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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

Lego makes 32 billion plastic bricks per year. No way can they spin their efforts as "environmentally friendly" -- no matter how much greenwashing.

(Note: I love Lego products. We have giant bins of previously-loved bricks.)

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The average weight of a lego is 2.5 grams. 32 billion bricks works out to ~5,500 metric tons of legos per year. Worldwide. That's less than a rounding error compared to any other kind of plastic production.

Let's have a sense of proportion.

This doesn't matter. Plastics are 'bad' and Lego is plastics. This is mainly an image problem.

I know your first line was sarcastic, but Lego should really be held up as what plastic can offer for sustainability. As I commented elsewhere, I have very few other 50+ year objects in my house, let alone toys that my kids actively play with. The next closest thing might be Atari cartridges at 40 years old, but with few exceptions, kids don’t really care about those either (coincidentally plastic shelled). I suppose I have vinyl records that are at least 50 years old (also plastic).

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.

Yes, Lego's product is very durable (not sure about sustainability), I think mostly because it is very stable: bricks are simple and they don't change. Well, nowadays they seem to be doing a lot of custom bricks for specific models but by and large bricks can be kept across generations.

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.

Lego bricks are forever, more or less. I don't know anyone who has trashed Lego bricks, they are reused, passed down to children, resold, etc... or stored in giant bins waiting to be reused.

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.

Where is all the Lego then? They have been making billions of bricks for decades. If it never breaks, they should be able to just shut down the factory and people would sell between themselves.

I would assume a huge portion eventually just gets landfilled.

It is a question I ask myself.

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.

Seems the better thing might be to have some kind of “pre-owned” program where kids no longer playing with their legos can send them back, get refurbished, and resold.

So, what they already do?

I think it's called ebay

If that was frictionless and a great substitute then Lego wouldn’t sell many new packages.

Single use plastic is the big problem. Not Lego.

And plastic ending up in UV light or, apparently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37624070), in contact with water and especially hot water, all of which apparently break it down to micro and nanoplastics. I don't know whether it's coarse and rough, but it gets everywhere.

completely agree. legos last for DECADES. That shit ain't going in a landfill. they retain their value pretty well. if anything, its jsut another sequesterization method as far as I'm concerned.

those stopit plastic wrappers they put on everything though...

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