They were trying to manufacture bricks from PET, but the properties of that plastic compared to ABS made it too difficult. Doesn't sound like a specifically 'recycled plastic' issue as such.
...but as the Guardian article says, over 80% is, and those are the bricks you probably think of when hearing "LEGO" - the remainder are elements that are transparent, bendy, have to be especially durable or have other special requirements. The article you linked also includes several "historic" plastic materials that aren't used anymore.
Better match for a recycled plastic? Finding that match means finding some consumer stuff which doesn't need to be that durable, which is going to mean even more pollution of Earth with plastics. Also finding too durable stuff in 2023 is a difficult problem considering the fact that manufacturers are never interested in doing too durable things.
That doesn't seem to be the reason why they're abandoning the plan. It seems like instead it's because they would have to change the entire manufacturing chain, and therefore increase their carbon footprint by changing to recycled plastics instead of decreasing it.
> The “level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories” to scale up recycled PET use, he said. “After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher. It was disappointing.”
I think if we replace 'carbon footprint' by 'too expensive' we might get closer to the actual reason.
Edit: I am sure that their factories are upgraded periodically so they should defer to the next upgrade instead of doing it now if that's too expensive and resources-hungry. Same as with changing car to an EV, the best for the environment is probably to keep your current ICE car until it's time to replace it and only then to buy an EV.
In any case, Lego's problem is that their business is fundamentally plastics at a time when plastics have got a bad rep to the point of being the bogeyman in some cases, and this shows that they are struggling to find a way around that even if only in term of image.
> It seems like instead it's because they would have to change the entire manufacturing chain
I live in such a place where all chemistry products from grocery shops used to decrease their package. For example, Ariel 500g become Ariel 400g and it happens not only to P&G goods. That tells me that claims about hardness of changing some giant well-functioning manufacturing processes are just a BS.
If they did this they’d have to sell it as a different brand.
Selling their Lego branded toys with recycled plastics would damage their brand. Kids would be better off buying knock offs instead of bricks made with recycled plastics.
LEGO has used and uses may different kinds of plastic not only ABS. From my understanding the effort here was halted because the whole reason to use PET was to be greener but if manufacturing with PET burns more CO2 than other non renewables it makes no sense at this time.
Seems the better thing might be to have some kind of “pre-owned” program where kids no longer playing with their legos can send them back, get refurbished, and resold.
And plastic ending up in UV light or, apparently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37624070), in contact with water and especially hot water, all of which apparently break it down to micro and nanoplastics. I don't know whether it's coarse and rough, but it gets everywhere.
completely agree. legos last for DECADES. That shit ain't going in a landfill. they retain their value pretty well. if anything, its jsut another sequesterization method as far as I'm concerned.
those stopit plastic wrappers they put on everything though...
The average weight of a lego is 2.5 grams. 32 billion bricks works out to ~5,500 metric tons of legos per year. Worldwide. That's less than a rounding error compared to any other kind of plastic production.
I know your first line was sarcastic, but Lego should really be held up as what plastic can offer for sustainability. As I commented elsewhere, I have very few other 50+ year objects in my house, let alone toys that my kids actively play with. The next closest thing might be Atari cartridges at 40 years old, but with few exceptions, kids don’t really care about those either (coincidentally plastic shelled). I suppose I have vinyl records that are at least 50 years old (also plastic).
I suppose we also have wood and glass furniture and glass and ceramics that are that old or older. That well designed plastic items can have the longevity of heirloom furniture should be a positive selling point.
Yes, Lego's product is very durable (not sure about sustainability), I think mostly because it is very stable: bricks are simple and they don't change. Well, nowadays they seem to be doing a lot of custom bricks for specific models but by and large bricks can be kept across generations.
My previous comment wasn't sarcastic. I think the main issue for Lego is that plastics have a bad rep. They can't say "who cares 5,000 tons is nothing" as that would be PR suicide and they can't stop using plastics, either... hence them trying to move to recycled plastics or at the very least to be seen to be seriously trying to do something.
Lego bricks are forever, more or less. I don't know anyone who has trashed Lego bricks, they are reused, passed down to children, resold, etc... or stored in giant bins waiting to be reused.
There are few things more environmentally friendly than that. Had they used recycled or bioplastics, they would have been carbon negative.
Plastic is not bad at all, there is no perfect material, but plastic checks many of the boxes, even its environment footprint is low. It is only a problem because it is too cheap, so cheap that we throw it away without thinking. But it is not the case for Lego bricks, people don't throw away Lego bricks, and they are not cheap.
Where is all the Lego then? They have been making billions of bricks for decades. If it never breaks, they should be able to just shut down the factory and people would sell between themselves.
I would assume a huge portion eventually just gets landfilled.
