Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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)
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...
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.
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".
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This applies to so many things in life. Voting, bad habits, and companies doing things to make the environment better.
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.
Or they could just keep making them as they've always done. Not everything needs to change, just most things.
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 ;)
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.