Lego Struggles to Find a Plant-Based Plastic That Clicks | Hacker News Reader

Lego Struggles to Find a Plant-Based Plastic That Clicks

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51 pointslord_sudo58 comments

I appreciate the initiative, however even without it, Lego isn't something that gets thrown away after a few months use,if at all.

Hmm I'm not following. This is about moving away from oil dependance, not making bricks bio degenerable.

I think that the idea is it matters less if it's not a disposable product.

Huh? Lego makes billions of pieces a year, disposability or not.

I'm not OP but how does that compare to disposable items like plastic forks, cups, pens, bottles or bags?

Single-use plastics are a much larger problem. Compare how many food wrappers you might see in the park vs Lego bricks.

Why does that matter? Producing plastic is not bad. It's burning it, littering it, or throwing it away in a permanent landfills that are the bad parts.

If it's not disposable, it's not bad.

Less bad. I'm just making this up, but I assume something like this has to happen. Someone must drill/dig/mine for the oil (and maybe extract the bitumen from sand), transport that oil product to a refinery, refine the oil into something that can be used to make plastics, ship that refined product to a plastics manufacturing facility, make the raw plastic, ship that plastic off to Lego's manufacturing facility, make the Lego, package them up and ship it off to a warehouse where it will then be shipped to someone like Amazon who will then sell it and have it delivered to the buyer. There's a huge environmental costs to everything, whether it's oil based or plant based.

As it stands, I understand the research as eventually crude oil will run out. For the most part, afaik, our plastics are a useful byproduct of our oil consumption for fuel that would otherwise be more landfill waste. It's best to make reusable and long term use plastics from that material.

As to plastics from plant sources, it seems that a lot of what we do use for disposable containers and packaging are a better fit for those sources considering how well they break down. Of course, this all assumes that proper landfills are used and it isn't just shipped out of the country of use.

hopefully they will move away from oil but nevertheless Lego is the only product I can think of I don't mind lasting for millennia for future peoples to enjoy

What do you base that on? Lego has plenty of small individual sets that get played with by kids, broken apart, bits go missing and eventually they get binned.

Sure... and then Starbucks sells 43 more drinks in the next 100ms and completely overwhelms your example.

Even if you keep it for decades it's got millennia left to be someone else's trash and landfill, so it's still worth substituting something that biodegrades.

No thanks. The older bricks break down and become brittle and discolored if exposed to sunlight enough already.

A product that doesn't last multiple generations to be passed down, and justified by the use of green materials? Sounds like a business dream.

I've got some from ~25 years ago that are discolored due to exposure to sunlight. There are ways to fix that (http://lego.jtooker.com/whitening/). I haven't noticed them getting brittle, though.

I've also got some bricks that are much older (from the 60s I think), and are still usable. They haven't spent time in the sun, so they are not even discolored.

My parents still have Lego from my childhood in the loft. The only parts that have degraded are electrical.

I’m not sure what we will do with it when they pass, it has little or no value.

Perhaps it would make sense to recycle it.

You might be surprised at the value. There's quite a collector's market for older Lego sets, if you check sites like Bricklink.

There are no complete sets, just loose bricks and a few instructions.

Sets is just one mindset. There are people with a different mindset who do want unsorted bricks. I do realize you were replying to a specific mention of sets though.

I've looked into it a bit. With some exceptions for very rare pieces, it's almost certainly not worth the effort of cataloging all your random LEGO pieces, unless you enjoy the process itself.

Agreed, that's not worth it if you value your time. But a rough idea of what sets are in there plus a kg price and someone will be happy to take it.

Spread it out onto the floor, photograph it, and stick it on eBay for $20 or whatever.

Or, donate it to a school or charity shop (thrift store?).

That you don't want to realise the full value doesn't mean it has no value.

Right, though I said nothing about cataloging.

Give it away on FreeCycle or similar, put a free ad somewhere. someone will take it.

Don't just throw it away.

Don't just throw it away.

I shall try but I'm sceptical there is much interest in a pile of unsorted 1970's Lego. I could be wrong though.

Did buy 7.5kg of unsorted Legos very recently,so yes, there's some interest.

I would totally buy it if you're able to ship to Canada. Love collecting and building with LEGO.

Post to craigslist or facebook marketplace and you'll quickly find out how in demand they are. Esp if there are minifigs. Lego collecting is VERY popular right now.

How much is there and do you live in the USA? I'm interested, if you want to talk about it, PM me.

It might fetch as much as $15 per kg depending on the quality and what sets were in it. Just one rare train in there and you're going to look at substantial money.

No joke, my child loves Legos. We always grab 'em when they show up on freecycle or Facebook or where-ever.

