Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles | Hacker News Reader

Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles

bbc.co.uk

18 pointsmgd11 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37642110

The problem is throw away plastic that's discarded as soon as it's bought. Legos can be used for decades, they're not the problem.

Fun fact, Lego is the worlds largest manufacturer of bricks, made of any material.. including for usage in masonry.

Rubber tires, too.

Well I don’t want second hand bottles in premium Lego products. They got recently crazy expensive. The real premium toy. Few hundred grams of plastic for hundred euros.

If it passes QA, why would you not want recycled material?

Recycled plastic is less strong than new “virgin” plastic. That’s why manufacturers typically only use 10%-30%, much more than that and it’s hard to keep good tolerances on dimensions and strength metrics. Also the vast majority of recycled plastic isn’t from recycling consumer plastic waste, but from recycling the off cuts of plastic manufacturing. Almost all the consumer plastic waste is just put into landfill. It’s almost never economical to sort and recycle that stuff.

> Almost all the consumer plastic waste is just put into landfill.

Aren't they primarilly incinerated? (which, unless you carefully capture exhaust, isn't much better)

There are some countries that incinerate most waste and some that incinerate just about nothing. Some of the latter export to some of the former, but most don't.

Six months ago (March 3rd, 2023) I approached a similar claim with actual data. Below is that post, and after the break is a brief update with pricing as of today. While there are absolutely sets today that exceed the highest 90s prices of sets, they are also monster sets today, with much higher part counts.

Bottom line, you can get legos cheaper today than 30 years ago, and that's BEFORE inflation.

### Time travel to March 3rd, 2023 ###

They really are not and have not gone up in price, but rather down when adjusted for inflation. There are a lot of larger sets available though, which I think drives this perception that "Lego is expensive", when in reality they're cheaper than they used to be.

Just as an example, lets look at 90s some sets https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Vintage-90s-To... 3 sets to look at here from toys-r-us in the 90s

$19.99 for 203 piece set, just shy of 10 cents per piece.

$12.99 for a 90 piece set, over 14 cents per piece.

$7.99 for a 56 piece set, also over 14 cents per piece.

Keep in mind all the above are not licensed sets, which are common today. Licensing does drive prices up. But I'll still include some in the mix.

Now today, at Target lets try to find similar cost sets and see how they stand up.

For $19.99 we can get some clone troopers! https://www.target.com/p/lego-star-wars-501st-clone-troopers...

Or a minecraft house https://www.target.com/p/lego-minecraft-the-mushroom-house-2...

The first being 119 pieces and the second 272 pieces Nearly 17 cents per piece, or a bit over 7 cents per piece. So the star wars set is more expensive than our 1990s comparison, but minecraft is actually cheaper! Not only that, if we factor in inflation by dividing by 2.29, You'll find both sets are substantially cheaper than their comparable 1990s set.

This stands true for other sets. At the $12 mark https://www.target.com/p/lego-friends-heartlake-city-pizzeri... is about 8 cents per piece, and https://www.target.com/p/lego-creator-deep-sea-creatures-bui... is under 6 cents a piece!

It does become harder to find sets at around that $8 mark, as many of them are just a mini-fig or small accessory set, but the point is not only have legos not gotten more expensive (on a per piece basis), you can still purchase sets that are larger than those we had in the 90s, for the same cost... and when accounting for inflation find they cost about half what they did at the time.

### Back to today. ###

So here we are 6 months later. Let's look at some data.

That clone trooper set? It's now cheaper than 6 months ago, at $15.99.

The minecraft house? $22.49. (8 cents a piece, still below 1990s prices, and that's before inflation!).

Our shark set is $12.99 and remains under 6 cents a piece.

I'm with you on this one (except for the price point, price seems fine?). Lego lasts, it's not like single use plastic packaging and bottles. Exceptions can be made for plastics that have a far longer useable lifetime.

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