Plastic is useful stuff, until it breaks. We've all had to throw something out (you can tell yourself it actually got recycled, if it makes you feel better) where most of it was fine but the object lost its utility due to a single crack.
Here's an image of a wheelbarrow on our farm. It's in constant use and has outlived our metal ones, since it doesn't rust. However, plastic is prone to cracking, and you can see where my wife has repeatedly patched it. Sadly we know it's just a matter of time before the material fails altogether. Nuplas Bee Hives
Repairable plastic would be ideal, for the sake of utility, sustainability and economics. As it turns out, the University of Michigan has opened a new Center for Materials Innovation, where researchers and students will develop "material solutions to problems facing society," and one of those problems is relevant to our wheelbarrow. One of the CMI's targets is to develop a new sort of repairable plastic:
The CMI's molecular beam epitaxy system shown here "can build materials with high precision." Image: Evan Dougherty, Michigan Engineering
You might be interested in a “hot stapler” such as https://a.co/d/420jafs ; there are also ways of melting a steel mesh into the plastic across a crack. Either is less likely to introduce stress risers than your tacked on straps.
As his wife (and perpetrator of those now mortifying tacked on straps), please tell me more about the second process!
I've used the melting-mesh-into-plastic technique a couple times. It works well with ABS, which is a likely plastic for wheelbarrows. This is the video I learned from. It's a low budget approach so you may be able to do it with tools/scrap you already have on hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmTWCzJbNBw
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