If you don't want them I can take them off your hands for you :)

Lego has more value than you think. You can at least sell it by the pound for pretty good price.

https://www.vocativ.com/underworld/crime/lego-heists/index.h...

> it has little or no value.

You are so wrong about that. Vintage sets go for many times their original worth, and some parts are worth more than you'd think reasonable for a little piece of plastic.

In original packaging maybe, but not after several kids have played with them for years (and inevitably lost pieces)

There's a cottage industry of people sorting those piles of lego and then completing the sets from parts bought individually. It's not going to make you millions but there are people that do this relatively successfully.

Bricklink is a fantastic resource to replace missing pieces.

You can sell unsorted lego by the pound (on Ebay they will fetch ~$8/pound), if there are no minifigs or special bricks. If you have minifigs or special bricks, and are willing to pull them out and sell separately, you'll make much more.

Prices on Craigslist in higher cost areas tend to be higher, as usual. If you live in a higher cost area, buy on Ebay, sell on Craigslist.

> some parts are worth more than you’d think reasonable...

all parts are worth more than I’d think reasonable.

You are entirely entitled to your own estimation of the value of lego parts, while I would agree that lego is in an absolute sense way too expensive on a relative scale it is cheap compared to most other toys given the amount of use it gets. The only things it really competes with are musical instruments and digital gizmos.

I am surprised at the cost of LEGO parts, but they are undeniably good and durable toys.

'Recycling' in this case means giving them to some child or charity that gives things to poor kids. LEGOs are an extremely powerful learning tool for young people.

That's very anecdotal. Just because you might have been attached to Legos, doesn't mean everyone is.

There is a near insatiable market for second hand lego. So even if you're not attached to it plenty of people value it enough that you'll be able to recoup a substantial fraction of your initial outlay. Lego holds its value better than most other commodities.

The first lego sets I had are still great. They are more basic and allow more open play than the current sets in my opinion.

The lego pieces today feel a bit better and are easier to connect and pull apart. But I do not like the way Legos transitioned into Collector-Pieces/Merchandizing toys. There's just too much of it and most of them limit your fantasy.

Yes, but little pieces end up inevitably lost. And for a company as big as Lego, it becomes a moral responsibility to look for solutions - even if each customer only loses one tiny block per year, that's millions of little indestructible plastic pieces. But it would be ideal if they would biodegrade in certain conditions like after 20 years under the sea.

The whole power of Lego is that it is a heirloom toy, it stays in the family. In mine now for three generations and likely more to come.

I don't really get the point, if you make bio plastic that lasts as long as normal plastic then won't it have the same effect on our plastic waste problem. Also, it is not like taking some oil out of the earth together with the tons of oil that are taken out for fuel (probably from a thickness that isn't really used for much else) will have a worse effects on our environment than clearing out enormous pieces of land to grow all these plants.

I think there's actually a few reasons why they are investing.

1) it makes them look like they care about green earth stuff, not saying they don't, but the marketing image is priceless.

2) it's potentially valuable IP that can be licensed to other companies, even where it doesn't work for lego, it might be a great fit more broadly.

3) Having it wear down more quickly means more responsible waste, also it ensures the product may instead of lasting decades, only last a few years.

4) Eventually crude oil will run out, and even before that will get much more costly to use as source material.

If they create a suitable plastic substitute, they'll make a mint off the technology alone.

I doubt their customers care. They should make things their customers care about.

It's more about virtue signaling

That's a rather cynical accusation. What if the people signaling this virtue are doing so because they genuinely believe in it?

Why would you assume that? Granted, there is a lot of corporate virtue signalling, and it's existed since time immemorial, but I don't get the sense Lego is necessarily virtue signalling in this case, or at least virtue signalling in a way that isn't genuine. One reason I say this is because it's a family-owned company and really aren't comparable to a corporate giants like Procter & Gamble(which happens to be known for blatant virtue signalling), Coca Cola, or Disney, to name a few.

I don't think it's farfetched for someone in charge at Lego to see value in biodegradable plastic, and there really isn't much of a reason for them not to research into and use biodegradable plastic if it was a viable alternative to whatever they're currently using.

Now, if they were making commercials about biodegradable Legos that don't exist, or "toxic masculinity", or saving the whales, then you could definitely say that Lego is virtue signalling. But I don't see that here.

It sort of is. The last time I saw this story going around, it was that they were swapping out the rubberier non-ABS bits that are almost always green tree elements to some kind of sugarcane-based polyethelene.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2018/march/pfp

$150 million is a pretty considerable amount to spend on virtue signaling.

It is virtue signalling.

As someone who has spent thousands of dollars on Lego, if I see "Biodegradable!" splash on the box I'm going to think twice. I painted my Lego, played with it in water, and I could still give it to my kids in the original condition. We can't know that any new Lego will perform the same way.

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