2010.11.17 Wednesday

Another hump day.

Work was productive, yet uneventful.

After work, I cooked up some pasta for dinner. I'm going to need to get some new tires for my car, so I spent a good chunk of time researching that. Also looked up more information about an oil filter adapter that converts my cartridge style into a standard (less expensive) canister style.

So I'm going to go off on a little rant here. Some years ago, car companies got together and decided they wanted to reduce waste and environment impact from vehicles. Pretty sure all the major car companies got together about this. Normally when people change out their oil, they also change out the filter too. "Old-style" filters, or canister filters look like this:

They have a filter on the inside of a metal canister. The goal of the agreement between manufacturers was to reduce wastefulness of tossing out a metal casing with the filter guts. So they designed this:

Not only is this cheaper to replace (less material), but it results in a lot less material going into landfills. If you look close enough, you can tell that these are the same guts inside the canister filters. Unfortunately, car companies went back on their word, and the cartridge style is harder to find, driving up the cost. I know for a fact these things should cost less to make per unit, but they are just so uncommon that even places like jiffy lube will tack on a fee for having such a less-common filter.

My solution is to adapt to what is cheaper for me, at the cost of the environment. Not exactly a great trade-off, but it's pretty stupid that I'm getting shafted by poor business choices someone else made. What do you think I should do?

End of rant.

Went to bed on the early side tonight.