Right. Because it is so much better to cut down increasingly rare tree species such as Koa and Mahogany.
Suggesting using plywood laminates - there is formaldehyde in plywoods. Also still requires cutting down trees.
The number of Ukes made from HPL is miniscule compared to the amount of the stuff that you will find in nearly every kitchen in the country. How many of you guys have HPL (aka Formica) countertops? Or if not, its something like granite or marble or some other thing sourced somewhere far away and trucked to your location that many many people cannot afford. Oh yeah - and the sealants they use on those expensive stone countertops - the vast majority contain significant PFAS. You know. The "forever" chemical.
A lot of the stuff that passes for "furniture" these days is made of OSB or other types of "manufactured wood" products that are made of, you got it, wood pulp and resins. Then they slap some HPL over it. Again - ukes make up a miniscule percentage of these uses.
Do you buy milk? Packaged in millions and millions of plastic cartons. Do you ever buy yogurt? Also mostly packaged in plastic. How about - well - almost everything you buy in the grocery? Plastic containers have replaced most glass and some tin cans. Your meat is wrapped in plastic. The veggies go into plastic bags. Unless you are trucking your own bags - which, BTW, I DO - the vast majority of bags are plastic, and paper isn't much better because - you know - cutting down those trees again. And guess what, the majority of those pack-your-own-grocery bags also contain plastics.
I totally agree that there needs to be less plastic in the environment, but ukuleles are not the prime suspect here. If you REALLY want to be serious about getting plastic out of our environment, you would be agitating seriously hard to get it out of the grocery store or at least minimized because THAT is the main source of plastic pollution. Rather than just indulging a snobbish "distaste" for so-called "plastic" instruments where you use "plastic" as a derogatory term with no basis in reality.
I've read a lot of talk here about woods of various kinds and which woods are better for what sound, and so on and so forth....but I can't find any discussion at all about wood choices in ukuleles and their environmental impact. Mahogony, for example, is a terrible choice in terms of the effect...
forum.ukuleleunderground.com
After my upcoming move I will be buying a Carbon Fiber cello - the same type owned by YoYo Ma. Most cellists also deride these as "plastic" instruments, yet in a blind sound test, professional cellists overwhelmingly selected the carbon fiber cello as having the better tone - over a Stradivarius. This was the exact opposite of sound tests where they could see which cello was being played.
Snob appeal is not in my bailiwick. You don't have to like my choices of instruments, but to try to blame the minority of us who own instruments made of something other than an expensive, hard to find, hard to replace in the environment wood for all of the plastic pollution in the world is more than a little hypocritical.
) sound better than any plastic uke, even outdoor (and their glue does fail eventually, find my pic of the separated top). Cheap used laminate ukes may need work (action lowered, fret ends smoothed, strings changed), but that's part of the fun, along with being able to give them away to whoever you meet that might want to learn to play.