- People have more Lego. Passed over collections become bigger and bigger. Maybe the average collection was 2 boxes of bricks before, now it is 5.
- More people use Lego. There is a lot of Lego for adults now. It is not just for kids, but kids still play with Lego. People, especially adults can make bigger models too, with more bricks.
- A lot of Lego are stored in attics, unused. What will happen to them after they are rediscovered? I don't know, but they will probably end up growing someone else's collection.
- Some may end up in landfills, lost, broken, etc... But I think it is a very small amount. Used, bulk Lego bricks are about $15/kg, more than copper scrap, it would be worth digging for them if they were a common occurrence.
I would think the opposite would be true. Plastics can only be recycled a few times before the long chain hydrocarbons start to break down too much, so the process "should" be, Virgin plastic -> 1 time use -> recycled into long term use.
In fairness they "forgot" because of concentrated efforts on the part of plastics producers to make them forget, and the complacency of regulators who were happy to put "you can recycle this" stamps on millions of products that were and still are largely bound for landfills and/or the pacific garbage patch.
But offloading responsibility for climate disasters onto consumers instead of the companies actually making all the decisions and the regulators permitting them to is a time honored tradition for the oil industry at this point.
Yes, because they're incentivized to (or depending how you look at it, penalized if they don't) by way of the core charge you pay that is refunded when you return the old battery.
It seems we have a solution to this problem but we're not using it. Imagine if you had to pay a "plastics charge" when you bought a 6-pack of soda, that would be refunded upon turning in the bottles? I have to figure that would prompt a lot more recycling.
However even beyond that, the cost to recycle plastic is also higher than that of just producing virgin plastic, partially because of the substantial subsidies given to the oil and gas industry. As such, it's pretty understandable why even the best recycling outfits in the United States don't see a ton of business, when recycle-ready plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic and takes more energy and effort to convert into new plastic products[1], you'd be stupid to do that. Hence we really only see it in niche industries where they can market their products as being "made from recycled bottles" or something and charge higher prices to Eco-conscious consumers. And to be clear, that's a good thing, unambiguously. But instead of relying on people who are willing to spend more to do a good thing, it seems to be to be far more effective to for starters, mandate businesses that make plastic products to at the very least, pay what oil is actually worth, especially given that we still rely on it for energy for tons of applications to which EV alternatives aren't yet ready for.
1: This is of course presuming your plastic product can be made from recycled plastic at all which is not a given. Many "recyclable" plastics cannot be used to make certain plastic products. Still other plastics are indeed single use unless your secondary use is MUCH DIFFERENT to the first, in which case even calling it recyclable seems dubious at best. Car bodies can technically be recycled to produce coral reefs, but few people would call that recycling.
And hell, we still have areas of the country where recycling service isn't even a given. I have a friend in Indiana who doesn't recycle because the city he lives in charges a non-insubstantial fee for recycling pickup, and while he would like to, he just can't afford it. So he drops his bottles and things in public recycling bins when able, but the majority of his goes in the trash because the city doesn't provide the service with regular garbage pickup.
I put a plastic container into the recycling bin. The recycling truck picks it up, takes it to the recycling facility, who sorts it into waste plastic that they can’t process. Previous purchasers of waste plastic no longer purchase it, because it is not economically viable to recycle. The recycling facility puts it on another truck which goes to the landfill.
Instead of telling us this, however, the city pretends they still recycle all the plastics they accept. It would be more environmentally friendly to put the junk plastic in the trash to begin with to avoid the extra trip and sorting. If we knew what plastics couldn’t be processed, we could avoid buying them as well (as much as you can avoid buying blister wrapped products).
Sure, but the original slogan was "reduce, reuse, recycle". In that order.
Recycling is a farce in that for decades companies have focused on it to ensure we don't reduce how much we consume. For example, I just heard an obvious greenwashing advertisement on the radio for some product the other day that said we should all "recycle, reduce, reuse", i.e. "consume the same amount, consume maybe a bit less, and if you really have to don't consume".
I mostly agree but I believe there's a lack of science in material design taking recycling/degradation into account. Be it plastic or other materials and tricks.
Having worked in a plastics factory (it's where I learned how to properly troubleshoot things, injection molding is fun) we recycled the runners or bad parts in house. Toss them in the grinder, blend them with a certain amount of virgin material, and it doesn't really affect the parts until you start getting past the 80/20 blends (if I remember correctly and this was about 11 years ago so some things may have changed).
But this is all relatively clean, fresh from the mold plastic. It didn't sit in a shipping container in the heat for months, degrading. It didn't absorb any number of oils or contaminants. I imagine a dirtier recycled plastic would require more virgin material to maintain the intended strength/material properties, so where the recycled plastic comes from is likely just as important as what you are trying to use it for.
