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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.
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).
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.
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).
I had a chemistry professor comment in one of his lectures that recycling plastics is stupid. People should just burn them. I recall he mentioned this because at the time there was a debate on building a waste burning power plant in the area.
When it comes to doing the calculations you ask, it appears someone did do that.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
If someone is going to look for an energy source to recycle this plastic, synthesize it, reduce it to it's constituent elements, or whatever you wish to do to lower the carbon emitted, then look closely at nuclear power. Nuclear power is low carbon, safe, and just generally a good idea. If someone wants to raise issues of the waste problem then I'll just say that it appears that any problems on the safety of the waste was included in those calculations. The author, Dr. Ripu Malhotra, also made a powerpoint presentation where he points out that next generation nuclear will consume much of the existing waste.
https://drive.google.com/file/...
When it comes to replacing petroleum based transportation fuel, and presumably also petroleum based feedstock for making Lego blocks, there's the US Navy program on developing a hydrocarbon synthesis device. A device that they intend to power with nuclear reactors.
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-...
One complaint I keep hearing is the costs of nuclear power. Well, a single reactor does cost a lot of money but it produces lots of energy, it will produce energy at a cost that's at least competitive with any source available today. We know this because of past performance. There's a lot of room for improvement with economies of scale and, in the USA at least, there is sufficient demand to allow for this economy of scale. The US government expects to see 20 GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year. A typical nuclear power reactor produces 1 GW of electrical capacity. We could build a new nuclear reactor every month and still need to build more electrical generation capacity from natural gas, wind, or whatever, to keep up with demand. The USA saw reactors being built at this rate once before and there's no reason to expect we can't do it again. This is especially true given the much greater material needs for the alternatives like wind and solar.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
You mean the smell of Harbor Freight?
The smell of a harbor freight store is vinyl. They have tons of stuff made of vinyl rubber that's pounded full of flex agents so that it stays flexible. Who cares whether it's healthy, right? The smell that really gacks me, though, is Xcelite handles. I've got a set of old Xcelite SAE nut drivers, and they're fantastic tools but if you put them in an enclosed space they will make that space smell goddamned awful.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"