Lego Wants To Completely Remake Its Toy Bricks Using Plant-Based Or Recycled Materials (seattletimes.com) 120
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.
Re: Make Legos Edible (Score:1)
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!
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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.
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When I was little I ate a whole set of Lego.
Did you end up shitting bricks?
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Short clip [tenor.com] of the event in question.
Why (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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And the proper way to shun someone is to use unicorns [youtube.com].
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Pence is here warming up for his forthcoming at-bat.
Re:Why (Score:4, Insightful)
They are doing it because of marketing. They're trying to sell more toys by pretending to care about the environment.
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They are doing it because of marketing. They're trying to sell more toys by pretending to care about the environment.
DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!
We have a winner!
We are seeing a new generation of parents that have been raised by their tree hugging a pot smoking parents. They want toys that are intellectually stimulating, environmentally friendly, contains no toxic chemicals, and all that other nonsense. Legos are some of the best toys for children as they are. I loved them growing up, as did my brothers and friends. Lego made a big push to get girls to like them with girl friendly color palettes, kits, and mark
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They want toys that are intellectually stimulating, environmentally friendly, contains no toxic chemicals, and all that other nonsense.
Have I passed through into a parallel universe? At what point did "intellectually stimulating", "environmentally friendly" and "non-toxic" become nonsense?
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Have I passed through into a parallel universe? At what point did "intellectually stimulating", "environmentally friendly" and "non-toxic" become nonsense?
My guess is between 1975 and 1990. From about 1975 back to the start of WW1 there was greater concerns than what kind of toys the children had. Parents were more concerned about war, economic depression, and energy shortages then what the toys were made of. After 1975 there wasn't much concern for war, the economy was starting to grow again, and things were looking fairly good. In 1990 things were even better with the Cold War over and so there wasn't parents much concerned about a nuclear war. So, som
Re: Why (Score:4, Interesting)
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Racism is not a natural response in most people. Where you find racism, you will find politicians attempting to use anger and hatred as tools to gain power, particularly among losers looking to escape responsibility for their own deficiencies.
People working hard and with a modicum of success do not go seeking enemies; it takes a lot of the Big Lie technique before their natural inhibitions against vile stupidity are worn down.
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They are doing it because of marketing. They're trying to sell more toys by pretending to care about the environment.
Or as an excuse to sell blocks which degrade over time solving the "used Lego sales" problem.
Bricks aren't where the carbon is going.... (Score:3)
Anyway, the best way to reduce Co2 isn't to di
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Legos are probably a half decent way of sequestering carbon.
Errr in what way? It takes energy to make them, it takes energy to get materials out of the ground, and at no point do they take carbon from the atmosphere in the process, unless you count millions of years ago as the start of the process.
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But I heard on YouTube that was all fake and it was happening right now since supposedly wells were filled up again!Q"!!
It must be true!
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Reposting because I understood your post now. You're quite wrong.
Oil products that go into plastic are not oil products that go into some Hummer. Specifically they don't go into the Hummer to prevent the inside of that Hummer from turning into some gooey mess. The Hummer will continue to use oil. However what may also happen is that if eventually the Hummers stop consuming oil then Lego's raw material costs will increase.
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No I'm saying specifically that you can't fuel a Hummer with Legos and that the absence of Legos will not reduce the oil being processed to make them.
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Your comment was reasonably intelligent. Pity you had to open with this line:
Legos are probably a half decent way of sequestering carbon.
Because that statement is so outright stupid that I have to dismiss everything else you said.
Think about it.
All ABS plastic is sourced from all ready sequestered carbon. It can't be a good way of sequestering carbon, because you're never going to be able to put more carbon back in the ground than you dug up to make the ABS.
Now, if they start making ABS equivalent plastics
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The comment may have sounded intelligent but it's basis is fundamentally flawed. Plastic products made from oil are part of a larger economy of oil and not separate. Oil being made into lego is not oil that isn't being burned in a Hummer. Rather Oil is distilled and converted into various forms, part of which goes into your hummer, and the other part of which goes painfully into the bottom of your feet as you find the bathroom in the dark at 2am. Removing one of the two uses won't reduce the amount of oil b
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Why? Because this is the future of mankind if mankind has any future and Lego wants to be long-term sustainable. Mankind will run out of oil within the next 100 years or so. Prices will rise drastically much earlier. It makes perfect sense to change your business model now, especially if the change may take many years or even decades before it's completed.
Of course, there are people who will pretend that new techniques will allow us to tap into oil much longer but they are missing the point. Those new techn
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Re: Why (Score:2)
It's not patents that stop people from making the same stuff, it's the fact that no one else is willing to build to spec. Lego are ridiculously durable and precisely engineered.
