Lego Plans To Make Half the Plastic In Bricks From Renewable Materials By 2026 68
Lego plans to make half of its bricks from renewable or recycled materials by 2026, with a goal of fully transitioning by 2032. While the company cites higher production costs and challenges with existing materials, it says it's committed to not passing these costs onto consumers. The Guardian reports: The Danish company last year ditched efforts to make bricks entirely from recycled bottles because of cost and production issues. At the moment, 22% of the material in its colourful bricks is not made from fossil fuels. The toymaker hopes gradually to bring down the amount of oil-based plastic it uses by paying up to 70% more for certified renewable resin, the raw plastic used to manufacture the bricks, in an attempt to encourage manufacturers to increase production. [...] Lego has also expanded its brick takeback programme, Replay -- where consumers can donate old bricks to the company through free shipping -- into the UK and continued to test similar models in the US and Europe.
Hey LEGO (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey LEGO,
Maybe keep making the bricks out of ABS plastic because that's what makes it LEGO and not MEGA BLOKS or SUPER BLOKS or any of the other 26 "LEGO Compatible" interlocking bricks. The problem with these other bricks is that it's only mechanically compatible, they're often not made out of the right material and when these bricks end up mixed in with LEGO, they're always the ones ones that damage the LEGO bricks.
https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/aboutus/assets/blt19f572ab26a9af07/Responsibility-Report-2016.pdf
One of their prototype's uses plastic made from wheat, page 48. Just what we need, "food" turned into plastic rather than eaten. Now maybe they meant "wheat waste" but that's not indicated.
As long as the plastic material is identical (eg ABS plastic from plant waste rather than oil) I don't see the problem, but like with the Coke/Pepsi "plant plastic", all this has managed to do is create more microplastic contamination in drinks because the required change to storage conditions for the weaker plastic isn't being done.
At least the LEGO ABS plastic is stupidly durable except for the baseplate/playmat stuff (the ones that are basically a 100x100 stud sheet of sheet that breaks on the corners from use.) So perhaps start there for durability replacement plastic.
Re:Hey LEGO (Score:4, Insightful)
"food" turned into plastic rather than eaten.
To be fair, we already use corn and sugar cane to make ethanol to fuel vehicles.
So, what Lego is doing isn't significantly stupider than what we already do.
Re: Hey LEGO (Score:4, Interesting)
Lego wanted to do this decades ago, but didnâ(TM)t because they couldnâ(TM)t find a bioplastic that behaved perfectly. I suspect the fact that theyâ(TM)re now going ahead means theyâ(TM)ve figured out how to do it right.
Re: Hey LEGO (Score:3)
Feel free to donate some unicode conversion code to /. Or maybe simply mark html forms with a content type and let most browsers finally do the right thing. Point is, there are more constructive ways to go about this.
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This Unicode issue has been going on for years and has apparently fallen on deaf ears. It is not clear how to nudge the people who run /. to actually improve this.
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There is no unicode issue. The backend handles it just fine, and has done so for decades. The problem is, there are plenty of codepoints which can be used to corrupt the page - things like decorations (accents, etc) which can be endlessly stacked to create a page that takes forever to load and is unreadable.
And Unicode doesn't make it easy to filt
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The problem is, there are plenty of codepoints which can be used to corrupt the page - things like decorations (accents, etc) which can be endlessly stacked to create a page that takes forever to load and is unreadable.
No. simply strip all unicode except for the subset you wish to support. Now that you have sanitized your data, it is safe to use.
There is no requirement to support unicode fully on /. but we are asking that the users not be surprised. For example, surprised like having smart quotes replaced by line noise.
‘ ' ’ “ " ” — are all different characters, and /. clearly supports them.
Convert input to UCS16 or UCS32 (whichever is your environment's native wide char format), discard most
Re:Hey LEGO (Score:5, Funny)
They'll be fine as long as they're still intensely painful to step on in bare feet.
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As far as I know none of the off brands are poor quality because they use renewable materials. In other words, there's nothing about them using renewables to make the bricks that means they'll be of poor quality.
On top of that, perhaps the reason they're stopping at half rather than using all renewables is because they are only able to maintain quality at half.
