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Lego Wants To Completely Remake Its Toy Bricks Using Plant-Based Or Recycled Materials (seattletimes.com)
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.
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.
Instead of abandoning ABS completely, I think it is about time to consider expanding the recycling of existing ABS to include not just packaging but also products themselves. Would that be feasible?
Everyone of us has quite a large number of items made from ABS. It is very common in electronics for instance. Just looking around me, my keyboard, mouse and monitor bezel in front of me are made of ABS.
Electronics should be recycled, and their enclosures are probably recycled with the rest but not all plastic enclosures have a resin identification code so that the type of plastic could be determined easily when recycled.
One challenge could be that ABS comes in many different variations, with varying proprtions of A (acrylonitrile), B (butadiene) and S (polystyrene), plus additives for UV-resistance or flame retardants.
ABS is such a versatile, wonderful material. I think we should treat it as such.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Make them soluble so they can be absorbed when embedded in a parent's foot.
Somehow I get the feeling "exactly" is going to have quite the wide margin to it. Don't get me wrong it would be great if they could come up with a perfect replacement, but that's not how these things usually turn out. There's going to be something about them that makes the current ones just a little better. Invest in classic bricks now!
As an aside, just found out there's a Legoland NY coming in 2020, heck yeah! There's already a Discovery Center, but for some reason nobody will lend me a kid so I can get in. Maybe I should just borrow one with asking and leave a note... better to ask forgiveness than permission right?
They can use the really ass like smelling plastic the chinese have been using. It's like an ass factory was merged into a brick of ABS and then molded into the bargain basement shit they sent to my door step.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Actually, the problem will be OTHER things eating them. Bugs. Bacteria. Rats.
They already have the same problem with wiring harnesses in some vehicles - critters find them delicious, apparently.
So in the future, legos will come in a cardboard box and be edible - like happy meals for rodents!
A vastly superior set of modeling blocks and systems were made by Fischer Teknik (as as far as I know still are).
Usable by kids (small parts, but Lego has them too), they are much more structurally sound and even worthy of small-scale engineering projects.
Lego beat them out in popularity, but that's sad, in the same way that VHS beating out BetaMax was sad. In each case the latter was far superior.
Lego should get with Monsanto and genetically engineer Lego plants that are immune to roundup, edible, too, that would be nice, perfect for kids who want to play with their food.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
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.
I'm not even sure if this is a good idea (I like an earlier post about how legos sequester carbon) but if it is, why not get started with a meaningful metric that will be achieved in the next 2-3 years? Oh, that's right, because that involves a lot of difficult work, and doesn't generate the nice press releases as predictably.
I seriously want to start a website like "all of the future promises and predictions that people made" where I mirror the promise, store it locally, and then check up on it like 12 years later to see if they kept their promise or if they kept shifting it backwards as a cool announcement since everyone forgot the earlier cool announcement.
Lego is awesome, and I think this is the FIRST promise I've heard them make like this. I think the State of California, and the European democracies, are the worst about pledging to be off carbon/nukes/diesel/crack in the next 15/20/25 years.
Oh man, I just got a wave of nostalgia thinking just from you mentioning those. They were amazing for building working models of all sorts of things, and I absolutely loved playing with those. You're correct that they were extremely well engineered.
Lego countered with it's own Technic series, like the Auto Chassis set I had, with which you could build a working car chassis with rack and pinion steering, working suspension, and even gear shifts. I actually built a working robotic arm out of that kit. Fun stuff. Arguably less well built, but it did have the advantage of working with all my existing legos.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
”The challenge is designing blocks that ... survive the ... weight of an unknowing parent's foot.”
That company is definitely run by a bunch of sadistic bastards. I suspected as much back when my daughter was young - but now I have proof.
#DeleteChrome
... that's no problem, it beats fastfood.
Bach says it all.
When I was a kid, I had both lego bricks as well as Fischer technic. I wouldn't call any of them superior. They both stimulate your brain, in different ways.
I want Legos that cause more injury to parents and their feet. Children need a way to protect themselves by building a wall, of sorts. And they're going to make their parents pay for it. Don't get me started on their ideas. They're not bringing ice cream, but groundings and chores. Is that what we want? #makelegogreatagain
Well, that is a very thoughtful response to the issue, but the actual amount of carbon that is sequestered is small compared to the amount of energy that is used in extraction and transportation before the crude is even turned into bricks. There is some research I saw that was published online a few years ago (perhaps an academic paper?), where the energy budget of Lego sets were studied. I wish I could find the link for that paper, it was really interesting.
Anyway, the best way to reduce Co2 isn't to dig it up and sequester it, it is to not dig it up in the first place. I think Lego is doing the right thing in trying to reduce the demand to dig up petrochemicals.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
When I was little I ate a whole set of Lego.
Did you end up shitting bricks?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
When using virgin polymer, the material is exactly the same batch after batch. You just can't do that with recycled plastics because every skip load is a variable mix.
Recyclers work hard to mitigate this by working in large batches (typically about 20 tonne) and assessing/grading the results. But it's not perfect, and subtle changes in the material can cause manufacturing problems. Constantly adjusting the process settings to compensate is not what you want, though we may be heading to a stage where machine learning is smart enough to assess products as they come off the line and automatically make adjustments.
The other big issue with recycled material is that's it's rarely clean white, so difficult to colour. Most is mixed colour ("jazz" as it's called) which is run to black. This might explain why they're looking at drinks bottles. There's a lot of clear PET on the market, it's an on-going resource, and it's cheap. However, it is very tricky to injection mould due to crystallinity issues. There are certain additives that help, but they're expensive.
Most PET is currently reused as polyester fibre, though a little goes back into bottles. (Not that much due to contamination issues. They can't actually solve that, so they keep lowering the regulations instead to allow more to be used.)
Plant-based polymers are a long way from being cost effective at the moment.
Why not make the bricks from Bamboo? To hell with the colors, use your imagination!
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It has been greatly increased activity with the newer, nourishing insulation on wiring harnesses. Before, rats might gnaw on a wire in their way. Now they eat all the insulation off the entire harness.
Nobody is 'forever banned' here. The word to use instead of 'banned' is 'shunned.' Yes, It's more work and it's not an easy top-down authoritarian thing to do like they practice at Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc., but that's the deal.
Pence is here warming up for his forthcoming at-bat.
This post is an example of what happens when you eat the new biodegradable Lego blocks.
Literally!
Lego blocks are made from ABS, and there is plenty of it in our garbage:
Almost everything on the outside of printers.
Computer accessories: charger and keyboard housing, monitor parts, those crappy computer speaker enclosures.
Many parts in a car interiors. If a plastic part isn't soft in a car, it's likely plastic.
The outside of many laptop computers
The outside of many kitchen appliances: blenders, mixers.
Housewares, outlet plates, bathroom accessories,
and many others.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Short clip of the event in question.
#DeleteFacebook
And the proper way to shun someone is to use unicorns.
#DeleteFacebook
Another advantage was that very few parts had sharp corners.
Depends on what you mean by "superior".
Fischer Teknik is actually used by universities to build working prototypes of machines.
Legos (even the "Technic" variety" really aren't up to the task.