I am looking for ideas on what products should be produced locally. Not things that your area can do sn awesome job at and export. Rather things that should be locally produced near everyone.
Feel free to define “locally” as you wish. I am thinking with 5 miles, but with 200 is also good.
Please include your reasoning. Everything from shipping costs, to ownership “punch-ability” are great.
I will kick things off in the comments.
Personally, I’d say as much as possible to cut down on emissions shipping the stuff across the planet or even across the country
Dirt!
I was just recommended a product called “Milorganite”, which is a soil product out of Milwaukee. They apparently ship it all over the US. People in, say, Florida are buying soil from Wisconsin.
Products that are cheaper to produce locally, for which there are resources and expertise, or that have some other competitive advantage.
I’ve been interested in those old-school radios recently, and most of them are made in China. With the recent tariffs, and because of supply-chain concerns on communications (Exhibit A: Israel attacks on alleged Hezbollah members by rigging pagers and walkie talkies), its a good idea to have local trusted community members with knowledge of radios to build them ourselves.
Unlike smartphones, radios are much easier to build, and requires zero dependency on some corporate/government controlled infrastructure. Maybe we could even have some sort of community code-words for secrecy or airgapped computer hardware integrated in the radio to do encryption.
Like some meshtastic stuff, but even meshtastic devices you buy online could get intercepted and compromised. I’m thinking of like radio enthusiasts should be helping their community build home-made radios, like from scratch, and placed repeaters throughout entire cities on their roof connected to solar panels.
This make it very difficult for governments to shut down communications in event of like protests.
eggs and dairy. and here local could be as big as a province/ state. international shipping of eggs sounds like a nightmare imo.
local veggies and fish also sound fantastic! none of those vaccuum packed frozen things.
broadband fiber. each city having its own public fiber offering is wishful thinking but yeah.
Pretty much all farming should be produced more locally.
50 years ago our food was much more local in the US. There were orchards and greenhouses where I grew up.
With today’s materials and electromechanical tech, greenhouses would be very effective all over the US.
Why are we shipping apples and grapes from Chile, to California, which then go on trucks all over the US? No way that’s more energy efficient than local greenhouses, and orchards.
Toilet paper. Easy to produce, doesn’t need to go on ships.
Is it easy to produce? Isnt it a lot of treatment steps between tree (or recycled) and usable paper roll? Definitely not requiring overseas shipping, but its also not something easily done down in the shed?
I think you need a forest, a pulp mill, and a paper mill. The forest might be the hardest part in a lot of places…
Hopefully with more recycling than new forests, but otherwise that sounds about right. Guess it really depends what we consider as local. Suburb level, probably not viable, but state level, definitely.
There are areas they farm trees for paper. ( I hope few companies are cutting down natural forests for paper.)
Of course, but even still, those areas are usually ex-natural forests, so the more paper that can be reclaiming via recycling, the less demand for clearing the natural forests. And its probably less energy intensive to recycle than to start from scratch.
I had no idea. Thank you.
- Local food
I’d raise my hand for furniture, clothing, and anything ceramics. Homewares and clothing basically. This already exists in one way or another, but I believe it would be amazing if more people could make a living actually designing and making these things, the products would be of better quality than the mass produced ones, and they would be unique.
Unfortunately it’s too expensive to become the norm in reality
Unfortunately it’s too expensive to become the norm in reality
Only if we believe we all need to have massive amounts of stuff. The world did fine with making what people needed prior to assembky lines and outsourcing .
Yes and no, on one side you are right and consumerism in our culture is to blame. But on the other hand, the costs of living today in many parts of the world would make this kind of localised crafts just impossible. Workers wouldn’t earn enough and the products would be prohibitively expensive.
A lot of cost of living cost (rent/housing costs) are basically artificially created out of a combination of corporate and NIMBY s.
Higher cost items isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If prices goes up but they last 5 decades it’s fine
Am I saying something offensive or ridiculously stupid? Just wondering because of the downvotes.
Answering to you: yes, and more to my point. It’s not just one thing you need to fix, it’s the whole system. And by cost of living I didn’t mean just rent. I meant everything, food, transport, utilities etc. I’ll just do my best while I can.
You didn’t say anything offensive or ridiculously stupid, no.
Most I’d have is a mild disagreement with the statement that it’s impossible to have local places–I feel like only minor adjustments would be needed for many goods in relation to that.
I’m going to go with restaurant meals.
Any restaurant that brings in prepared food from a central location frozen/pre-cooked/etc. is terrible.
Baby formula.
If every community makes some, nation wide shortages may be less likely.
If the ownership are local, then irrate parents can punch them. This will avoid issues with quality.
If all producers are small, regulators can shut down bad actors. Currently, the big players get warnings (in some countries.)
The issue with baby formula is that it’s pretty strictly regulated by the FDA, and getting approval is a lengthy (and extremely expensive) process. So there are only a few companies that hold a functional near-monopoly on the production, because they’re the only ones who had the resources to go through the process.
And to be clear, I’m not advocating for looser regulation on formula. Safety regulations are writ in blood. But local formula production would essentially require massive subsidies and fast-tracking to offset the costs and testing associated with starting production.
