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The fact that Lego is making a decision that is directly against their own financial interest should unring the bell. Making quality things that last forever is the Reduce and Reuse of the recycle triangle. All of my childhood Legos are now owned by my nieces and nephews.

> But Lego has now revealed that after more than two years of testing, it had found that using recycled PET didn't reduce carbon emissions.

> It said the reason for that was because extra steps were required in the production process, which meant it needed to use more energy.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66910573

Exactly. Reduce and Reuse Are the only valid paths for plastic and Lego is the most reusable. Recycling plastic is bullshit and single-use plastics should be banned.

That's a really good point, it had crossed my mind. I do wonder if at some point Lego will change to some sort of subscriber model to keep shareholders happy. The Lego company seems to be one of the last "good" companies to not want to fleece customers, and that would be down to their part family ownership I suppose. Pessimistically I think "all good things...".

Fortunately, the "shareholders" are a couple of the grandchildren of the founder; it is entirely family owned, not publicly traded.

It’s true that on environmental timescales, all plastic is bad. But Lego is probably the most durable and reusable use of plastic for entertainment we have today.

Whatever logic brought you to the conclusion that reselling a thing means it’s no longer wanted is completely backwards. The fact you are seeing tons of Lego for sale online is because it’s so damn desired and valuable. Landfills are not filled with Lego. They’re filled with textiles from the fast-fashion industry and single-use plastics.

Lego is basically irrelevant when it comes to fossil fuel consumption or environmental plastic pollution. I’m glad they decided not to make their product worse for no point.

I wish “environmentalists” would keep their focus on things that will actually make a difference, as opposed to insisting on these performative sacrifices that make our world poorer, duller or less capable without meaningfully helping the environment.

> I wish “environmentalists” would keep their focus on things that will actually make a difference, as opposed to insisting on these performative sacrifices that make our world poorer, duller or less capable without meaningfully helping the environment.

I agree with this a great deal. Environmentalists tend to forget that lots of people just do not care about the environment, and if you want to make meaningful differences then you have to appeal to those people on other grounds. For example, LED bulbs are a success because they are just better than incandescents in almost every way. Conversely, paper straws suck ass at the basic job of being a straw, and so I actively avoid any restaurant I know which uses them.

Most people don't have anything against the environment. If you give them an environmentally friendly way to do something that's just as good as (or even better than) the old way, they're going to be fine with switching. But you have to put in the effort to make it an actual attractive solution, and not expect people to be happy with a bad substitute just because it's better for the environment.

? It's the one toy that does have a substantial long term resale market. Not everything needs to be ephemeral. It's just ABS, it's not asbestos.

Because they build a reputation of good quality plastic pieces that fit very snug together for, like they said, generations. New type os plastic seens to not be like that and the final product was not really good. If its really true or not, i don't know, but that was their justification.

Lego has got to be the lowest on the list for me as far as concern about plastic use. Who throws away Lego? Post a couple pounds of Lego on FB marketplace and see how fast it sells.

Some of our Lego is from the 1950s, and my daughter is the third generation playing with it. Surely 60+ years of use is a pretty good run for something made of plastic.

Further context:

https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b...

The footprint over the lifetime is higher. Seems like an entirely reasonable decision.

> ...if Lego is mostly dumped after a kid grows up... Anecdotally, most kids don't want old Lego

This is entirely wrong.

Nearly all the toys from my own childhood wound up in the garbage or Goodwill at one point or another... except the Legos. Kids want to build gigantic castles and spaceports of their own -- 20x larger than any sets Lego sells -- and those gigantic environments require having a ton of random assorted pieces.

Legos seem to be the one toy that doesn't get dumped.

> just look online at the moms selling old unwanted Lego cheap

That actually shows the opposite of what you're trying to say. They're not tossing them in the garbage, they are selling them, because they're still perfectly desirable. (Because not everyone winds up with grandkids to give them to, or wants to hold onto them until then.)

Your anecdote is not an anecdote, it's a made up fact.

My son is way more excited by my old sets with pirates, astronauts and castles than he is by the latest franchised crap like marvel, Harry Potter and all.

Here, at least mine is a real anecdote.

My son is not. He'd prefer the Batman and Spiderman sets as opposed to the random old pieces his grand parents keep offering him. Any kid who tells you they'd prefer old stuff to new is lying, otherwise Lego'd be selling that old stuff rather than the cross franchising they do today.

Maybe you should then question your parenting. I would be so distressed if my kid was incapable of creating original play without the support of a franchised movie.

Also, no my son is not lying to me.

You think someone's parenting abilities are in question because a child prefers new superhero Legos over more generic older sets?

Yes I just wrote it above. What part left you with a doubt?

I do think that it is indeed concerning when imitation is the only play a kid is able to perform. When a kid can only enjoy Spiderman lego sets that's because all they can play is basically an imitation of the movies they've seen.

