Re: [AtE] Heirloom tech?
Lastly you have common "junk" items that depend on a high baseline tech to create, and that don't decay easily.
Plastic bags and bottles are a great start: These may last for 200, 400, perhaps 1,000 years. We toss them away all the time, but they would be fantastically lightweight water carriers, or let a society sidestep the need to figure out how to make glass for many purposes that would in turn enable tech jumps. There are so many in dumps and landfills that if an apocalypse killed most of the world, it would take tens of generations to deplete the supply of "new" salvage, and of course those already salvaged would continue to serve.
Aluminum cans, caps, and foil fall into this category, too.
If you want to go all Mad Max, it isn't hard to imagine flexible armor made from layered plastic garbage bags and bits of aluminum. It would look like garbage, but it would likely be at least as good as anything made from natural materials, and it would depend on low-risk, low-labor salvage, not high-risk, high-labor farming and hunting.
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