Somewhat unrelated, but I'm really not a fan of that single hard flash look in the two photos of the Lego staff. Looks like they were going for something grungy and gritty, but it didn't get executed that well.
Legos have been a popular gateway for kids to engineering and tech. The article itself talks about the materials engineering challenge in reformulating the blocks.
This is yet another story that shows a complete disregard for the crime that lies at the heart of the Lego empire: the original design for the bricks was taken from a company called Kiddicraft, see:
And for an encore, Lego only acquired the Kiddicraft assets to wipe out this 'inconvenient truth' before suing another company for patent infringement.
Lego is a great toy, but any story about the origin of the bricks should at least reference the true origins of the brick rather than the Lego white-washed version.
What bothers me more is having started their business this way, they are heavily litigious to companies that make products compatible or similar to Lego. Its good to see they generally lose these cases.
The blocks were made from polyethylene [1], the history section of the wiki page states that it was reserved for use in RADAR sets during WWII, this would have been how he got access to it as he was responsible for the design and manufacture of the British RADAR transmitters. I have been told that he was the first person to try putting colouring into LDPE.
This may have been after the Page design though, my mother was the eldest child but wasn't born until 1941.
I think we contributed some pictures to the UK Materials engineering society, will ask.
Thank you. The early history of the brick is a favorite subject of mine and there are a lot of details that are lost or about to be lost and to recover some of it is very special.
Yes, I could have put that more clearly. Kiddicraft were like a UK Fisher Price of the 40s and 50s - they produced a massive range of toys, not just bricks. I think they failed and resurrected a couple of times with new owners keeping the brand name around.
> but any story about the origin of the bricks should...
I see where you're coming from, but in this case the origin is there only to frame what the article is really about: the engineering challenge for the future of the bricks.
Going into the whitewashed origins of the Lego concept would distract from what the article is about.
I disagree with that. Every time the whitewashed story is repeated the real one is forgotten a little bit more. The article is about Lego bricks, tries to use the brick and its history to frame the story, if you're going to do that I think it should be historically accurate. That would not distract from what the article is about at all, and if it was a distraction then so is the story the way it is written right now, they could have simply omitted that part.
Just like the plastic straw ban, it's basically meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but obviously very important for their brand.
It would probably be much better to invest that money for example in less polluting ocean shipments, which are a huge problem, but that doesn't have the "feel good" factor about it.
I don't believe that's what the original poster was saying at all. It was that when "going green" the marketing department seems to be one deciding what they do first rather than the engineering team.
And what evidence is there of this ? Because it sure sounds like you just made this up.
In most companies these policies have come from the CEO down largely because there has been significant demand coming from (a) employees, (b) consumers and (c) shareholders.
Could be the product of lunchtime chats about the world, their place in it, etc... many people in the company may have contributed with marketing making a move.
I will then consider in the rest of that second from my math education (public school no less) that when dealing with orders of magnitude incremental improvements basically will never get you where you need to be. Might feel good though.
By that same logic, there's no point in voting in elections, or paying your taxes, or even commenting on HN (since the number of HN users that aren't you is at least several orders of magnitude more than you).
Consider for a second that we aren't making lots of incremental improvements though. We're making negligible improvements that are highly visible for marketing and feel good reasons. This is even worse than doing nothing at all because the people that would actually make sacrifices to help are placated by these charades.
This is just like the table water ban.
"Meaningful change is hard, let's max out virtue signaling points instead."
Moore's law (or the exponential effect in general) hasn't applied to any other modern fields (last 200 years) and had finally failed in semiconductors. It's not an actual law, it's just an observation of a manufacturing system benefiting from its own gains.
So unless Lego's output costs cut in half with a reduction in co2 production, there won't be anything like a moores law effect.
I think pounds of beef is a great way to measure impact.
I don't see any real easy numbers, but it seems a pound of beef is probably in the ballpark of 20 pounds of CO₂, so 1 million tons translates into 50,000 tons of beef, or a few days of US consumption (which is above 1 pound/week per person).
So giving up Legos entirely is like getting everyone in the US to eat chicken 5 times a year.
... according to the legendary measure that 5% + 5% + 5% ... will allow us to divide by 6-10 our CO2 emissions, which is simply not true. To access these kinds of savings:
- A great depression
- A drastic reduction of population
Any other “saving” measure will immediately be followed by a temptation to use the unused resources. Politically saying “no” to consumption when the resources are available means saying “no” to increasing the government debt by 10: It’s the right solution but politically unviable. Global warming and govt debt is actually the same problem, by the way.
So it’s worth mentioning from the GP that incremental improvements won’t get us out of global warming. Or else, we’ve been lied to about the scale that “we must divide out consumption by 10”.
