Eyeglasses with frames welded to the lenses would be kinda cool, and may even justify current commercial price points (not that they would be sold for them).
Most eyeglass facilities also would not touch used frames, given the potential for frames pre-existing damage and wear, and how that creates liabilities for the lab while installing new lenses.
Sounds like your eyeglass facility really wanted you to buy new frames.
To my knowledge opto-technician will map and cut new lenses using your frames or old lenses as a template.
Also looking at the prices, it looks to me that most of the profits are in selling the lenses (unless you buying designer frames for gazillion $). Where I live no-name frames are very often free or for extremely low price (< 30$).
EDIT: also it would be an insane task to mass manufacture specific lenses for specific frames, just due to the fact of variability of eye conditions: near-sightedness, far-sightedness, astigmatism and varying strength on these conditions (cylinder angle and diopter).
I've had the same Nike frames for probably over 10 years now and the previous ones (same brand & style) for about 5 years until I broke them. My prescription changes very slowly, so I've only updated the lens once. But except for that one frame breakage, I actually have every eyeglass frame I've ever purchased since I first got glasses in 1993.
I'll burn more gasoline driving home from work than the mass of a pair of eyeglasses. And I'll burn it in a car that has a 10-15 year lifespan and weighs about as much as 100,000 pairs of glasses (I'm guessing here, but it's at least in the tens of thousands).
Bikeshedding for purpose of condescension is one of the biggest and most avoidable sins of environmentalism. Don't do that.
Throw those broken glasses out, throw on a new pair, and get back to work working on something important.
It's insignificant for eye glass frames, but not so much for other stuff, like packaging.
It’s not as if this is nuclear waste. Toss it in the ground, wrap it up nicely, and we’ll revisit it in 50-100 years.
Disclaimer: recovering recycling evangelist
Hubris my man. Pure hubris. I'm not saying it's not possible, but when there are strong financial interests tied to NOT doing exactly that, it doesn't feel like something I'd say I'm confident in.
Also "soon enough" to undo all the damage that things like the Pacific Garbage Patch have done to the environment? Soon enough to remove all the mercury in food chain? There's literal things dying because of this. I think the hand wringing is justified. You can make it a value prop (we save X human lives because of products packaged in this manner, so fuck these bees) but there's still actual consequences to our planetary roommates.
Your pacific garbage patch example is disingenuous. It would not occur if poor countries had proper waste disposal infrastructure (ie collection and landfills).
Sure, and if we just provide food for everyone then nobody will be hungry.
That's some high quality hand waving there my friend. The whole "don't worry, we'll figure it out" attitude just comes across as useless. There aren't realistic solutions in place right now. People are working on solutions though. This doesn't mean that there's any reason to assume these solutions would work on a global scale.
When dealing with problems like this, we're going to require extraordinary solutions. Confusing "possible" and "probable" is my issue here.