Surprising Development

Costco Optical will never run out of pliers.

At Costco Optical one can order prescription eyeglasses for $130--more if you want fancy frames, lenses that darken in the sunlight (polychromic), or multi-focals.

I chose the cheapest option--why invest in expensive glasses when cataract surgery is a likely possibility?

I' m exclusively an eyeglass- and hard-lens-wearer. Hard contact lenses last at least three years, and I can't, er, see disposing of soft contact lenses every day. Soft lenses encourage behavior that is bad for the environment: Flushing Your Contacts Does Terrible Things to Our Land and Oceans

For a lot of people, contact lenses are a daily necessity. Market research shows 45 million Americans, about one in eight, wear contacts, meaning the United States alone consumes somewhere between five and 14 billion lenses annually. And now, new research shows all those contact lenses may end up as micro-plastic pollution in our soil, rivers, and oceans.

An estimated 20 percent of contact-lens wearers, studied as part of a 400-person online survey, flush their lenses down the sink or toilet, as opposed to placing them in the trash as industry experts recommend. That amounts to 20 metric tons of plastic, or 20,000 kilograms (about 44,000 pounds), flushed per year—about the weight of a small airplane. The biggest culprit? Daily-use lenses, which occupy about 40 percent of the market.

As I slouch into my dotage, one surprising development has been that many of my penurious ways (transportation, cooking, consuming) have turned out to be friendly to the environment.