Bit of a nitpick, but they’re not getting their energy from those sources, they’re offsetting their use with those sources. I want to be clear that they helped build actual wind farms and didn’t just buy carbon credit “indulgences” so full credit to them, but it’s still a difference I feel needs to be pointed out.
Electricity is relatively fungible. It's a distinction without a difference - it's like claiming that I don't get my pay from my employer because my boss doesn't actually hand me a packet full of cash each fortnight.
Couldn't the research they are doing help other industries using plastics to become more environmentally friendly? Even if their numbers aren't that impressive in the grand scheme of things, the total usage of ABS is surely a lot higher than Lego bricks.
Innovation in what they are good at (plastic bricks, not shipping) seems like a responsible thing to do, even if it is also good PR.
That's assuming the impact of this change only applies to the raw CO2 transfer. But there's material research which can apply in other places, there's pressure on other known companies, etc. Even if it's a marketing push, the fact that people may see that some companies try to reduce reliance on wasteful production and start looking at other products they buy is a positive thing.
We probably can't predict right now if Lego can have a bigger impact on the world by trying to offset the current emission from other companies, or by being public about adjusting their prices. Pure production numbers give us only part of the answer.
Sounds noble, but how much of a difference does it make? 1 million tons of co2/yr is not that much. That's about the equivalent of a town of 60,000 Americans. Put in carbon credit terms, that's about $5-10 million bucks worth of carbon for a company making about $1.5 billion in profit per year.
Wouldn't it make more sense for the company to just plant trees or do environmental work or something? I imagine researching and eventually switching to an entirely different material will be on the order of (at least) a half a billion dollars for a company with six billion bucks a year in revenue, probably more.
[edit] I agree with the general sentiment of the comments below, and trust me I'm as concerned about climate change as the rest, but LEGO has so far invested about $200 million into something with an environmental cost of around $5-10 million - and they haven't even gotten close with the solutions they've found so far. $200 million spent in the right places can do a massive amount of good, far more IMHO than a more sustainable LEGO.
To put things in perspective: each LEGO brick is 47 grams of co2. One transatlantic flight is about 3 tons of co2. So one transatlantic flight is equivalent to nearly 60,000 LEGO pieces.
I agree that changes have to come from everywhere to effectively fight global warming, but I think that there's a limit. At what point do you just not bother? There's got to be a cutoff. And couldn't 200 million bucks be used so much more effectively against climate change?
OTOH: it's a high-profile company with exacting requirements for its pieces. If they can convert, companies that might have been on the fence ("it's too hard! our requirements are special! nobody else is doing it") might jump in, too.
It’s not about the enviroment. It’s about virtue-signaling strongly enough to protect their business interests. You won’t see “Lego Buys Carbon Credits” as a headline on HN.
The majority of people in this world want the world to be clean and free of the effects of climate change. Companies are comprised of these people. Hence there will always be internal struggles to "do your part" from employees. Especially since that often ends up making products that are more sustainable not just environmentally friendly. And so win-win for everyone.
I agree with your synicism. But I still think it's a good thing. It might be a insignificant amount of plastic but it's a very visible use of plastic. Plus it's one less company using plastic which raises pressure on the others.
Finally if through their research/testing they do come up with durable alternatives to plastic it's a win for us all.
> is an effective way to lock up that carbon for a long time
It is not. It may be locked up for a little while (~100 years) but we're talking about ridiculous amounts in comparison of the millions of years that make up for long-term carbon cycle. When it degrades (burning, decomposition) it just releases the carbon. The tldr of the environmentally problematic human action on the carbon cycle is that we are pumping carbon from the long-term cycle (coal, petroleum, eg inside the earth's crust) into the short-term cycle (atmosphere, biosphere). Biosphere already so huge that there's no way we can make up for our pumping by making it bigger. We just have to stop emptying the long-term cycle. (or find a way to pump the other way; i'm no geologist or chemist but this sounds very unlikely for energy efficiency reason)
What of the ripple effects of their investment in the research? If they are actually able to devise a sustainable alternative with the same properties, I would imagine that would have quite the applicability elsewhere.
But, for example, USA must divide its CO2 emissions by 6 to prevent global warming. If each company makes a 5% improvement, we have a 5% improvement. Just in the industrial sector. Still not saved from GW.
France, in the Western average, must divide its emissions by 2.1. Still impossible without either dividing its population by 2, or dividing each person’s wealth by 2.
The government that would implement such a drastic reduction of the economy would never even be elected, and it would cause riots from East to West.
So, low level of emissions can only be reached as the result of a war.
