Lego Says It Won't Use Recycled Plastic Because It Doesnt Help the Planet | Hacker News Reader

Lego Says It Won't Use Recycled Plastic Because It Doesnt Help the Planet

gizmodo.com.au

31 pointscfcfcf57 comments

> the material didn’t reduce carbon emissions

Good on them for checking that, but aren't there additional concerns with plastics, e.g. reducing the amount of microplastics in the environment?

Lego isn't micro. That's why it hurts to step on it with bare feet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltrop

legos are worse

Some pieces are, and many are close. Microplastic is defined as pieces < 5mm.

You really have to put some wear on a piece of plastic to get microplastic particles. Washing polyester clothes and driving cars on "rubber" tires for example.

Or sun exposure - many large chunky plastic items become brittle and fragment after years in the sun.

Then there's shadecloth - literally tens of hundreds of thousands of kilometres of shadecloth woven from plastic fibres that all eventually goes rotten and is replaced.

Tearing old shadecloth down sends tonnes of microplastic into the environment after what frayed and blew away while it was up.

https://www.sagehort.com.au/horticultural-materials/shadeclo...

Oh yeah, I left a tarp over a project one summer and was shocked at how much of it flaked off into the yard. At least it was down-slope from the well pump.

> "rubber" tires

Incidentally Lego has a claim to being one of the largest tire manufactures. Apparently they are making more tires than anybody else but of course the tires are tiny.

https://jalopnik.com/lego-is-actually-the-world-s-biggest-ti...

Of all the plastics. LEGO plastics are probably the ones I am least worried about. Mostly because I inherited my dads LEGO sets and then my nephew inherited my LEGO sets. These are plastics that are used for generations. My bigger worry are single use plastics.

But good on LEGO for researching alternatives.

No, Lego does not say it won't use recycled plastic, it won't use this specific recycled plastic, i.e. recycled PET from water bottles, as it was investigating. It is still committed to research alternative recycled plastics options.

It's so rare for a company to actually do the research to see if their greenwashing campaign is actually doing anything for the environment. This is great to see

I was just chatting with friends about my misgivings of gifting Lego sets to my kid. He absolutely loves building them and I enjoy serving as building assistant to him.

But Lego makes thousands of pounds of new plastic toys every year. I’m not sure I want to support that.

We’re looking at buying used bricks in bulk, and you can find instructions online. But then you’re bidding against everyone else.

If this references buying on eBay, couldn't one just filter by Buy It Now?

”Lego makes thousands of pounds of new plastic toys every year.”

There is nothing inherently wrong about plastic. Plastic waste is the problem. Cheap plastic waste.

In general Lego

- is used for decades

- is not cheap

Plastic has it’s uses. It’s not inherently evil.

Lego’s use of plastic is the best kind.

There is nothing wrong in supporting Lego.

That doesn't mean there's nothing wrong with it.

It still consumes a non renewable resource, and a lot of Lego still ends up in the environment or landfills.

"It still consumes a non renewable resource..."

As does most of our current industrial processes.

I really can't see beyond blind value signaling why anyone would want to single out Lego. "It's a really familiar brand and uses plastics - let's take them down a notch". Far too easy and also misplaced.

If all companies made their products as lasting as Lego we would have lot less problems.

Lego should be held as an aspirational role model, not a pariah.

> As does most of our current industrial processes.

Thanks for backing up the original OP's reasoning. That's why you should always try to reuse instead of buying new.

"That's why you should always try to reuse instead of buying new."

I totally agree. I disagreed with targeting specific companies especially when their product is very long lasting with robust resale market (meaning the chances of the product just ending up in a landfill are small).

Lego uses high quality plastic that last generations. I’ve handed down boxes to my kids and it will probably be handed down to theirs. Recycled plastic is lower quality.

