Lego Drops Plans To Make Bricks From Recycled Plastic Bottles (cbsnews.com) 58
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Denmark's Lego said on Monday that it remains committed to its quest to find sustainable materials to reduce carbon emissions, even after an experiment by the world's largest toymaker to use recycled bottles did not work. Lego said it has "decided not to progress" with making its trademark colorful bricks from recycled plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET, and after more than two years of testing "found the material didn't reduce carbon emissions." Lego enthusiastically announced in 2021 that the prototype PET blocks had become the first recycled alternative to pass its "strict" quality, safety and play requirements, following experimentation with several other iterations that proved not durable enough.
The company said scientists and engineers tested more than 250 variations of PET materials, as well as hundreds of other plastic formulations, before nailing down the prototype, which was made with plastic sourced from suppliers in the U.S. that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority. On average, a one-liter plastic PET bottle made enough raw material for ten 2 x 4 Lego bricks. Despite the determination that the PET prototype failed to save on carbon emissions, Lego said it remained "fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032." [...] Lego said it will continue to use bio-polypropylene, the sustainable and biological variant of polyethylene -- a plastic used in everything from consumer and food packaging to tires -- for parts in Lego sets such as leaves, trees and other accessories.
The company said scientists and engineers tested more than 250 variations of PET materials, as well as hundreds of other plastic formulations, before nailing down the prototype, which was made with plastic sourced from suppliers in the U.S. that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority. On average, a one-liter plastic PET bottle made enough raw material for ten 2 x 4 Lego bricks. Despite the determination that the PET prototype failed to save on carbon emissions, Lego said it remained "fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032." [...] Lego said it will continue to use bio-polypropylene, the sustainable and biological variant of polyethylene -- a plastic used in everything from consumer and food packaging to tires -- for parts in Lego sets such as leaves, trees and other accessories.
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It's hard to use wood as injection mold material.
Actually... (Score:3)
If you dissolve the lignin out such that you are left with a pure cellulose pulp, which is what you do for paper manufacturing, you can dissolve the cellulose in an appropriate solvent and injection mold it to your heart's content. This is how we make cellophane. The most common solvents used are horribly toxic and environmentally destructive, however. There have been efforts to make this process more green. I don't know how successful they've been to this point.
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Now ponder how this mixes with saliva. We're still talking about toys made for kids aged 2-12.
No matter how much geeks try to pretend otherwise.
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I think he's suggesting that your cellulose lego brick will not be a lego brick for long once the toddler puts it in their mouth and it starts to dissolve, rather than making any kind of statement about toxicity.
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I know what he said. I understood what he meant.
You specifically mentioned toxicity in your reply, rather than saying "it won't dissolve" so I'm sure you can understand the confusion.
By the way, since you're the expert: would you actually use cellophane in this application? As far as I know, it's a thin film and not something suitable for an application like lego bricks. hence my assumption that it would be some other kind of cellulose based material--of which I have seen many fall apart when exposed to moisture.
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Cellophane is just a particular product name that people are familiar with. Because it's just cellulose. Cellophane, rayon, "transparent wood", and the like are all just different applications of cellulose that have been dissolved into viscose and then made into various shapes.
The same way rayon doesn't dissolve in rain, the bricks wouldn't dissolve if a child put them in their mouth. As it's just cellulose, it is non-toxic. Though the production of viscose requires toxic chemicals, those are not present i
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It's hard to use wood as injection mold material.
Not sure about you ... but my "wood" fits female "injection molds" quite nicely, thank you very much!
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But I sure hope that you don't think it makes a great gift for kids.
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Turns out that wood, by its own nature, is a carbon capture device. As you cut trees to harvest wood, you replant new ones. Every chunk of wood you ship is encapsulating carbon, and it is replenished by the reforesting backfill. So, why not wood?
I suspect you know why not and are simply trolling. How long will a wooden lego last being chewed on by a 2 year old? Jeebus Christo.
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How long will a wooden lego last being chewed on by a 2 year old? Jeebus Christo.
You probably shouldn't be giving your two year old items small enough to put into their mouth regardless of whether they're made out of wood or plastic.
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That's why you give them Duplos, Legos' larger, easier-to-manipulate blocks.
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> Every chunk of wood you ship is encapsulating carbon
Yes but the wood may break down/rot in decades or centuries. When carbon is encapsulated in plastic it stays trapped for thousands of years. :)
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"bio-polypropylene" isn't made from oil, it's plastic made from plants, that traps the carbon for thousands of years.
There's a whole bunch of plastics made from plant these days.
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However, steel can't be given the candy colors that they want. Wood can be stained, but that's still not good enough. And barring some exotic ironwoods maybe, wood doesn't have the physical properties either.
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Those are Lincoln Logs not Lego, try to keep up.
Durability (Score:4, Funny)
"several other iterations that proved not durable enough. "
It has to be strong enough to resist the naked foot of a 250 pound father on a stair in the dark, stamping a rectangular impression into the foot.
That feeling is hard to describe, literally.
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Repeat as necessary.
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Technically, every foot can withstand the Lego brick. In practice, and perceptually, no so much.
Very few other things can make the most prim and proper schoolmarm swear like a sailor.
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Very few other things can make the most prim and proper schoolmarm swear like a sailor.
My wife was a HS English teacher and she occasionally had such sailor-like commentary about some of her students' work while grading papers at home -- noting that her written feedback was always much more reserved ...
Navy SEAL training (Score:2)
It is also part of Hell Week in the screening for SEAL recruits that they walk barefoot over Lego bricks.
If our guys are subject to it as part of their training, it is not torture.
On the other hand, SEALs are sailors, and if they curse consistent with Navy tradition, heh!