Yeah of course, like when you kill someone and make a baby the next day it cancels out and everybody is fine. We need to stop with this bs "carbon credit" and other "just plant trees" making dirty petrochemical industries wash themselves from any responsibility (with their argument "hey what are you talking about i just invested as much into fighting climate change as building new refineries, this is huge money"). There is only one way to win against climate change and it's to solve the root of the problem, not pour money into the consequences, ignore the causes and call it a day.
Of course investing money into problematic consequences is useful, but as a society we need to stop lying to ourselves about the root of the problem which is our lifestyle. We consume too much energy, we need to lower petrochemical industry to it's bare minimum (eg eliminate most plastic packaging and recycle it more), we need to stop intensive agriculture and extremist exploitation of natural resources and ecosystems. And we need to change our personal lifestyle, buy less ultra-packaged cooked meals, buy fruits/vegs/cereals/sugar in bulk, not buy a car to our kids just because why not. And make people around follow your lead by hassling them. And yeah, i meant "around you" literally, do go after people that leave trash in parks or throw cigarette buts on the street (be nice, pick it up, but do engage conversation).
When LEGO will replace plastic with something nicer they will be doing the only useful thing they could do, which is actually solving once and for all the environmental problems their business creates. Not simply being "concerned" and rolling out a green logo.
I'm not talking about rolling out a green logo or planting just a handful of trees, I'm saying what if LEGO took the money from their efforts and applied it to more powerful conservation efforts.
The reality is that every climate-saving action costs money and effort, and some are drastically more helpful than others. Turning off my laptop at night helps, but just barely (@10Wh/night, power from a dirty coal plant = 3.6kWh/yr = 3.6kg CO2/yr.) Biking instead of driving to work helps; say your commute is 10km/6 miles return trip, you save ~2.5kg CO2/day [0], 260 workdays = 650 kg CO2/yr.
But even if you did that, and many other little things to reduce your footprint, it would still be absolutely dwarfed by one transatlantic return flight at nearly 3000kg CO2 produced.
Two points I'm trying to make here:
1) Some ways of reducing emissions are very powerful, others are not. It's worthwile to spend our efforts on the biggest polluters, because:
2) Climate change is an extremely urgent problem that must be tackled NOW. LEGO's efforts are noble, but even if successful they have a small cumulative effect that builds year over year. Depending on what LEGO invests they'll take one to five hundred years to pay off. Meanwhile, the planet will become an unliveable hellscape far sooner. Why not invest the money in something with a more immediate and powerful effect?
Sure sure (i mostly agree until your point 1), but what else could LEGO plausibly do themselves? I already hinted at it but i really don't believe that giving money for someone else to do something will get us far. It's a short term feel good & do nothing hit. I'm a bit tired of all the intellectual masturbation (no offense meant, it's a general comment) on finding the exact best solution that will solve everything. There is no such thing and we're in there for a while. Currently anything will be better so lets just do that, it'll be something less to do and we'll get better ideas going. It's funny how the current state of action is for people to do "concrete personal actions" (like you said, biking, recycling, etc) but for companies/states to shove money around designing abstract plans and do PR explaining how they couldn't care more. We have to keep it real whatever the level of power and especially big structures need to get going.
So, LEGO. Their manufacturing process is probably mostly robotized electric industrial chains which i'm not sure has the room for large improvement (maybe they can lower the energy cost but probably not that much). Another obvious spot is the distribution but i'm not sure they handle it themselves, most of it is probably done by subcontractors. And it's not like LEGO is gonna bring back freight trains instead of trucks, this kind of things has to come from large scale transporters and from public policies. Worrying about material then feels natural. The reason we can't just "shut off" Exxon or Total is because virtually all our industry depends on some sort of petroleum derivative.
So on your point 2: something like what? Right now a reasonable thing to do is probably to work downstream on cutting these dependencies on oil companies, taking away power and eventually shutting them down. It's not because it's urgent that we have to think on short term.
Lego is sometimes an odd company. Their goals don't always align with profits. I have a feeling the ownership allows the direction a lot of leeway in sacrificing short term profits in order to satisfy their core values, one of which is sustainability.
As for if this "should" be done. In Denmark we have a national mentality that says you should fix your own problems before you judge anyone else. So, without pressure to maximize profits, I think it's likely that they are only concerned with how to maximize the "green" value within their own company. In essence it's a very Danish thing to be so focused on yourself that you don't consider if it really matters.
This is noble but seems a little misguided. Legos seem like they'd have by far one of the lowest carbon to utility ratios of any toy you can buy. I used the ones I had as a kid for hours almost every day. I've passed them down to my kid who uses them daily. More than 99% are in perfect shape and I see no reason we won't one day pass them onto another generation.
When you're discarding the plastic junk some family member got for your kid just last Christmas, there probably aren't any Legos in there.
