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Lego Wants To Completely Remake Its Toy Bricks Using Plant-Based Or Recycled Materials (seattletimes.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the slowly-but-surely dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: Lego is trying to refashion the product it is best known for: It wants to eliminate its dependence on petroleum-based plastics, and build its toys entirely from plant-based or recycled materials by 2030. The challenge is designing blocks that click together yet separate easily, retain bright colors, and survive the rigors of being put through a laundry load, or the weight of an unknowing parent's foot. In essence, the company wants to switch the ingredients, but keep the product exactly the same. [...] Lego emits about 1 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, about three-quarters of which comes from the raw materials that go into its factories, according to Tim Brooks, the company's vice president for environmental responsibility. Lego is taking a two-pronged approach to reducing the amount of pollution it causes. For one, it wants to keep all of its packaging out of landfills by 2025 by eliminating things like plastic bags inside its cardboard packaging. It is also pushing for the plastic in its toys to come from sources like plant fibers or recycled bottles by 2030. The billion-dollar company is reportedly investing about $120 million and hiring about 100 people to make these changes possible. "Lego is already using polyethylene made from sugar-cane husks in flexible pieces like dragon wings, palm trees and fishing rods, but these constitute only 1 to 2 percent of its output, and the material is too soft for the company's toy blocks," reports The Seattle Times. Lego has already experimented with around 200 alternatives, but most of the materials have so far fallen short.

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Why by alvinrod · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why bother doing that. Legos are probably a half decent way of sequestering carbon. The oil that they don't lock up into tiny plastic bricks is just going to go into some asshole's Hummer. Legos are so expensive now (and the old sets are worth a good amount as collectors items) that no one with half a brain is going to throw them out as trash. They just get passed on to your own kids or nieces and nephews.

    Sure, make the packaging better for the environment because that's going to get tossed, but the bricks themselves could stay as they are. The recycled plastic idea isn't bad. There's probably enough in the Pacific garbage patch for the next several thousand years. However, unless we get some breakthroughs in regards to plant fibers, they'll just end up with something that degrades and ends up getting thrown out and needs replacement, which is probably worse from an energy use perspective (but not so bad as a business model) than making something that will still be getting inadvertently sucked up by vacuums on judgement day.

    1. Re: Why by reiterate · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Here's another perspective: the "invented" problems you're whining about are real, and are really the result of people very much like you who assumed that they could pretty much do whatever they wanted and have all the cake, forever. People who did not care about the ill effects of their industries, the commercialization of American culture, or the privatization of our government, and now surprise surprise are handwaving away these issues as some kind of weakness on the part of those suffering. You're criticizing responsibility and human wellbeing. Grow the fuck up.

  2. Re:Recycling ABS on a larger scale by Koby77 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Part of the problem is that is costs more to recycle plastic than it does to simply manufacture new plastic. Otherwise there would already be a market for non-subsidized plastic, the way there is a market for aluminum and scrap steel. Also, since most of the cost for recycling is energy, and most off that energy comes from fossil fuels, you aren't really saving anything by recycling plastic (challenge: for anyone who says use renewable energy, calculate the carbon footprint of a solar panel, nuclear power plant, or windmill, plus add the added carbon necessary in economic activity to pay for its higher cost).

  3. "Reuse" always beats "Recycle" by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's NO NEED to make Lego bricks "recyclable", because there's no fucking need TO recycle them... they can be reused as-is. Seriously, I can take a box of Lego bricks from when I was a small child decades ago, and they interoperate perfectly well with a brand new box of Lego bricks purchased now.

    It's like hand-wringing about an IBM Model M keyboard being "non-recyclable" -- it's an utterly moot point, because they're still useful today, practically indestructible, and even if damaged, you can almost always take 20 "broken" Model M keyboards and end up with 17-19 working ones after cannibalizing one or two of them for spare parts.

    If anything, Lego is worried that TOO FEW Lego bricks end up in landfills, and TOO MANY end up getting passed on to the next generation. Eventually, thanks to exponential growth, we'll end up in a period where newborns end up inheriting a half-million Lego bricks that belonged to their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and have NO NEED for more. Lego has to find some way to make them NOT last forever so that won't happen.