Don't forget "refuse". A ton of stuff is not worth the materials from which they were made in the first place.
A nice thing to keep in mind is that complex products are essentially non-recyclable. A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.
I think the intention was pointing out that reduce implies you consume only the things you need, while refuse means you'll deliberately refuse wasteful things even if you need them.
For example, smarthome lighting. The lightbulbs could be dumb, and all the smarts could live in the lightswitches, that would reduce waste. Conversely, the traditional smarthome lighting approach is very wasteful, every lightbulb is a small computer, and who knows what percent of the discarded lightbulbs gets recycled.
Don't think iPods are anything special, they are just small computers: they have CPU, ram, storage and a battery. I'd imagine they mostly went into e-cycling just like the billions of cellphones that are scrapped. They are similar sizes to cell phones.
About "reusing": using less plastic is great, but as far as I'm concerned, the main problem is not plastic products that are used for a long time (and that includes Lego), but single-use plastic. It can even be counter-productive: salt and pepper mills made out of plastic are practically indestructible, but no longer "fashionable", so we recently got some made of glass, and promptly ended up breaking one of them and having to replace it, which is also not that good for the environment (glass production needs a lot of energy).
> which is also not that good for the environment (glass production needs a lot of energy)
Not saying you're wrong, but how many glass bottles do you use on a monthly basis? The embodied energy of a salt/pepper mill does not compare there I think.
Why not both? What makes jars the right problem to optimize? People don’t consume jars, they consume jarred things. One’s consumption of jarred mustard is unrelated to jarred pepper. You’re assuming they haven’t thought about other jarred things.
A mill lets you control how course you want the salt. It comes in big chunks which you might want to use as is, and then the mill lets you configure exactly how fine to grind.
As was the intent of plastic producers. And we are now past the point where there is no competition. No one is going to use glass to replace plastic in mass, the cost is too high.
Credit where credit is due. Lego is an inherently reusable product. It is regularly passed down in families. So I don't much care that it isn't recyclable or made from recycled content. Go after all the cheap plastic toys designed to break a week after Christmas to make room for the next must-have thing.
My kids are playing with Lego that belonged to my mother when she was a child! With the exception of Lincoln Log, Erector Sets, and Tinker Toys, I don’t know if any other toys we’ve given them with such pedigree. Going into teenage years they still play with 50+ year old Lego, which are forward compatible with all of my sets from childhood and all of their new sets.
Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys lost their interest a long time ago, and erector set hasn’t caught in, except for some school projects.
I guess an argument could be made that discarded lego bricks are a much bigger problem most other plastic products, given their durability. But nobody ever throws lego away.
Or less of a problem. If they are durable then they won't break down and contribute to the microplastics problem. There are worse things than sitting inert deep inside a landfill.
The volume of Lego discarded is a drop in the ocean compared to all other plastics. I expect most Lego leaves homes unintentionally inside a vacuum bag.
75 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] thread> The “level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories” to scale up recycled PET use, he said. “After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher. It was disappointing.”
Edit: I am sure that their factories are upgraded periodically so they should defer to the next upgrade instead of doing it now if that's too expensive and resources-hungry. Same as with changing car to an EV, the best for the environment is probably to keep your current ICE car until it's time to replace it and only then to buy an EV.
In any case, Lego's problem is that their business is fundamentally plastics at a time when plastics have got a bad rep to the point of being the bogeyman in some cases, and this shows that they are struggling to find a way around that even if only in term of image.
I live in such a place where all chemistry products from grocery shops used to decrease their package. For example, Ariel 500g become Ariel 400g and it happens not only to P&G goods. That tells me that claims about hardness of changing some giant well-functioning manufacturing processes are just a BS.
Selling their Lego branded toys with recycled plastics would damage their brand. Kids would be better off buying knock offs instead of bricks made with recycled plastics.
(Note: I love Lego products. We have giant bins of previously-loved bricks.)
those stopit plastic wrappers they put on everything though...
Let's have a sense of proportion.
I suppose we also have wood and glass furniture and glass and ceramics that are that old or older. That well designed plastic items can have the longevity of heirloom furniture should be a positive selling point.
My previous comment wasn't sarcastic. I think the main issue for Lego is that plastics have a bad rep. They can't say "who cares 5,000 tons is nothing" as that would be PR suicide and they can't stop using plastics, either... hence them trying to move to recycled plastics or at the very least to be seen to be seriously trying to do something.
There are few things more environmentally friendly than that. Had they used recycled or bioplastics, they would have been carbon negative.
Plastic is not bad at all, there is no perfect material, but plastic checks many of the boxes, even its environment footprint is low. It is only a problem because it is too cheap, so cheap that we throw it away without thinking. But it is not the case for Lego bricks, people don't throw away Lego bricks, and they are not cheap.
