zlacker

>>hrl+(OP)
This should be an economics piece, not an environmental piece. The author states that "one of iron’s unalterable properties is that it rusts" yet further on acknowledges the existence of stainless steel.

There's nothing wrong with reinforced concrete, but the incentives to produce long lasting buildings are not there. The cheapest bidder will generally win and their building will last the "design life" of the building, but often not much more. The simplest way to change this is to extend the design life, which would result in stainless steels or another more expensive material being used in this application.

>>brutus+J5
> The author states that "one of iron’s unalterable properties is that it rusts" yet further on acknowledges the existence of stainless

Even stainless steel rusts, just more slowly. Roughly 10-100x more slowly, judging by https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1124/ML112490377.pdf and https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/23/8705/pdf.

>>wahern+0c
That doesn't smell right. I've got 15 year old knives that have never once shown signs of rust. A pair of old scissors left in the rain rusted in under a day. That puts the factor to closer to >10000 than 10 or 100...

>>petera+wh
There are different grades of steel, doped with all sorts of additives, depending on the desired traits. The most corrosion-resistant variant today used in knives would be one of the nitrogen steels, like Nitro-V.

https://knifesteelnerds.com/2019/09/23/nitro-v-its-propertie...

But they all corrode, eventually. If you want a true corrosion-resistant metal that stays (kinda) sharp, look at one of the cobalt alloys like Stellite.