In the worst case, they're high quality ABS so they're more recyclable than most packaging you bother to sort.
Further, making plastic out of petroleum is a form of direct carbon sequestration. Carbon sitting on the floor of a kid's room or inside of a landfill is not warming the atmosphere. It is normally burnt!
It's not though, because if it weren't being used for Lego/plastic products in general we wouldn't just burn it it'd just be left in the ground (or potentially make other oil products slightly cheaper depending on the volume of plastic we're talking about). We burn about all the oil we want for the price right now so anything not used in plastic would just not be extracted.
>We burn about all the oil we want for the price right now so anything not used in plastic would just not be extracted.
That's simply not the case. If you have two consumers competing for the same resource, the price is kept high and the supplier works to produce more while both consumers work to consume less. If one of the consumers is removed, the other has less of an incentive to conserve and the supplier has less of an incentive to produce. If the demand for oil to be used in the chemical industry went down, slightly more oil would be burnt and slightly less would be produced.
If the price of oil fell due to a weakening chemical industry demand, oil-burning enterprises would become more proftable. The lower the price of oil, the cheaper renewables must be to compete. Further, if it was true that the demand for oil to burn was totally inelastic, carbon taxes would be pointless from the outset because raising the price of consumption wouldn't reduce it.
It's not the production of oil that sends CO2 into the atmosphere, it's the burning of it. Thus even though less oil would be produced, more CO2 would still be sent into the atmosphere.
Thats the case for apple chargers. I have seen that macbook chargers fail after about 6 months use because they switched to a plastic that was less toxic. Conveniently the side of the cable that always fails is the one you can't remove from the brick so you have to buy a new $100 charger at least once a year.
Plastics are inherently unstable over time, and that instability is exacerbated by temperature swings, and exposure to UV light. This is an issue in the art world that’s become a conservation nightmare. https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/ne...
I’d be shocked if LEGO were uniquely stable, which means that over time you’re going to see leaching or plasticer and other elements of the plastic. Really the question is how much, over what time period, and how harmful it is to humans.imdont have the answer to that, and I accept that the answer could be anything from “essentially harmless” to “gay frogs” or anything in between.
Most materials used in everyday are also not thermodynamically stable. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are stone (assuming your rain isn’t acidic), table salt, and baking soda.
Most useful materials are kinetically stable (e.g plastic, wood, paper) but will break down over a long enough timeframe.
That’s a good point, and not too pedantic I think. There have been concerns about leaching from pressure treated woods, conservation of paper products which leach acidic compounds are an issue, and I may have given the impression that plastic was somehow unusually ephemeral when it’s far from unique. Thanks for the kind correction.
Kinetic stability vs. Thermodynamic stability is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to make a chemistry lab simulator without just handcoding thousands of reactions.
Books like The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics have all the information needed to simulate a reaction thermodynamically, but not realistically. For example, thermodynamically hydrogen gas should explode on contact with oxygen, but that doesn’t generally happen in real life without something like a spark. You need the rate constant for a reaction and you can only get that through bench research or really advanced quantum chemistry simulations. That rate constant only applies to that reaction so you need a different one for methane and oxygen for example. By that point your back to just handcoding individual reactions.
I wonder if they've tried a rigid-plastic-or-ceramic base, coated in PLA.
They probably have.
Pla takes colors well. Another, more rigid form would keep the element's form intact, so long as the PLA were the right thickness to maintain "springiness" (and thus uncracked rigid form under pressure) and color.
I hope they do well! Those movies boosted sales well enough - maybe a Lego star wars movie could help, if done well by the same Lego Movie team. Lets not pretend that Disney would forego that money.
> “It is important,” said Mr. Brooks, “that we can make a toy that doesn’t jeopardize” children’s future.
That's a weird looking quote. The last two words (children's future) aren't really part of what he said? Was that something the writer added or changed to make it more clear, or more evocative? If so, shouldn't it say [children's future]?
Biggest benefit I can see is that this'll probably lead to a fair bit more research into recyclable/renewable plastics. That tends to help industry as a whole eventually, as knowledge spreads.
Absolutely. A bunch of people in here are suggesting that the effort is wasteful considering Lego's current emissions, but
this is R&D work that could have impacts far beyond their current facilities. Given Lego's quality and durability standards, I'd imagine that anything they're satisfied with will have a wide range of applications in other industries.
i was assuming you were concerned with the assembly coming apart when used, but now i see your concern, using the technic material itself is similar to making an airplane out of concrete~yes?