I would assume a huge portion eventually just gets landfilled.
Some guesses:
- People have more Lego. Passed over collections become bigger and bigger. Maybe the average collection was 2 boxes of bricks before, now it is 5.
- More people use Lego. There is a lot of Lego for adults now. It is not just for kids, but kids still play with Lego. People, especially adults can make bigger models too, with more bricks.
- A lot of Lego are stored in attics, unused. What will happen to them after they are rediscovered? I don't know, but they will probably end up growing someone else's collection.
- Some may end up in landfills, lost, broken, etc... But I think it is a very small amount. Used, bulk Lego bricks are about $15/kg, more than copper scrap, it would be worth digging for them if they were a common occurrence.
Lego is essentially a forever product. Not millenia, but compared to plastic destined for waste (packaging, cutlery, bags, etc etc).
But offloading responsibility for climate disasters onto consumers instead of the companies actually making all the decisions and the regulators permitting them to is a time honored tradition for the oil industry at this point.
It seems we have a solution to this problem but we're not using it. Imagine if you had to pay a "plastics charge" when you bought a 6-pack of soda, that would be refunded upon turning in the bottles? I have to figure that would prompt a lot more recycling.
However even beyond that, the cost to recycle plastic is also higher than that of just producing virgin plastic, partially because of the substantial subsidies given to the oil and gas industry. As such, it's pretty understandable why even the best recycling outfits in the United States don't see a ton of business, when recycle-ready plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic and takes more energy and effort to convert into new plastic products[1], you'd be stupid to do that. Hence we really only see it in niche industries where they can market their products as being "made from recycled bottles" or something and charge higher prices to Eco-conscious consumers. And to be clear, that's a good thing, unambiguously. But instead of relying on people who are willing to spend more to do a good thing, it seems to be to be far more effective to for starters, mandate businesses that make plastic products to at the very least, pay what oil is actually worth, especially given that we still rely on it for energy for tons of applications to which EV alternatives aren't yet ready for.
1: This is of course presuming your plastic product can be made from recycled plastic at all which is not a given. Many "recyclable" plastics cannot be used to make certain plastic products. Still other plastics are indeed single use unless your secondary use is MUCH DIFFERENT to the first, in which case even calling it recyclable seems dubious at best. Car bodies can technically be recycled to produce coral reefs, but few people would call that recycling.
And hell, we still have areas of the country where recycling service isn't even a given. I have a friend in Indiana who doesn't recycle because the city he lives in charges a non-insubstantial fee for recycling pickup, and while he would like to, he just can't afford it. So he drops his bottles and things in public recycling bins when able, but the majority of his goes in the trash because the city doesn't provide the service with regular garbage pickup.
Instead of telling us this, however, the city pretends they still recycle all the plastics they accept. It would be more environmentally friendly to put the junk plastic in the trash to begin with to avoid the extra trip and sorting. If we knew what plastics couldn’t be processed, we could avoid buying them as well (as much as you can avoid buying blister wrapped products).
Recycling is a farce in that for decades companies have focused on it to ensure we don't reduce how much we consume. For example, I just heard an obvious greenwashing advertisement on the radio for some product the other day that said we should all "recycle, reduce, reuse", i.e. "consume the same amount, consume maybe a bit less, and if you really have to don't consume".
But this is all relatively clean, fresh from the mold plastic. It didn't sit in a shipping container in the heat for months, degrading. It didn't absorb any number of oils or contaminants. I imagine a dirtier recycled plastic would require more virgin material to maintain the intended strength/material properties, so where the recycled plastic comes from is likely just as important as what you are trying to use it for.
A nice thing to keep in mind is that complex products are essentially non-recyclable. A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.
I don't see how it's different from "reduce": you have to refuse to reduce.
For example, smarthome lighting. The lightbulbs could be dumb, and all the smarts could live in the lightswitches, that would reduce waste. Conversely, the traditional smarthome lighting approach is very wasteful, every lightbulb is a small computer, and who knows what percent of the discarded lightbulbs gets recycled.
By definition, that’s what reduce is. Whether you need it (reducing water consumption) or don’t (reducing smart bulb consumption), it’s reduce.
Can you name some examples?
Not saying you're wrong, but how many glass bottles do you use on a monthly basis? The embodied energy of a salt/pepper mill does not compare there I think.
Why not both? What makes jars the right problem to optimize? People don’t consume jars, they consume jarred things. One’s consumption of jarred mustard is unrelated to jarred pepper. You’re assuming they haven’t thought about other jarred things.
They want to avoid wasteful packaging
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37642110
Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys lost their interest a long time ago, and erector set hasn’t caught in, except for some school projects.