> When a kid can only enjoy Spiderman lego sets that's because all they can play is basically an imitation of the movies they've seen.

Not necessarily; just because they only do imitative play with Lego doesn't mean they only do imitative play more generally.

Oh wow, yikes.

> What part left you with a doubt?

HN rules suggest "assuming good intent." I tried my best with your comment but saw absolutely none, so figured I'd double check to see if i was missing something. Guess not.

Where was the bad intent in my comment?

Giving an opinion is bad intent?

Did I insult anyone or sid anything inflammatory? Maybe you got mixed up with the parent who called my kid a liar.

> He'd prefer the Batman and Spiderman sets as opposed to the random old pieces his grand parents keep offering him.

Good for him.

> Any kid who tells you they'd prefer old stuff to new is lying,

The issue isn't preferring old stuff to new as much as preferring what Lego used to make more of vs. what they currently make more of, but, no, neither of those preferences is nonexistent in individuals.

> otherwise Lego'd be selling that old stuff rather than the cross franchising they do today.

No, aggregate market demand, weighted by who has money to spend (and people who aren't even kids), doesn't indicate any kid with contrary stated preference is lying. Humans aren't mental carbon copy clones in slightly different fleshsuits.

Oh wow. Not often I get as triggered by a comment where someone is wrong on the Internet as this. This has to be some of the dumbest drivel I've ever read in a comment about Lego.

The Lego sets I got as a kid in the 80s, have been built and has been (and is!) being played with by my ten year old daugher. Classics such as 6080 and 40567. Or lego space stuff such as 6980, 6940, 6783 or a variety of the others she's been playing with.

One of the big appeals of LEGO is that it's generational. It is that the plastics produced 30, 40, 50 years ago is just as good today in 2023, as it was in 1986. The utter baloney you're coughing up would ruin one of the main great points about LEGO. It would render it not generational toys but yet another bunch of bollocks that expires after a few years.

And shove your anecdotes. I doubt you've got kids.

Yeah, my kids visited their great-grandmother in Australia a few years back, and out came the 1960s legos. Great fun was had.

How mature. I doubt you're older than 15 with a response like that.

15 years is not "bunch of bollocks that expires" - that's a pretty good lifetime for any modern plastic toy, and if the plastic is something like PLA, will just break down to sugars.

What you fail to understand is the ABS plastic is just adding to the pool of what will all become trash eventually, in 100 years we'll have a larger pile of this junk, whereas using a biodegradable plastic the total amount may remain the same or have declined.

You do you though, continue to buy new plastic bags at the supermarket, favour plastic packaging, plastic cup straws, all because you can "re-use" them. Oh wait, they've banned them for a reason.

I'm 44.

Since '86, I've noticed that I've lost a 3 gray 2x1 full size bricks for the Castle, two bricks for one of the spaceships. Every single other model has all their bricks.

I despise the "planned obsolesce" bollocks some folks are hell bent on pushing into everything. I cheer on lego not to subscribe to it. I, and lots and lots of other brickheads would probably abandon them in an instant if they did.

> You do you though, continue to buy new plastic bags at the supermarket, favour plastic packaging, plastic cup straws, all because you can "re-use" them.

You're comparing Lego to things that are pretty much designed to be single-use, and that's part of why you're getting a lot of people arguing with you. As many have pointed out, Lego is not single use. First, kids can play with them for _years_. That's longer than a lot of stuff that kids play with. But also, because they're high quality and they do last a long time, they're great for actually passing down to younger generations. I'm in my 40's now and recently passed the legos I had as a child on to my niece and nephew. I'm sure they'll get passed on to another generation at some point. There's a _huge_ amount value in products that are so incredibly reusable.

I need to add another reply to this drivel, to point out that No, I do not buy plastic packaging, plastic cup straws, or other silly plastic products that are essentially one-use.

LEGO is not one-use. The entire point of lego is to NOT be one-use. I'm starting to suspect you think the purpose of lego is to buy a lego model, build it, play a bit with the result, and then it's "done".

That's not how it works. Those bricks add to the pile of bricks you've got, to build creatively from. After a while, those 'piles' of bricks get changed to well sorted drawings, with different drawers for different bricks. ;) We use something like this:

https://www.plasticboxshop.co.uk/craft-storage-boxes-c4/comp...

for storing different sized legos, to easily find what you're looking for.

Bricks also do get worse with time. I remember getting some old Lego as a child and finding the pieces barely stuck together. Having old bricks mixed with new ones, my designs would often "fail" at older pieces first.

They'll get there, the first stab just wasn't great. That said, LEGO truly is multi-generational. My kids are playing with my childhood LEGO and it looks close to new.

I’ve put my old lego in the dishwasher (you can use a “net”) and it comes out like new.