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Yeah what I have always read that the big difference with Lego versus the cheaper brands is the fact that they have extremely strict tolerances for their molding production (supposedly their numbers are 0.0.5 to 0.1mm which is pretty tight for an injection molded toy), so they replace molds as soon as they get a little clapped out from use and have a very mature production process so that's part of what adds to the premium price. They can always stand on the fact that a lego produced 30-40 years ago will
Re:Hey LEGO (Score:5, Insightful)
Just what we need, "food" turned into plastic rather than eaten. Now maybe they meant "wheat waste" but that's not indicated.
Most of the wheat plant is cellulose, not seeds. Cellulose makes great polymers.
Don't forget that petroleum based plastic is just made with much older rotten food.
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Maybe keep making the bricks out of ABS plastic because that's what makes it LEGO
Hey Internet Man, We'll make LEGO bricks out of whatever we want and our name and our name alone is what makes it LEGO.
Snark aside, your issue with the other bricks are not the material, it's the QC and the tolerance. LEGOs have infamously tight tolerances and their foray into alternative materials have been held back precisely by this quality control process.
Let them do their job, and don't pretend that what makes LEGO is the material you *think* they are using (they aren't using pure ABS now either).
Virtue signalling (Score:2, Informative)
Having people ship plastic waste by mail to have it recycled is virtue signalling and effectively harms the environment, i.e. it's counterproductive regarding its stated goal, though it may help the goal of increasing profits.
Re:Virtue signalling (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. This is environmental theater.
TFS says using recycled materials costs 70% more. That means the collection, sorting, cleaning, shipping, and processing of the recycled material uses 70% more resources.
Disclaimer: My mom gave me a set of Legos fifty years ago. I still have them and still play with them.
Re: Virtue signalling (Score:5, Interesting)
As well you should still play with them.
Recently we were at my parents house and they still have my old Lego sets, back when all Legos were some rectangular shape and basic colors (unless you got the space sets that had some special shapes). Nowadays it seems that they're all specialized kits.
Anyway, my 9 yo son starts playing with them and I join in. Suddenly I'm not 50+ anymore; eight years old again, digging through several hundreds of pieces in the box looking for that one particular blue 1x4 piece with the silk screened headlights I know is in there somewhere.
What's he been doing lately? Pulling out his own Lego sets and building new creative stuff. The iPad? Sitting idle on the charger. And I join in when I can,
Off topic but maybe not so much.
100s - not in Denmark (Score:1)
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Lego has put some older books up on their instructions site, with a few dozen from 1996. I hope that they'll do some of the earlier ones, because I'd like to rebuild stuff from my earliest sets from the 1980s, and I don't have the books anymore.
Re: 100s - not in Denmark (Score:2)
Thanks for pointing that out, I'm going to have to go look at the site.
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Suddenly I'm not 50+ anymore; eight years old again...
During COVID lockdowns I discovered the incredibly vast world of MOCs (my own creations), where people have made instructions for truly incredible things. Rebrickable.com is huge for that. Then with places like bricklink.com you can order loose parts to get the supply you need. I've been assembling what amounts to works of art ever since. Everything's nearly unique, and massive.
In my work office, I've got a 5ft long Sulaco (from Aliens) that's over 10,000 parts. I'm in a 120-year-old train company bu
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Nowadays it seems that they're all specialized kits.
Not true. The basic blocks are still available.
Many stores don't carry them because the kits are way more profitable, but you can order them online from Lego.
There are always lots of Legos for sale on Craigslist.
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TFS says using recycled materials costs 70% more. That means the collection, sorting, cleaning, shipping, and processing of the recycled material uses 70% more resources.
You think pricing is related 1:1 to resource consumption? That's adorbs.
Re: Virtue signalling (Score:2)
70% more of the resources that have been internalised. CO2 emissions, along with many other serious environmental harms are still externalities that arenâ(TM)t modelled by our financial system.
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Not necessarily. Cost isn't only the resources, it's the time. Maybe they need to be washed for longer, without actually using any more water, for example. That would use more energy, but energy is something we can produce with close to zero emissions now.
The process is being refined all the time too. It's one of those important technologies that we need to develop, and ideally make flexible enough to take advantage of clean energy when it is available, rather than needing to run all the time.
