Lego abandons effort to make bricks from recycled plastic bottles
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys lost their interest a long time ago, and erector set hasn’t caught in, except for some school projects.
But offloading responsibility for climate disasters onto consumers instead of the companies actually making all the decisions and the regulators permitting them to is a time honored tradition for the oil industry at this point.
It seems we have a solution to this problem but we're not using it. Imagine if you had to pay a "plastics charge" when you bought a 6-pack of soda, that would be refunded upon turning in the bottles? I have to figure that would prompt a lot more recycling.
However even beyond that, the cost to recycle plastic is also higher than that of just producing virgin plastic, partially because of the substantial subsidies given to the oil and gas industry. As such, it's pretty understandable why even the best recycling outfits in the United States don't see a ton of business, when recycle-ready plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic and takes more energy and effort to convert into new plastic products[1], you'd be stupid to do that. Hence we really only see it in niche industries where they can market their products as being "made from recycled bottles" or something and charge higher prices to Eco-conscious consumers. And to be clear, that's a good thing, unambiguously. But instead of relying on people who are willing to spend more to do a good thing, it seems to be to be far more effective to for starters, mandate businesses that make plastic products to at the very least, pay what oil is actually worth, especially given that we still rely on it for energy for tons of applications to which EV alternatives aren't yet ready for.
1: This is of course presuming your plastic product can be made from recycled plastic at all which is not a given. Many "recyclable" plastics cannot be used to make certain plastic products. Still other plastics are indeed single use unless your secondary use is MUCH DIFFERENT to the first, in which case even calling it recyclable seems dubious at best. Car bodies can technically be recycled to produce coral reefs, but few people would call that recycling.
And hell, we still have areas of the country where recycling service isn't even a given. I have a friend in Indiana who doesn't recycle because the city he lives in charges a non-insubstantial fee for recycling pickup, and while he would like to, he just can't afford it. So he drops his bottles and things in public recycling bins when able, but the majority of his goes in the trash because the city doesn't provide the service with regular garbage pickup.
Instead of telling us this, however, the city pretends they still recycle all the plastics they accept. It would be more environmentally friendly to put the junk plastic in the trash to begin with to avoid the extra trip and sorting. If we knew what plastics couldn’t be processed, we could avoid buying them as well (as much as you can avoid buying blister wrapped products).
Recycling is a farce in that for decades companies have focused on it to ensure we don't reduce how much we consume. For example, I just heard an obvious greenwashing advertisement on the radio for some product the other day that said we should all "recycle, reduce, reuse", i.e. "consume the same amount, consume maybe a bit less, and if you really have to don't consume".
But this is all relatively clean, fresh from the mold plastic. It didn't sit in a shipping container in the heat for months, degrading. It didn't absorb any number of oils or contaminants. I imagine a dirtier recycled plastic would require more virgin material to maintain the intended strength/material properties, so where the recycled plastic comes from is likely just as important as what you are trying to use it for.
A nice thing to keep in mind is that complex products are essentially non-recyclable. A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.
I don't see how it's different from "reduce": you have to refuse to reduce.
For example, smarthome lighting. The lightbulbs could be dumb, and all the smarts could live in the lightswitches, that would reduce waste. Conversely, the traditional smarthome lighting approach is very wasteful, every lightbulb is a small computer, and who knows what percent of the discarded lightbulbs gets recycled.
By definition, that’s what reduce is. Whether you need it (reducing water consumption) or don’t (reducing smart bulb consumption), it’s reduce.
Can you name some examples?
Not saying you're wrong, but how many glass bottles do you use on a monthly basis? The embodied energy of a salt/pepper mill does not compare there I think.
Why not both? What makes jars the right problem to optimize? People don’t consume jars, they consume jarred things. One’s consumption of jarred mustard is unrelated to jarred pepper. You’re assuming they haven’t thought about other jarred things.
They want to avoid wasteful packaging
> The “level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories” to scale up recycled PET use, he said. “After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher. It was disappointing.”
Edit: I am sure that their factories are upgraded periodically so they should defer to the next upgrade instead of doing it now if that's too expensive and resources-hungry. Same as with changing car to an EV, the best for the environment is probably to keep your current ICE car until it's time to replace it and only then to buy an EV.
In any case, Lego's problem is that their business is fundamentally plastics at a time when plastics have got a bad rep to the point of being the bogeyman in some cases, and this shows that they are struggling to find a way around that even if only in term of image.
I live in such a place where all chemistry products from grocery shops used to decrease their package. For example, Ariel 500g become Ariel 400g and it happens not only to P&G goods. That tells me that claims about hardness of changing some giant well-functioning manufacturing processes are just a BS.
Lego is essentially a forever product. Not millenia, but compared to plastic destined for waste (packaging, cutlery, bags, etc etc).
(Note: I love Lego products. We have giant bins of previously-loved bricks.)
those stopit plastic wrappers they put on everything though...
Let's have a sense of proportion.
I suppose we also have wood and glass furniture and glass and ceramics that are that old or older. That well designed plastic items can have the longevity of heirloom furniture should be a positive selling point.
My previous comment wasn't sarcastic. I think the main issue for Lego is that plastics have a bad rep. They can't say "who cares 5,000 tons is nothing" as that would be PR suicide and they can't stop using plastics, either... hence them trying to move to recycled plastics or at the very least to be seen to be seriously trying to do something.
There are few things more environmentally friendly than that. Had they used recycled or bioplastics, they would have been carbon negative.
Plastic is not bad at all, there is no perfect material, but plastic checks many of the boxes, even its environment footprint is low. It is only a problem because it is too cheap, so cheap that we throw it away without thinking. But it is not the case for Lego bricks, people don't throw away Lego bricks, and they are not cheap.
I would assume a huge portion eventually just gets landfilled.
Some guesses:
- People have more Lego. Passed over collections become bigger and bigger. Maybe the average collection was 2 boxes of bricks before, now it is 5.
- More people use Lego. There is a lot of Lego for adults now. It is not just for kids, but kids still play with Lego. People, especially adults can make bigger models too, with more bricks.
- A lot of Lego are stored in attics, unused. What will happen to them after they are rediscovered? I don't know, but they will probably end up growing someone else's collection.
- Some may end up in landfills, lost, broken, etc... But I think it is a very small amount. Used, bulk Lego bricks are about $15/kg, more than copper scrap, it would be worth digging for them if they were a common occurrence.
Selling their Lego branded toys with recycled plastics would damage their brand. Kids would be better off buying knock offs instead of bricks made with recycled plastics.