Im a real cynic when it comes to lego. it has increasingly become a product that is sold to parents and then foisted upon children. I know a few parents who claim their kids love lego but empirical evidence seems to be far from that. We bought lego for our kids but they were (briefly) only really interested in the characters and we built a few things but minecraft is a way more interesting way of doing the same thing. Secondly isnt Lego just a business that becomes obsolete because of technology and 3d printers. How long before you can just print the thing you want - plastic or not. It seems to me lego is destined to only have made sense during the late 20th and early 21st century. we should all get over it... maybe they should have bought minecraft?
I'm an adult and was given a small Lego kit as a gift. Only took me 20 minutes to put it together but it was so fun to problem solve and manipulate things in real life. 3D on the computer will never match the experience for a long time.
I loved lego as a kid, and I had access to a PC by 8.
The key, for me, to keep lego interesting was to have a lot of generic legos. In my mind, lego has done a disservice to the power of their own invention by focusing more on the lego minifigures and things like bionicles -- which you use to build that one set piece and then don't use much beyond that.
If you focus on the bigger sets and sets of just the standard bricks, the limit is your imagination. In my mind, if you're using instructions, you're doing it wrong.
I think there's a nice middle ground in there. You can make the pirate ship, or the TIE fighter or whatever... And then make a pirate tie fighter, with wings and a sail! What I never got was the "make a set and then glue it all up and put it on the mantelpiece" attitude. That's doing it wrong to me.
IIRC sets used to have instructions for multiple models you could make, which helped to support the idea of making different things. My kids want to make the model and put it on the shelf - they're deaf to my protestations.
The instructions are good at teaching you a variety of ways the bricks can be used, help understand how to make larger structures from them, etc. And hell, following the instructions is fun, too.
Bionicle always had an issue balancing "re-usable pieces" and "one-of-a-kind pieces". The original single-piece torso[1] is a great example of a piece that has almost no other uses.
Things slowly got better with more re-usable pieces until the 2008 a of Matorans, which consisted of 2 feet, 2 hands, 4 limbs, 1 body piece, 1 translucent head, 1 mask, and some combination of single piece weapons - most put together with ball joints.
I personally think this move from technic like "composable" pieces to ball-joint only single purpose pieces was the downfall of Bionicle, but there's probably a thousand other factors involved ;)
Bionicle was one of the worst things to come out of Lego, with Ninjago a close second. Lego really loses its way every couple of years, and then somehow they go back to their roots and they prosper.
I think most kids will choose screens over Lego any day. But we try to limit the time our kids spend on screens and Lego is almost always their go-to toy to play with for an afternoon. I'm always amazed at the creativity it fosters.
You should come and try to take some Lego away from my youngest sons. I wish you much good luck and hope there won't be any sharp objects nearby. Also: up your life insurance ;)
Not all kids are different, some will take to Lego like fish to water, others don't care. In my family almost all the kids (girls and boys both) like Lego. This in spite of Lego doing what they can to destroy their image with all the fads an the horrible sets they put out every couple of years until they find their 'true North' again.
> Secondly isnt Lego just a business that becomes obsolete because of technology and 3d printers. How long before you can just print the thing you want - plastic or not.
To get something approaching the build quality and strength of a lego brick, you're going to need a mighty expensive printer.
Rather than trying to re-invent plastics they should just be making the base stocks directly. In theory you can suck in carbon dioxide and build your own carbon chains to make anything you want.
Or they could just keep making them as they've always done. Not everything needs to change, just most things.
I think right now any way you cut that kind of carbon sequestration it's going to be more effective and less polluting to use the energy you'd put into that process another way.
Let's suppose for a moment that we lived in a fully environment-friendly world. If a company decided to use coal or non recycled plastic, we would be now bashing them.
If the same happens in the opposite direction, we think "well, it's not gonna change anything".
It's the equivalent of 200000 cars, a 60000 people town,.. Who cares. It's nice, and ethically it's the right thing to do.
Hopefully they have the honesty to stick with ABS if they can't find an alternative that is actually better for the environment. One fears that, if they do find an alternative, they'll switch for the sake of public perception even though it's actually worse in terms of pollution, energy use, etc..
To all the negativity: isn’t the root of the carbon problem that there’s no single big thing that can make a difference? Vehicles need to change one by one. Power plants need to change one by one. Cattle farms need to change one by one. Here we have LEGO doing its part, which is all that one entity can really be expected to do.
Everybody needs to do their part. What is an ocean if not a multitude of drops?
Last week, I went to my childhood home in France and found a perfectly preserved 40 year old set of Lego Technic from my childhood, and gave them to my daughter to play with. It's going to be well-nigh impossible for Lego to test the longevity of a plant-based replacement, accelerated simulated testing only provides an upper bound.
The only viable option for them would be to find a process to produce ABS using plant-based feedstocks, a process that will likely be an order of magnitude more expensive than petroleum-based ABS, at least to start with.