Re:Durability (Score:4, Informative)
I know the feeling of both of them, and unless that gravel comes in perfect cuboids with perfectly cut edges and pointy corners, it's not even remotely in the same ballpark.
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Most (western) adults will have stepped on a Lego brick sometime in their lives. There is no need to describe the feeling because it's one of the few things that are nearly universal as it's happened to everyone.
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"This is adorable. You think legos hurt, trod on a 4 sided dice at 3 AM. You will learn the meaning of pain."
You should try a toddler-Lego, the bricks are wayyyy bigger.
PET would be terrible (Score:3, Insightful)
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And yet that's not the reason they dropped it. We'll just let the actual product maker decide if the material properties would be suitable to make bricks.
Focus on Minds not Bricks (Score:2)
Our best bet to solve our environmental - and many other - problems is to ensure we recruit the best minds into science and engineering fields. Providing our kids (and their parents!) with toys that let them grow their creativity and knowledge by building their own
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They need to sell more bricks to make more profits. Capitalism will never allow that.
Re:Focus on Minds not Bricks (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like the large bins of generic lego that already exist?
https://www.lego.com/en-ca/sea... [lego.com]
Or maybe you mean like the great 3-1 in sets that already exist?
https://www.lego.com/en-ca/the... [lego.com]
Or the large selection of idea books that already exist?
https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=lego... [amazon.ca]
Or the lego hosted site with challenges and activities and contests?
https://ideas.lego.com/howitwo... [lego.com]
Hell they even made a lego movie that explicitly promoted and demonstrated the joy of building things from whatever was at hand.
One set that came from that, remains one my absolute favorite examples, where they built a pod-racer type hover-craft thing out of a castle gate and wagon:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/394871... [www.ebay.ca]
Not to mention the huge lego fan communities from bricknerd to youtube channels that constantly show off new ideas, have contests of their own, tutorials, and teach advanced techniques...
So... yeah.. WTF are you on about?
If you only buy sets with licensed tie-ins and then only use them to build one thing, then its time to look in the mirror. That's on you.
Discontinued Mindstorms (Score:3)
So... yeah.. WTF are you on about?
Mainly this [slashdot.org], which seems to have escaped your notice.
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Ok, and in another thread you wrote this...
"The problem is that they now create models with lots of very specialised bricks so reusing the bricks for your own creations is much harder than it used to be."
I disagree.
If you spend a lot of time with modern lego, you'd find that most of these specialized pieces aren't specialized at all, they are not created for a particular model to do a specialized thing and they tend to be reused over and over again in all the modern sets, in different ways, and for differen
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over kits that have fixed instructions to just build one thing
Instructions are great to learn how to put things together. If you (or your kid) thinks they always need to be followed then that's your problem, not the problem of instructions.
100% of my lego came with instructions. That doesn't mean those were used.
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LEGO Air Filters? (Score:2)
Where's my money??
Lego's are the least of our worries (Score:2)
It is telling they couldn't find a way to use recycled plastic that actually had a smaller carbon foot print. Goes to show how utterly ineffective recycling is, a
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Legos are very definitely not the problem with plastics. The problem with plastics are single use plastics. Even those are justifiable in certain contexts, e.g., medical, it'd be pretty hard to imagine modern medicine without single use plastics. The real boogieman is the beverage industry. Americans blow through 50,000,000,000 plastic bottles a year just for bottled drinking water. That's something that is accessible to nearly all Americans in effectively unlimited amounts from the tap, something peop
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If people are buying all of their drinking water in bottles and getting it in six-packs of 1 litre each, your bottled water market is broken. A functioning market would have squarish 6-litre bottles which use less plastic and make more efficient use of space in storage and transportation. They also sell 8l bottles here, but I find them too unwieldy; and reusable 20l bottles which are used in conjunction with a dispensing machine.
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Or, you know, just get it from the bloody tap which is unlimited and dirt cheap. I've even lived places that didn't meter usage for residential customers because it wasn't worth it, you paid a flat fee for the hookup.
Your 20L bottles can't claim environmental protection when they're usually delivered in a fossil fuel powered truck.
If you're too stuck up to drink tap water because taste invest in a filtration system. IMHO, bottled water should be illegal in any context other than disaster recovery. You
Re:Lego's are the least of our worries (Score:4, Funny)
>> they last basically forever. Legos from the 80s still work as well as they did out of the box.
In fact they shrink a little, and don't fit that well any more.
Easy Countermeasure: put them in water for 24h
they re-humidify for the next 20 years, grow a little, and are like new, fitting better again.
Propylene and Ethylene: they are different! (Score:2)
No! "bio-polypropylene, the sustainable and biological variant of polyethylene" is just wrong.
Different monomers entirely. One is not a variant on the other. You can't recycle either very much, but you certainly can't recycle them together and get anything other than... garbage. Which means they are different enough to matter even in the tiny scope of this reporter's ignorance on plastic.
Some consolation in their honesty about it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, that's nice to see. Lego is privately-owned, so it can make statements and operate its business without worrying "what will the shareholders think?".
Other Forms of Waste and Pollution (Score:2)
...after more than two years of testing "found the material didn't reduce carbon emissions."
If it was at least carbon neutral the reduction in solid plastic waste would be a benefit by itself.
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If it was at least carbon neutral the reduction in solid plastic waste would be a benefit by itself.
I recall my chemistry professor at university starting a lecture with a bit of an aside on how we'd be better off burning plastic for fuel than trying to recycle it. I believe he wanted to point this out because at the time there was some debate about a waste-to-electricity power plant being planned nearby. Perhaps less petroleum is used since, as that chemistry professor pointed out, we aren't hauling plastic all over the place for recycling and burning petroleum fuel to do it.
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Too Soon? (Score:2)