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I first heard of the "Cora ball", a lint-collecting object that grabs microfibers in the washing machine to prevent their going down the drain to contaminate the water supply, from a link to its Kickstarter posted to Tumblr by ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
jacquez45 years ago, but at that point the first round of Kickstarter was over and they weren't taking orders and didn't have a shipping date, plus they hadn't arranged any supply outside North America. As far as I can tell, nobody else is making a similar product yet, but they now have a worldwide database of stockists including a Dutch online store that serves the whole EU, so we will definitely get one (or a few?) soon (with all the usual caveats about the majority of pollution coming from industrial sources and collective action being necessary to enact real change! Aside from reducing the amount of lint we personally put into drains, though, this should probably be good for our washing machine, which, like everything else in our lives, sees way more lint than it was designed to thanks to our two angora house bunnies).
I'm kind of surprised that nobody else has started making a copycat of this yet though. It seems like the kind of thing where even if their actual design is patented, surely there are other ways you could construct things to remove lint in the washing cycle? For that matter, if it's a huge environmental problem that washing machines unlike dryers don't remove lint, maybe... address that? I mean, I know, that's talking about structural change, so it's probably a matter of regulation or a financial incentive for the industry to shift. But surely in the long term that is a much simpler [aspect of a] problem to solve than, say, the contamination from metabolized medication in water supplies, or the space requirements of solar farming, or the wildlife casualties of wind turbines, or maze of infrastructure and regulations that will have to change to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
I'm kind of surprised that nobody else has started making a copycat of this yet though. It seems like the kind of thing where even if their actual design is patented, surely there are other ways you could construct things to remove lint in the washing cycle? For that matter, if it's a huge environmental problem that washing machines unlike dryers don't remove lint, maybe... address that? I mean, I know, that's talking about structural change, so it's probably a matter of regulation or a financial incentive for the industry to shift. But surely in the long term that is a much simpler [aspect of a] problem to solve than, say, the contamination from metabolized medication in water supplies, or the space requirements of solar farming, or the wildlife casualties of wind turbines, or maze of infrastructure and regulations that will have to change to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
