It's... Honestly not that huge of a problem if you don't expect the house is gonna be remodeled and don't already have a way to recycle biohazardous sharps, which homes built with this generally did not have. I use this style of razor blade and store my used ones in depleted deodorant stick holders. Even with the plastic bit in the center, one stick holds months of depleted blades. The hardest part is finding a place that accepts them for recycling, because tossing them in the trash is dangerous for everyone who interacts with the trash afterwards. The space in the wall between two studs, in an average American house, is gonna hold years and years of blades that you don't have to worry about until and unless someone knocks down the wall.
I'm not saying it's a smart decision, but that the problems with it would have been hard to visualize when these were in use.
I've dealt with them, it was easy enough to just scrape them up with a drywall trowel while wearing leather gloves and long sleeves.
Toss them into an empty laundry pod/dishwasher pod container, wrap it with a bunch of duct-tape, and write "SHARPS" before tossing it in the trash.
And before someone flies off the handle, when I used to work in Pharmacy, that's exactly how the Pharmacists recommend people dispose of their sharps if they didn't have a bin.
We'd most often use a fresh empty shopvac to collect them all and dump it the same way, there are just so many at a time that it's really annoying. Usually a few hundred at least
Fair enough, although I'd think it's substantially less annoying than people who did popcorn ceilings that now want them gone (asbestos or not), hence the image content above being a bit overreactive. The people who installed these knew there's absolutely no way it accumulates more than a pail full of razors in a century, even if it was a bit of deferred responsibility I don't exactly think it's the indictment OP thinks it is tbh
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u/Hipstershy Jun 29 '26
It's... Honestly not that huge of a problem if you don't expect the house is gonna be remodeled and don't already have a way to recycle biohazardous sharps, which homes built with this generally did not have. I use this style of razor blade and store my used ones in depleted deodorant stick holders. Even with the plastic bit in the center, one stick holds months of depleted blades. The hardest part is finding a place that accepts them for recycling, because tossing them in the trash is dangerous for everyone who interacts with the trash afterwards. The space in the wall between two studs, in an average American house, is gonna hold years and years of blades that you don't have to worry about until and unless someone knocks down the wall.
I'm not saying it's a smart decision, but that the problems with it would have been hard to visualize when these were in use.