Softer plastic is better (Score:1)
I remember an old toy block system almost identical, dimensions were the same, to Lego blocks but they were notably softer plastic. They were still plenty tough but quite a few blocks had my teeth marks left in them.
I liked those blocks more, even as a kid, because they didn't hurt your foot as much when stood on.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Recycling ABS on a larger scale (Score:2)
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 en
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Re:Recycling ABS on a larger scale (Score:4, Interesting)
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Best way to deal with used plastic is simply burn it, and generate some electricity.
Re:Recycling ABS on a larger scale (Score:4, Informative)
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... [blogspot.com]
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/... [google.com]
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-... [phys.org]
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.
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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.
These days they pretty much do, thanks to EU recycling regulations. Corporations are responsible for recycling what they "produce" (rebrand, usually) so the plastic parts are marked for recycling now.
Dissolvable (Score:2)
Make them soluble so they can be absorbed when embedded in a parent's foot.
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Interlocking molded gelatin capsules filled with skin lotion, when you step on them your feet feel BETTER than they did before!
Exactly the same (Score:2)
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
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Problem is no family with little kids, and the only friends with kids either have infants or teenagers who wouldn't be interested... though a 6-month old is technically someone under 18 right?
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Knowing how Lego specifies their bricks, "exactly" is the right word. For a long time, Lego manufacturing used the tightest tolerances on plastic products in the world (on the order of 2 micrometer, IIRC). They've since been overtaken, but this is the reason 40 year-old Lego bricks still work perfectly, while clone products tend to fall apart. Lego won't change to new plastics until they get this right.
Material consistency is also an issue (Score:1)
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
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This post is an example of what happens when you eat the new biodegradable Lego blocks.
Maybe (Score:2)
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.
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You mean the smell of Harbor Freight?
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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.
Bayer/Monsanto (Score:2)
"Reuse" always beats "Recycle" (Score:5, Interesting)
There's NO NEED to make Lego bricks "recyclable", because there's no fucking need TO recycle them... they can be reused as-is. Seriously, I can take a box of Lego bricks from when I was a small child decades ago, and they interoperate perfectly well with a brand new box of Lego bricks purchased now.
It's like hand-wringing about an IBM Model M keyboard being "non-recyclable" -- it's an utterly moot point, because they're still useful today, practically indestructible, and even if damaged, you can almost always take 20 "broken" Model M keyboards and end up with 17-19 working ones after cannibalizing one or two of them for spare parts.
If anything, Lego is worried that TOO FEW Lego bricks end up in landfills, and TOO MANY end up getting passed on to the next generation. Eventually, thanks to exponential growth, we'll end up in a period where newborns end up inheriting a half-million Lego bricks that belonged to their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and have NO NEED for more. Lego has to find some way to make them NOT last forever so that won't happen.
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. 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.
I was going to call bullshit on exponential growth, but you seem to have thought about your post quite a bit, so I assume the exponential growth you're referring to is as follows:
generation 0: parents buy child a box of legos.
child leaves legos scattered on the floor.
parent steps on legos barefoot, jumps into the air, slips, and cracks skull landing on legos.
generation 1: generation 0's orphans give their legos to their kids.
repeat tragedy of generation 0.
repeat for N generations, producing exponential grow
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I've got 50 year old Lego bricks and the only reason I can tell the difference is that the logo changed sometime in the 70s and the blue and white ones have yellowed. Other than that, they are perfectly fine. Lego is smart enough not to mess with their product unless they can come up with the perfect alternative.
Re: "Reuse" always beats "Recycle" (Score:2)
The yellowing is due to flameproofing chemicals. Put the yellowed bricks in a Ziploc bag, add enough 40-volume cream-type peroxide developer for hair dye, seal the bag, and leave it in the sun for a few hours (shake the bag every 30-60 minutes to redistribute the peroxide).
If you're *really* careful, you can also apply it with a brush to whiten things like an Amiga mouse, Intellivision II gamepad, etc. Just don't let it get on the circuit boards or active components.
Google: "retro-brite"
Later... 2030... Always Later... (Score:2)
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 yea
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Be sure to include governments - you can add most of the Kyoto Protocol signatories to your list.
I knew it (Score:2)
”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.
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My dad stepped on a Pyraminx on my bedroom floor. He was hopping mad about that!
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M'aam your kids are eating lego ... (Score:1)
... that's no problem, it beats fastfood.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Laser-Cut Bamboo (Score:2)
Why not make the bricks from Bamboo? To hell with the colors, use your imagination!
There is Plenty of ABS to be had for Recycling! (Score:2)
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.
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The sad part is, these plastics are classed as "hard plastic" and not as recyclable.