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Exactly, the best thing to do if you really don't want your Lego's is donate them to a shelter, church or other collection point for (poorer) children to play with. My collection of Lego's was partially donated and partially purchased with what little money we got from grandparents on holidays. It helps children in the development of logic, math and engineering skills. It's an excellent prototyping system if you are going to be doing some 3D printing as well.
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"effectively harms the environment"
Show your work
The second part of the announcement (Score:5, Funny)
Is that the corners will be sharp and painful as always when you happen to walk barefoot on the carpet at night, wondering just how many pieces that last set was
The worst virtue signaling (Score:1)
Unfortunately, this is another bad case of virtue signaling. Lego’s product does not contribute in any meaningful way to the consumption of, or emissions by, fossil fuels when compared to almost any other consumer of gas and oil - most use more and burn it. Indeed, their greenhouse gasses are largely not emitted as the oil is solidified into a polymer and not burned. Sure, this takes energy, but not all of the potential CO2 is released.
What does concern me, however, is how “renewable” pla
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Lego should be more concerned with finding a plastic that completely dissociates at the end of its life - not just degrading into smaller plastic pieces.
As soon as a set of Legos reaches the end of its life, we should start that study. As far as I know, Legos only get lost.
ABS should be recycled (Score:5, Informative)
I think it should be possible to instead recycle the ABS plastic in LEGO bricks, but the industry needs to have the willpower to create the infrastructure to do it.
ABS is the most used type of plastic for toys, appliances, computer peripherals, sporting goods, etc..
One problem is that it is only packaging that get tagged with a resin identification code, and therefore gets accepted by recyclers, and ABS doesn't have one (other than the "Other" code).
It is also an alloy: made out of the three plastics that make up the acronym: Acrylonitrile, Butadiene and Styrene, in varying amounts for different applications.
If it was possible to encode the composition in the plastic somehow, then different pieces could be mixed to get different variations.
ABS is such an amazing, versatile material, and as such it is a valuable resource. It deserved better than to just be incinerated after the gizmo it was used for has broken in some way.
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Why do you feel the need to recycle Lego? Unless the piece is utterly broken (and even then) it is still a valid toy. It is really hard to break most Lego pieces and even the ones that break easy (looking at you 90s road signs) they are fixable with a simple barrel piece.
My collection of Legos went back with pieces from before I was born, 9V trains, 12V trains (the old ones) and the 6V battery powered trains. They were all still functional and are today, some pieces must be well over 50 years old.
What's with the drastic negativity in this thread? (Score:5, Insightful)
This article is interesting because it shows another aspect of renewables that we don't read so much about. The energy transition problem is mostly 'solved' - it's engineering and implementation now, which I obviously do not underestimate, and of course processes are being improved as they go (solar panel efficiencies and cost, for instance).. That means we need to start widening the views from raw energy and fuel and start paying greater attention to the other stuff produced from fossil resources - plastic is certainly one.
To my knowledge there is not a generally used alternative to plastic at the moment. I say to my knowledge because there may well be one and I just need educating on it, but then that's rather the point of articles like this. They're indicators - a purely plastics-based company is deciding and taking engineering-based steps towards making an alternative to plastic waste (as opposed to just slapping a green sticker on the front or buying up some carbon credits or what have you). It's clearly early days - the 'more expensive to produce' part is to be expected at this stage of the industrialisation process. As the industry turns more towards this style of approach, engineering changes will likely reduce cost of production, supply chain increases will reduce scarcity etc. (and here we need to be careful as to how that's done/what's suddenly now more abundant etc.).
Less of the knee-jerk. More of the interest and the science please.
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The energy transition problem is mostly 'solved' - it's engineering and implementation now,
It's not. We still need cost effective energy storage.
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We're rapidly getting there. Sodium-ion batteries for grid storage should be substantially cheaper and safer than lithium-ion and have far fewer supply constraints. China is first to produce them in any real numbers, but several other countries have factories being built for or converted to sodium battery production. I believe we'll see them widely installed in the next few years.
Re: What's with the drastic negativity in this thr (Score:2)
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t the time of writing, I'm seeing close to 100% of the comments in negative 'virtue signalling' knee-jerk comments. What the hell Slashdot, we used to be interested and care about stuff like this.
