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Comment by DubiousPusher | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

wouldn't be surprised if they went to something that was unusable after 3 years and said 'its for the environment'

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.

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.

Old legos contain toxic chemicals... fyi..

Almost everything contains toxic chemicals. The question is whether or not they leach out.

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.

</pedantic>

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.

True, Lego degrades in the sun.

Source: I have left Lego outside, in the sun for many weeks. The effect is also visible at every Legoland.

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