The article mentions PLA (shudder). It's well known filament material for low-end 3D printing hobbyists, and far inferior to ABS in its physical properties, not to mention that little problem of being water-soluble. The fact they even considered that garbage does not augur well of the judgment of whoever is responsible for the project.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] thread> On-Topic: [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddicraft
And for an encore, Lego only acquired the Kiddicraft assets to wipe out this 'inconvenient truth' before suing another company for patent infringement.
Lego is a great toy, but any story about the origin of the bricks should at least reference the true origins of the brick rather than the Lego white-washed version.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone
We still have some of them in the family.
This may have been after the Page design though, my mother was the eldest child but wasn't born until 1941.
I think we contributed some pictures to the UK Materials engineering society, will ask.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
Page committed suicide after the business failed in the 50s.
[0] http://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875...
> Page was never aware of this, and his daughter has stated that she "was relieved that my father never knew about Lego before he died.”
This leaves me with a different impression of the circumstances surrounding his death than the initial one I got from your comment, however.
I see where you're coming from, but in this case the origin is there only to frame what the article is really about: the engineering challenge for the future of the bricks.
Going into the whitewashed origins of the Lego concept would distract from what the article is about.
That's about 214133 passenger vehicles driven for one year, or 107980 homes' energy use for one year according to this:
https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...
Just like the plastic straw ban, it's basically meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but obviously very important for their brand.
It would probably be much better to invest that money for example in less polluting ocean shipments, which are a huge problem, but that doesn't have the "feel good" factor about it.
Consider for a split second that we may have to make lots of little incremental improvements to have a large gain...
In most companies these policies have come from the CEO down largely because there has been significant demand coming from (a) employees, (b) consumers and (c) shareholders.
Could be the product of lunchtime chats about the world, their place in it, etc... many people in the company may have contributed with marketing making a move.
This is just like the table water ban.
"Meaningful change is hard, let's max out virtue signaling points instead."
Imagine the competitive advantage Lego will have once they develop this new source of material.
You've heard of Moore's Law, ya? Like Einstein said, the most powerful force in the world is compound interest. Same thing.
So unless Lego's output costs cut in half with a reduction in co2 production, there won't be anything like a moores law effect.
Uh huh. No progress, no innovation.
So this is irrelevant too:
Metcalfe's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
"costs cut in half"
Uh huh. We'll never have carbon taxes either.
I don't see any real easy numbers, but it seems a pound of beef is probably in the ballpark of 20 pounds of CO₂, so 1 million tons translates into 50,000 tons of beef, or a few days of US consumption (which is above 1 pound/week per person).
So giving up Legos entirely is like getting everyone in the US to eat chicken 5 times a year.
The problem is that everything is about perception and there's no followthrough to our myopic/distracted news media.
This probably ties more into the ongoing devolution of journalism into "reportage".
- A great depression
- A drastic reduction of population
Any other “saving” measure will immediately be followed by a temptation to use the unused resources. Politically saying “no” to consumption when the resources are available means saying “no” to increasing the government debt by 10: It’s the right solution but politically unviable. Global warming and govt debt is actually the same problem, by the way.
So it’s worth mentioning from the GP that incremental improvements won’t get us out of global warming. Or else, we’ve been lied to about the scale that “we must divide out consumption by 10”.
[0]: https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2017/may/100-pe...
Innovation in what they are good at (plastic bricks, not shipping) seems like a responsible thing to do, even if it is also good PR.
We probably can't predict right now if Lego can have a bigger impact on the world by trying to offset the current emission from other companies, or by being public about adjusting their prices. Pure production numbers give us only part of the answer.
Wouldn't it make more sense for the company to just plant trees or do environmental work or something? I imagine researching and eventually switching to an entirely different material will be on the order of (at least) a half a billion dollars for a company with six billion bucks a year in revenue, probably more.
[edit] I agree with the general sentiment of the comments below, and trust me I'm as concerned about climate change as the rest, but LEGO has so far invested about $200 million into something with an environmental cost of around $5-10 million - and they haven't even gotten close with the solutions they've found so far. $200 million spent in the right places can do a massive amount of good, far more IMHO than a more sustainable LEGO.
To put things in perspective: each LEGO brick is 47 grams of co2. One transatlantic flight is about 3 tons of co2. So one transatlantic flight is equivalent to nearly 60,000 LEGO pieces.
I agree that changes have to come from everywhere to effectively fight global warming, but I think that there's a limit. At what point do you just not bother? There's got to be a cutoff. And couldn't 200 million bucks be used so much more effectively against climate change?