Slashdot - or what is left of it - is mostly comprised of older guys. We have been around long enough to smell bullshit when it gets aired out as a press release. We have seen too many instances when a let's-jump-on-the-bandwagon style change in production, process, design or materials is just another case of enshittification. Lego built its business being the best, most precise and durable building brick on the market, as others have pointed out. Many here are betting that they are only trying to earn
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On the 'good enough' bit - I agree that if they don't follow through on the commitment and leave it in its current state then it will be window dressing only. But given they're saying costs increase by 70% by doing this, I'm strongly guessing they're going to be se
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Slashdot - or what is left of it - is mostly comprised of older guys. We have been around long enough to smell bullshit
*spit-take* thank you for the laugh
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You've been around long enough to get stuck in your positions.
Lego is privately held. It doesn't have to answer to shareholders, and it has a wide and enthusiastic fan base. My kids are 6 and 8, and they have probably somewhere north of 10,000 pieces and are still eager for more to incorporate into their playtime. Their favorite gifts to others are Lego.
This isn't Lego jumping on a bandwagon. This is Lego making a conscious effort to change a direction to help reduce waste, and they're doing so methodically
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Lego is privately held. It doesn't have to answer to shareholders, and it has a wide and enthusiastic fan base. My kids are 6 and 8, and they have probably somewhere north of 10,000 pieces and are still eager for more to incorporate into their playtime. Their favorite gifts to others are Lego.
This isn't Lego jumping on a bandwagon. This is Lego making a conscious effort to change a direction to help reduce waste, and they're doing so methodically and meticulously over a long enough timeframe that they can monitor for quality issues. I'm confident that the bricks will still support stacks hundreds of meters tall and will still fit just as tightly as they ever have even after thousands of connections. They seem to fit even more tightly these days than I remember as a child and as a teenager, suggesting that Lego hasn't lost anything in the last 40 years despite substantially expanded production and creation of a vast array of custom shapes.
You did not make the argument that Lego is not jumping on the bandwagon, just that their motivations are "pure". I hope you are right about quality. I doubt you would humblebrag about owning 10,000+ pieces of dollar store knockoffs. Time will tell, but I am skeptical and statistics indicate that skepticism is the correct response.
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Less of the knee-jerk.
You know how change works: Start with the man in the mirror. There is nothing knee-jerk about accusing Lego of virtue signalling for asking customers to send old bricks by mail. That will never ever help the environment, no matter how you refine the recycling technology. Accusing people who make negative comments just because you disagree or want to be a white knight for a corporation, you commerce slut, THAT is an actual knee-jerk reaction.
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Because a lot of the "we're going to use less virgin oil" type of stories come from a purely greenwashing marketing gimmick.
Lego needs to keep using ABS until something that is perfectly compatible exists. Otherwise you get the problem those other knock-offs have, where they are made out of cheaper materials, less tolerances, and damaging the existing LEGO bricks when used. (In case a few posters missed my point earlier.)
I had a set of one of the alternatives, a not-compatible kind that had longer studs, I
We do care (Score:2)
What the hell Slashdot, we used to be interested and care about stuff like this. This is basic engineering, this is materials science, this is early day stages of what is clearly an interesting direction.
What we care about is Lego remaining Lego and remaining affordable. There is no science in the article only a corporate desire to switch to renewable plastic so there is no eningeering or material science under consideration because not details of either are provided. If you want to engage scientific and technical interest then you need some actual details of what the new plastic formulation is, how it has been tested etc.
The concern arises from two factors. First, they indicated they would pay up to 70
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I'm seeing close to 100% of the comments in negative 'virtue signalling' knee-jerk comments. What the hell Slashdot, we used to be interested and care about stuff like this.
It's Friday. People with brains and social skills are off enjoying themselves. Only the dredges are left. I'm not even joking, this isn't about LEGO. Slashdot has specific waves of posts of certain quality, and mods of certain quality. They vary with time of day and day of the week. Friday afternoon (Europe time) is negative time, has been for many years.
I bet you a Marsbar tomorrow the mods will have buried the negativity and interesting posts are promoted again.
Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
it says it's committed to not passing these costs onto consumers
Because the cost of plastic is entirely why Legos cost so much. /s
Anti-plastic gone too far (Score:2)
Disposable single use plastics are a problem for the environment and very wasteful, it makes sense to minimise their use and where still used maximise the recycled polymer content so as to not waste valuable virgin materials.
On the other hand, products like Lego needs to be durable, such products should ideally be reused rather than recycled where possible. There is a healthy second hand market for Lego bricks, but Lego doesn’t want to encourage that second hand market, as they will lose sales.
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The second hand market makes the last line of the summary sound completely insane:
Who would go to the effort of packing up Lego to post it but wouldn't go to the effort of donating it to a charity shop?
But will they still be an effective killer? (Score:1)
Please do not recycle or destroy your old LEGOs. (Score:3, Insightful)
The old bricks, they put a lot of effort into making a material that would last forever. Please do not throw them away, destroy them, or recycle them. Any of those options would be such a waste. If you don't want your old LEGOs anymore, please just send them to me.
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The old bricks, they put a lot of effort into making a material that would last forever. Please do not throw them away, destroy them, or recycle them. Any of those options would be such a waste. If you don't want your old LEGOs anymore, please just send them to me.
Does anyone throw away old Lego? I've still got some in my collection that came from my elder relatives. Some of them are older than me by a few years. I've heard of people selling them, trading them for other building products / toys, or giving them to Goodwill or other charity shops. I can't imagine finding a stash of them somewhere and just tossing them in the trash.
I'd be curious what Lego comes up with. I know they've experimented recently with other materials, but they're also pretty serious about mak
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I'm sure there's cases of LEGO being accidently disposed of, or purposely/maliciously disposed of.
Like if a house/apartment has a fire, you must dispose of anything that is smoke damaged. If the LEGO was not in the room that was on fire, you can scrub the bricks with toothpaste (microplastics will be shed) and the bricks will still be usable, albeit scratched up. But it's far more likely someone is going into that home and landfilling everything. Smoke damage is difficult to remove from everything except me
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You're just one of those Russians they pay to come up with some angry refutation of any accurate and good statement I make, aren't you? Is it actually payment, or do they just threaten you with violence? Either way, you're getting slow.
Reuse (Score:1)
Plastic alternative (Score:2)
Tell me there's no market for LEGO Premium bricks made from titanium alloy. And that LEGO lovers wouldn't pay enough of a premium to make it profitable.
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Good point.
It depends on the alloy. There is a nickel-titanium alloy used as a 'memory metal'. It is apparently fairly flexible and returns to its original shape after being deformed.
While I'm sure it would take some practical experimentation to get it right, that sounds like the type of property that would allow two bricks with tight tolerances to click together.
i camped at a campsite (Score:3)
I buy Lego technics on e-bay (Score:2)
Personally I just want lots of technics pieces so I can build things from scratch. I'm not looking for little kits. So I sometimes go on ebay and buy used technics. It's a great deal. Picked up all kinds of gears, differentials, driveshafts, u-joints, wheels, pneumatic rams, etc.
Pretty sure I'm not a normal user of Lego. Most people today just buy the star wars kits, put the x-wing together a couple of times, and then it goes on the shelf, often in pieces in a box. The average kid doesn't really build th
I wonder what they'll say next year (Score:2)
Because in 2023, it was "Lego abandons effort to make bricks from recycled plastic bottles"
https://www.theguardian.com/li... [theguardian.com]
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They abandoned it because it was the wrong plastic and the pieces just didn't work. Plastic bottles are usually make of PET. I 3D print with both PETG and ABS, and they have different properties.
smells like pussy (Score:1)
This is the kind of decision made by females.
No please not (Score:2)
If you have dabbled with ABS and 3D printing, you would know it is the nastiest of the materials you can work with. But it is the most durable, solid, and impact resistant. In fact, we know this in real life practice form LEGO where "vintage" bricks still hold today.
Okay, I might have lied a little. There is an alternative: ASA. It is even harder and UV resistant. Downside? It's process is even more toxic than ABS:
https://www.makeshaper.com/pos... [makeshaper.com]
PLA, PETG, PVA, and many others?
Please...