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Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where all the bricks go. I still have the lego bricks my parents got for my older sister which I inherited. It’s a huge box, most of it was passed down to our family from other families .

My daughter has already a massive brick collection just because of the sets she was presented with.

By now she very child should have no need anymore to buy Lego bricks so many should be in circulation. I just fear they are being thrown away.

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The whole point of LEGO bricks is to act as a carbon sink for the foreseeable future. The whole construction toys angle is just a ruse.

I have thousands of pounds of carbon sink in my basement!

It is more nefarious than that

https://babylonbee.com/news/lego-introduces-new-sharper-bric...

These are depopulation bricks.

Christian conspiracy theories need not apply.

A very, very expensive carbon sink..

Nobody throws away Lego bricks, there is huge market, you can sell them in various ways (by kilograms, by pieces).

People do try to throw them away. A good chunk of my kids' lego collection is a mixed selection of blocks we found in a skip.

https://lego.com/replay :

> Q: Do I need to clean my bricks before I donate?

> A: Thank you for the offer but no, you don’t. Give Back Box will be sorting and cleaning the bricks before donation. To help them in their job, you can try to remove obviously damaged or disfigured bricks from your donation.

I got 75% of a 7745 train, a ton of rails, a traffic light and assorted mystery trainish blocks from a bag that someone rescued from a dumpster. Unfortunately, they could carry only 1 of the 2 bags in the dumpster. I got it very cheaply, as they didn't think they would get much money from it. A lot of the rails were snapped. Some have white paint.

I restored it, but my heart wept for the previous owner.

The market just grew a lot in the past decades (adult fans in particular, but on all fronts). Also, Lego will inevitably get thrown away, but a lot of it resides in boxes in attics etc. stored for decades for the next generation (my four year old is busy laying out his claim on my stash at his grandparents house and arranging for its transfer to him).

> By now she very child should have no need anymore to buy Lego bricks so many should be in circulation.

It might not be so much of an issue for legos, but but I've read you should not give vintage toys to kids, because past manufacturing process do not meet modern standards.

For instance: vintage yellow megablocks have high levels of heavy metals (https://tamararubin.com/2020/12/how-old-are-your-childs-toys...). I threw away some of those my wife got at a consignment sale, because I could not tell when they were made.

> I just fear they are being thrown away.

They are being thrown away.

I reckon archeologists will be digging them up in centuries to come.

Don't worry, my kid is buying them by the kilo at yard sales :)

There's a huge secondary market but it certainly could be bigger. I wonder if Lego themselves shouldn't advertise more how to get rid of old bricks.

Lego bricks are very cheap to manufacture. The main cost is R&D and licensing. Lego themselves are probably better off financially having a recycling program where the bricks are melted down to make park benches, and then making brand new bricks.

That will cost less than cleaning, sorting and QA-ing recycled bricks.

Old bricks keep value very well to the tune of $0.10c/piece.

You can get a park bench for less than 2k [1]

A park bench made of old legos would only make sense where it was made with 20k pieces or fewer. I would guestimate a park bench of recycled Lego would ba a 50k opportunity cost

[1] https://www.belson.com/Parkview-Style-Steel-Park-Benches-wit...

> Old bricks keep value very well to the tune of $0.10c/piece.

True, but to the Lego company themselves, new bricks perhaps cost only $0.005 per piece, and old bricks probably are worth far less.

To Lego themselves, they're not worth much, but to collectors they will be. But that involves a lot of labor involving sorting, cleaning, organizing, order picking and shipping, the question there is whether Lego is willing to do that or if they leave it up to hobbyists.

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