The majority of people in this world want the world to be clean and free of the effects of climate change. Companies are comprised of these people. Hence there will always be internal struggles to "do your part" from employees. Especially since that often ends up making products that are more sustainable not just environmentally friendly. And so win-win for everyone.
Finally if through their research/testing they do come up with durable alternatives to plastic it's a win for us all.
The more who avoid the issue and just plant a few trees, the longer it will take, and the lower the chances of us ever having done enough.
Trees are effective at capturing carbon and building with timber is an effective way to lock up that carbon for a long time.
It is not. It may be locked up for a little while (~100 years) but we're talking about ridiculous amounts in comparison of the millions of years that make up for long-term carbon cycle. When it degrades (burning, decomposition) it just releases the carbon. The tldr of the environmentally problematic human action on the carbon cycle is that we are pumping carbon from the long-term cycle (coal, petroleum, eg inside the earth's crust) into the short-term cycle (atmosphere, biosphere). Biosphere already so huge that there's no way we can make up for our pumping by making it bigger. We just have to stop emptying the long-term cycle. (or find a way to pump the other way; i'm no geologist or chemist but this sounds very unlikely for energy efficiency reason)
France, in the Western average, must divide its emissions by 2.1. Still impossible without either dividing its population by 2, or dividing each person’s wealth by 2.
The government that would implement such a drastic reduction of the economy would never even be elected, and it would cause riots from East to West.
So, low level of emissions can only be reached as the result of a war.
Of course investing money into problematic consequences is useful, but as a society we need to stop lying to ourselves about the root of the problem which is our lifestyle. We consume too much energy, we need to lower petrochemical industry to it's bare minimum (eg eliminate most plastic packaging and recycle it more), we need to stop intensive agriculture and extremist exploitation of natural resources and ecosystems. And we need to change our personal lifestyle, buy less ultra-packaged cooked meals, buy fruits/vegs/cereals/sugar in bulk, not buy a car to our kids just because why not. And make people around follow your lead by hassling them. And yeah, i meant "around you" literally, do go after people that leave trash in parks or throw cigarette buts on the street (be nice, pick it up, but do engage conversation).
When LEGO will replace plastic with something nicer they will be doing the only useful thing they could do, which is actually solving once and for all the environmental problems their business creates. Not simply being "concerned" and rolling out a green logo.
I'm not talking about rolling out a green logo or planting just a handful of trees, I'm saying what if LEGO took the money from their efforts and applied it to more powerful conservation efforts.
The reality is that every climate-saving action costs money and effort, and some are drastically more helpful than others. Turning off my laptop at night helps, but just barely (@10Wh/night, power from a dirty coal plant = 3.6kWh/yr = 3.6kg CO2/yr.) Biking instead of driving to work helps; say your commute is 10km/6 miles return trip, you save ~2.5kg CO2/day [0], 260 workdays = 650 kg CO2/yr.
But even if you did that, and many other little things to reduce your footprint, it would still be absolutely dwarfed by one transatlantic return flight at nearly 3000kg CO2 produced.
Two points I'm trying to make here:
1) Some ways of reducing emissions are very powerful, others are not. It's worthwile to spend our efforts on the biggest polluters, because:
2) Climate change is an extremely urgent problem that must be tackled NOW. LEGO's efforts are noble, but even if successful they have a small cumulative effect that builds year over year. Depending on what LEGO invests they'll take one to five hundred years to pay off. Meanwhile, the planet will become an unliveable hellscape far sooner. Why not invest the money in something with a more immediate and powerful effect?
[0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
So, LEGO. Their manufacturing process is probably mostly robotized electric industrial chains which i'm not sure has the room for large improvement (maybe they can lower the energy cost but probably not that much). Another obvious spot is the distribution but i'm not sure they handle it themselves, most of it is probably done by subcontractors. And it's not like LEGO is gonna bring back freight trains instead of trucks, this kind of things has to come from large scale transporters and from public policies. Worrying about material then feels natural. The reason we can't just "shut off" Exxon or Total is because virtually all our industry depends on some sort of petroleum derivative.
So on your point 2: something like what? Right now a reasonable thing to do is probably to work downstream on cutting these dependencies on oil companies, taking away power and eventually shutting them down. It's not because it's urgent that we have to think on short term.
As for if this "should" be done. In Denmark we have a national mentality that says you should fix your own problems before you judge anyone else. So, without pressure to maximize profits, I think it's likely that they are only concerned with how to maximize the "green" value within their own company. In essence it's a very Danish thing to be so focused on yourself that you don't consider if it really matters.
When you're discarding the plastic junk some family member got for your kid just last Christmas, there probably aren't any Legos in there.
In the worst case, they're high quality ABS so they're more recyclable than most packaging you bother to sort.
