.
In a world drowning in ewaste, and lithium being a precious resource, why are we collectively wasting so much on individual drills when, as JubilantJaguar said, we could own these things communally and not create so much waste.
The idea of a communal toolshed for your street, block, tenement, whatever, isn't the same as having tools sitting at work. Work for most people is a commute away. Communal toolsheds would be local. They ideally shouldn't be any more than 10 mins walk away. Can you really begrudge a 10 minute walk for the sake of your wallet, environment, and community?
This also helps the young get into DIY easier. Most of my mates growing up barely did any DIY or tinkering, not because they weren't interested, but because the cost of getting the necessary tools was prohibitive as a teenager. It's taken me years to accumulate the toolbox I have now, and many of the items in there are hand-me-downs or second-hand. A communally owned toolshed gives everyone instant access to tools regardless of personal wealth or resources. If a power tool dies, £150 spread between multiple households is nothing compared to £150 for an individual household.
Managing it, caring for the tools, ensuring they're returned, and in a good state, are obviously hurdles to be addressed, but if communal toolsheds were the cultural norm then they could easily be overcome. We manage to do it with books easily enough, why not anything else?
I'm guessing that 6-20 minutes is like the actual time spent driving screws or drilling holes. Each one takes maybe a few seconds. 6-20 minutes in that case translates to hundreds of screws driven, even on the low end. So not nearly as worthless as the time makes it sound.
Sure, it's a factoid. Maybe it's 20 minutes. But we all know it's very low. Seven minutes is an overestimate for my drill.
Yes, and it's a problem. The possibility of borrowing one from your neighbor is passed over entirely and the alternative is to drive to get another one already in your possession.
All of this is completely unsustainable behavior at the scale of the planet. I suppose you'll get in a huff and take this personally but I really am talking about all of us. As I said, I have a drill myself and bought it for exactly the reasons you cited. I just think we could all do better.
But the transaction cost of borrowing my neighbors is much higher. I have to talk to him for 20 minutes, he has to find it, it's not charged, it's a piece of crap and the Chuck doesn't work. An hour process for a 10 second job to hang the shelf.
I think a drill is a terrible tool to use as an example since it's used for many purposes and almost any household chore. A better tool would be a Sawzall, it's built for a niche tasks and can be essential for that one cut. I will absolutely have a chat with the neighbor to avoid trying to make a cut with a hand held hacksaw blade trying to cut a stud in half. I use it so infrequently I absolutely don't need my own.
But an awful lot of households do have electric drills and apparently the average one gets less use than yours. Mine certainly does. Whatever the exact number of minutes-per-lifetime, you're gonna have difficulty persuading me that every single household of all the 8 billion people on earth needs its own electric drill and that there's not a better way of organizing things.
And that's my whole point: America's hyper-consumerist comfort-oriented lifestyle, where everyone has a closet overflowing with semi-useless junk, where talking to one's neighbor is a waste of precious time, is just not a realistic goal for a sustainable civilization. Nor even particularly desirable, I'd say. Again: please don't take this personally, I'm criticizing a whole system and I too have an electric drill (though not a Sawzall, whatever that is).
Every household has a stove. Isn't a communal oven where we all bring our dough a more environmentally ethical choice? My neighborhood has a laundromat but I have a washer and dryer. Is that selfish? Personally I'd love a communal heating system, I hate dealing with my furnace.
I take no offense to the conversation, but I think putting a stigma on drill ownership is quite low on the Social Irresponsibility Index.
This is partly a US-vs-rest-of-world cultural misunderstanding. Here in Europe housing units are much smaller than in the USA, people live on top of each other and many of the things you mention are already shared. And it's not actually a problem for everyone. In Sweden, for example, even middle-class people live in apartment buildings with collective heating.
I guess you'll say that, at heart, deep down, Europeans really want to be Americans and live in suburban castles and drive and share nothing, and maybe you are even right. But whether we want it or not, that is not a sustainable solution for humanity. An electric drill being used for 5-20 minutes in its lifetime is, I continue to believe, a very decent microcosm of the whole problem.
You think I say a lot of things.
I agree, we own many things that we should borrow. I disagree that electric drills are the worst offenders. I wish my small town had a lending library. I would gladly use it. But I would still keep a drill at home, even though I have 3 at work.
a drill is the most useful power tool that people tend to own… most of the time you could get away with just a screw driver and a self tapping screw, but we don’t because a power drill is a convenience object
i think we all tend to agree that we should be less wasteful, but a power drill is a shit example of that, and will only push people to write off the idea
rather than “we should all borrow a power drill rather than owning”, it should be something more like “yknow that 1 time you needed a nail gun? wouldn’t it be nice if you could just borrow it” (for me that item was a circular saw, and i use it maybe once every 5 years - i’d love to put it into a tool library or similar if i could borrow other things from time to time)
Word up. A drill being a poor consumer choice is right up there with plastic straws being the worst environmental offense. How about sharing a lawn mower or weed whacker? Let alone a car.
You shouldn't be lamenting the lack of skilled trades and also be arguing for less tools. I'm all for borrowing and lending, but we all need a basic tool kit.
How do people do without an electric drill? Why don't they use it?!
In fairness 7 minutes with an electric drill will get you a lot of holes!
The problem is that it's an incredibly inefficient use of resources. Most drills sit unplugged virtually the whole time. If we could only find a way to share them, we could have the same number of holes for a tiny fraction of the resources and the pollution. And as a bonus it might even strengthen local communities, which would be another obvious win. IMO the electric drill shows the dysfunction of consumer capitalism in microcosm.
You're correct, but it's a fractal. It's drills all the way down.