Lego to replace oil in its bricks with pricier renewable plastic

(Honest question)

I am a tad surprised it has taken them this long.

How does that follow?

That's just not true. If it were, oil production would decrease every year from the current year onward. It's actually been increasing, and given recent discoveries of large unconventional reserves in the US and elsewhere, we can keep on increasing oil production every year for a long time.

See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...

> extracting oil will consume more oil than it produces.

Huh?

1) EROEI is still strongly positive in fossil fuel extraction, and 2) even if it weren't, we'd still extract fossil fuels.

Given the utility of petroleum as a chemical feedstock and energy-dense fuel for aviation, we're going to keep extracting the stuff long after it becomes EROEI-negative. It makes perfect sense to spend 1.2 units of nuclear/solar/etc. energy to extract 1.0 units of oil energy if that oil energy meets a need that nuclear/solar/etc. can't satisfy.

You can't make legos out of uranium.

Imagine there's a material A that there's only 100,000 of left.

It takes only 1 energy to consume it and turn it into a single product. Also using it could cause -5 damage to the environment.

You realize however that it is not sustainable, it's going to be done at some point in the future.

You start to look for solutions. You find a new material that can replace the other material B, however it's not as good for making the products. It takes 5 energy to consume it and it takes 3 energy to make the product and then when recycled it takes another 3 energy.

Let's say that COVID v2 requires restaurants to sterilize utensils so thoroughly that it costs $1000 per utensil. Obviously at that point most restaurants would opt to just buy new utensils each time.

When reuse or recycling is saving consumers money and/or making companies money, everyone already does it. Things like salvaging copper wiring from old buildings or putting wrecked cars into junk yards to be stripped of useful parts and scrapped.

> Even if something is more energy intensive to create, it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.

This assumes the cost of getting raw materials is greater than that of salvaging old materials. This is true for metals which is why you see people collecting used cans or recycling phones for "free". But it's not true for plastics (petroleum is ridiculously cheap and easy to get) which is why you don't see corporations fighting to collect the Pacific garbage patch or offering free recycling services for consumers to get at their waste plastic.

Additionally, the price of new materials does not include what it costs to get rid of them, nor does it typically include the cost of fixing what gets destroyed (like nature or human fertility) when its made or discarded.

Can't just the employee cost of gathering and placing them in a dishwasher, the fraction of the cost of the dishwasher machine itself, sorting them out, replacing the quantity that got stolen or thrown in the garbage by mistake or damaged, the accounting of mistakes where dirty or otherwise unsanitary ones are handed to customers, etc... exceed the cost of disposable?

It's not a theoretical concern. Or at least any theoretical concern is not hugely useful in the practical operation of a restaurant.

For an example of recycling, try evaluating the cost of making a milk crate out of plastic bags vs. virgin plastic.

Reuse, sure, but I doubt you have the equipment required to recycle paper, glass, metals, plastic, etc. If you did, I'm sure you'd know that equipment was probably pretty expensive to purchase, and far from free to operate.

> Or recycle crates by using them as decorations.

That's not really "recycling", that's just another form of reuse.

> it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.

That's if it's being reused. Most people don't reuse all that much of what they consume. Think soda cans or bottles, jars of peanut butter or jams, plastic laundry detergent containers, paper or plastic grocery bags, etc. Most of that ends up being thrown away after being used once.

It's great when people reuse those things over and over after their initial use, but the reality is that very few people actually do so.

All of this is why very little of the plastic we toss in recycling bins actually gets recycled. It's just not economically feasible to recycle all that plastic. For decades now we've shipped all of it overseas, but a lot of those places have stopped taking our plastic, because they don't want it either.

Perhaps the externalities are exaggerated then? If you say something is scarce and the market says it's abundant, who's right? You? Why?

The fact is that Lego isn't, to any meaningful degree, contributing to adverse outcomes by using petroleum as a feedstock. The market tells them they got the right answer. Their oil use is a drop in the bucket. They shouldn't feel pressured to worsen their product over moral and aesthetic pressure from activists.

> The economic argument doesn't work, so it's a little hard not to frame it as a moral issue instead.

The market is working just fine. The trouble is that the moralizers don't like the priority stack rank the market produces and seek to use various forms of non-market power to get the outcomes they want. People doing this makes us all worse off. Trust the market.