> I really can't see beyond blind value signaling why anyone would want to single out Lego

Who is singling out Lego? Every company needs to drastically reduce their consumption of non-renewable resources, their generation of CO2, and their environmental impact. Lego makes 60 billion bricks a year, it's a scale big enough to not get a free pass.

The amount of plastic in LEGO is a drop in the bucket compared to: Plastic packaging for food and goods, bottled drinks, car parts (panels etc; remember that a car is completely trash after ~20 years), plastic in shared goods such as school chairs and airplane cabins. So, it's simply not worth worrying about.

I was at an event were the organizers praised themselves for caring about the planet, sustainability, and for how green they were.

They were also serving cookies individually wrapped in plastic.

I once saw for sale a new copy of "F**k Plastic", wrapped in plastic.

Without knowing anything about them, the amount of plastic they saved could easily be many orders of magnitude greater than a few hundred cookie wrappers. You're placing more importance on the cookies just because they're more visible.

Cellophane, or plastic?

One of the two is biodegradable.

No idea. Looked it up, it turns out a lot of what we think is cellophane is actually plastic, so doubly no idea.

This is a strawman. If we want to stop using fossils, it doesn't matter which use-cases we stop first. The main general problem in veening off fossils I see is that economies will crash and there will be wars if we regulate away use of fossils. So that's not going to happen any time soon.

However, LEGO is a completely optional/luxury aspect that won't affect economies at large, so perhaps it's better to start there. There are probably many of these "drops in the bucket" that together form something impactful.

You could remove LEGO completely and it wouldn’t take us any closer to solving real problems. It’s just a waste of time.

Plastic has so many use cases that probably all of them individually is a drop in the ocean. Starting to actually do something is what matters.

Yepp, thanks. The keyword really is "starting." Everything and anything is a start, no matter how small it looks in isolation.

Being an expert in LEGO waste reduction makes nothing for being an expert in plastic packaging reduction. The multiplier is tiny for LEGO and huge for coming up with ways to replace drinking bottles, shampoo bottles, and everything that is single use.

The solution is not to remove all the luxuries (LEGO), the solution is enabling our basic necessities to work without plastics.

(Reducing LEGO is a "vitamin" and reducing single use packagin is "aspirin" in SAAS parlance, if that makes sense. It's good that LEGO takes responsibility for their own stuff, I'm not shitting on them.)

Your way of thinking is how we get into useless campaigns like stopping plastic straws.

If you're willing to go through the trade offs in not using large scale first hand plastic, surely buying second hand isn't that much of an inconvenience

Go calculate what a small fraction of your total plastic footprint is Lego. Worrying about it for one millisecond is complete lunacy

Lego lasts for decades, usually (the very fact that there is a used market is evidence of that).

It's not quite the same as one-use, disposable plastic items.

Lego inspires kids to be engineers and that can contribute to solving environmental problems.

Or create more problems.

Aren't engineers did the environment problem?

This is an interesting thing to publicly post (though it might be true) given their business involves pumping out millions of tonnes of fresh plastic that will probably end up in the environment over time. If I was in their PR department I would try to not draw any attention to myself in this space.

”that will probably end up in the environment over time.”

A few brick here and there, for sure. I have 40 year old Lego blocks in my house. Unless the quality has degraded severely that plastic will be used for decades.

The problem with plastic is cheap packaging that is designed to be thrown away by the consumer at the first instance.

Well anecdotally my mom threw out all of my Lego once I left home. It’s not something I miss because I didn’t really use them much. Using Lego to build things always felt like cheating, like you’re building a preassembled kit (which you are). I always preferred to make things out of “raw materials” like wood, metal, cardboard etc.

"mom threw out all of my Lego once I left home"

I guess she wasn't aware of the vibrant resale market?

No ha, and apparently neither was I until right now.

This is news to me too. Now that my kids are older, last year I decided to clear some space in what had been their playroom by finding a new home for the small mountain of Lego that we had accumulated. I rang around local schools and charities but no one was in the slightest bit interested. In the end I had to sadly take the lot to landfill.