That's simply not the case. If you have two consumers competing for the same resource, the price is kept high and the supplier works to produce more while both consumers work to consume less. If one of the consumers is removed, the other has less of an incentive to conserve and the supplier has less of an incentive to produce. If the demand for oil to be used in the chemical industry went down, slightly more oil would be burnt and slightly less would be produced.
If the price of oil fell due to a weakening chemical industry demand, oil-burning enterprises would become more proftable. The lower the price of oil, the cheaper renewables must be to compete. Further, if it was true that the demand for oil to burn was totally inelastic, carbon taxes would be pointless from the outset because raising the price of consumption wouldn't reduce it.
I’d be shocked if LEGO were uniquely stable, which means that over time you’re going to see leaching or plasticer and other elements of the plastic. Really the question is how much, over what time period, and how harmful it is to humans.imdont have the answer to that, and I accept that the answer could be anything from “essentially harmless” to “gay frogs” or anything in between.
Most useful materials are kinetically stable (e.g plastic, wood, paper) but will break down over a long enough timeframe.
</pedantic>
Kinetic stability vs. Thermodynamic stability is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to make a chemistry lab simulator without just handcoding thousands of reactions.
Books like The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics have all the information needed to simulate a reaction thermodynamically, but not realistically. For example, thermodynamically hydrogen gas should explode on contact with oxygen, but that doesn’t generally happen in real life without something like a spark. You need the rate constant for a reaction and you can only get that through bench research or really advanced quantum chemistry simulations. That rate constant only applies to that reaction so you need a different one for methane and oxygen for example. By that point your back to just handcoding individual reactions.
Source: I have left Lego outside, in the sun for many weeks. The effect is also visible at every Legoland.
They probably have.
Pla takes colors well. Another, more rigid form would keep the element's form intact, so long as the PLA were the right thickness to maintain "springiness" (and thus uncracked rigid form under pressure) and color.
I hope they do well! Those movies boosted sales well enough - maybe a Lego star wars movie could help, if done well by the same Lego Movie team. Lets not pretend that Disney would forego that money.
That's a weird looking quote. The last two words (children's future) aren't really part of what he said? Was that something the writer added or changed to make it more clear, or more evocative? If so, shouldn't it say [children's future]?
The key, for me, to keep lego interesting was to have a lot of generic legos. In my mind, lego has done a disservice to the power of their own invention by focusing more on the lego minifigures and things like bionicles -- which you use to build that one set piece and then don't use much beyond that.
If you focus on the bigger sets and sets of just the standard bricks, the limit is your imagination. In my mind, if you're using instructions, you're doing it wrong.
They still do sometimes—they even have a line where every set has instructions for 3 different models.
On the other hand I used to love making Airfix models.
Things slowly got better with more re-usable pieces until the 2008 a of Matorans, which consisted of 2 feet, 2 hands, 4 limbs, 1 body piece, 1 translucent head, 1 mask, and some combination of single piece weapons - most put together with ball joints.
I personally think this move from technic like "composable" pieces to ball-joint only single purpose pieces was the downfall of Bionicle, but there's probably a thousand other factors involved ;)
[1] http://img.bricklink.com/PL/32489.jpg
Not all kids are different, some will take to Lego like fish to water, others don't care. In my family almost all the kids (girls and boys both) like Lego. This in spite of Lego doing what they can to destroy their image with all the fads an the horrible sets they put out every couple of years until they find their 'true North' again.
To get something approaching the build quality and strength of a lego brick, you're going to need a mighty expensive printer.
This applies to so many things in life. Voting, bad habits, and companies doing things to make the environment better.
Or they could just keep making them as they've always done. Not everything needs to change, just most things.
Let's suppose for a moment that we lived in a fully environment-friendly world. If a company decided to use coal or non recycled plastic, we would be now bashing them. If the same happens in the opposite direction, we think "well, it's not gonna change anything".
It's the equivalent of 200000 cars, a 60000 people town,.. Who cares. It's nice, and ethically it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, if Lego wants to fund the search for a greener alternative to ABS, we should all be happy.
If they ever find one, then other companies and the environment could benefit too.
This is especially true since if the new material satisfies lego's stringent requirements, then it should be good enough for everybody else.
Everybody needs to do their part. What is an ocean if not a multitude of drops?
The only viable option for them would be to find a process to produce ABS using plant-based feedstocks, a process that will likely be an order of magnitude more expensive than petroleum-based ABS, at least to start with.
The article mentions PLA (shudder). It's well known filament material for low-end 3D printing hobbyists, and far inferior to ABS in its physical properties, not to mention that little problem of being water-soluble. The fact they even considered that garbage does not augur well of the judgment of whoever is responsible for the project.