Oh, super interesting from point of view of market segmentation. Where do you live? Urban or rural?

It does seem the prices of unorganized mounds of blocks is quite cheap nowadays (10-20 EUR/kg seems to be the going rate via quick ebay survey). Maybe those decades of non-obsolescense are saturating the market.

Definetly not land-fill prices yet, though.

This. My kids are now the third generation enjoying the same Lego bricks.

The oldest were bought by my great grandparents for my father, so these toys already involve five generations and probably will still be used for at least another couple of generations.

As far as sustainability goes, Legos are incredible.

Look, I do realize that "recycling plastic" for years was just "ship to China / Mexico", so it was all a giant scam that the government helped the plastic industry perpetuate: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

But... this struck me as weird. Recycling plastic doesn't need to help reduce carbon emissions, but rather, reduce non-biodegradeable waste that will outnumber fish by 2050: https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/pla...

As CBS News reports, Lego said that it “decided not to progress” with the bricks after it “found the material didn’t reduce carbon emissions,

I find this whole obsession with CO2 and "carbon emissions" to be destructive because it takes away the focus from the more pressing concerns like pollution, desertification of farmland, overfishing, collapse of natural ecosystems from rainforests to kelp forests to coral reefs, plummeting populations of insects, etc. etc. That is far far more dire than ocean levels rising by a foot, or humans having to move out of arid environments. And in this case, it's almost comical that reducing plastic pollution is measured by how much it can reduce carbon emissions.

fyi carbon emissions directly causes global warming and ocean acidification, so yes, mitigating carbon emissions IS very important to help your desertification, rainforests, kelp forests, and coral reefs

Many of these things are due to invasive species introduced by humans such as kelp forests being killed by sea urchins. Desertification has to do with capitalism and farmers racing to the bottom depleting the soil of nutrients - just like the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression wasn’t caused by global warming. Desertification has been going on for 40 years now

https://www.freethink.com/energy/desertification-desert-gree...

This is exactly what I’m talking about — we should be focusing on solving these issues without waiting for the climate change to reverse!

I think you're being a little selective in trying to show your point. Human-driven climate change is the biggest driver of ecological damage. Even the article you link to is based on a report that climate change is the biggest driver of desertification worldwide.

I agree with you that land management can mitigate desertification, the same way hunting invasive species can help protect native biodiversity.

This doesn't mean it's wrong to focus on climate change, and by extension, carbon emissions. If anything, they demonstrate that we should focus on climate change. It's like scaling an internet technology company: we want to build something small that has a massive impact.

Reducing carbon emissions will by far have a greater impact than trying to eradicate sea urchins from the pacific northwest. It is just as feasible as better land management. And for things like coral reef bleaching, which I'm personally very interested in, it's unclear if there's any other solution.

Insofar as these things are a threat to human civilization, when that breaks down and stops polluting the recovery will be fairly rapid. Also, a bunch of these problems (eg ecosystem collapse) are driven by climate change.

That is far far more dire than ocean levels rising by a foot

People who write things like this tend to think of a peaceful shoreline but with slightly less beach/cliff, completely neglecting the way tides work. The water doesn't stay evenly distributed.

Im surprised the responses to you are in disagreement, this seems like the obvious and clear takeaway to me. Climate change and other issues of habitat destruction and pollution are very interconnected, but they're not the same. Carbon is not the only environmental issue.

Rather than recycling plastic, it would make more sense for Lego to include an offer to re-buy the used Lego pieces in each package, so people become aware of the resell value and don't throw them away after a few years. It may even allow them to participate in the Lego resellers market.

In case you or others aren't aware, LEGO does offer a free donation program: https://lego.com/replay

Changing anything about Lego would be monumentally stupid. The stuff is essentially perfect and has been for decades.

But the use of a virgin plastic means the additional production of oil.

I don't understand how not using recycled plastic is better.. One requires the extraction of new raw material, the other does not.

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