
Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing - blondie9x
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/energy-environment/lego-plastic-denmark-environment-toys.html
======
owenversteeg
Sounds noble, but how much of a difference does it make? 1 million tons of
co2/yr is not that much. That's about the equivalent of a town of 60,000
Americans. Put in carbon credit terms, that's about $5-10 million bucks worth
of carbon for a company making about $1.5 billion in profit per year.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the company to just plant trees or do
environmental work or something? I imagine researching and eventually
switching to an entirely different material will be on the order of (at least)
a half a billion dollars for a company with six billion bucks a year in
revenue, probably more.

[edit] I agree with the general sentiment of the comments below, and trust me
I'm as concerned about climate change as the rest, but LEGO has so far
invested about $200 million into something with an environmental cost of
around $5-10 million - and they haven't even gotten close with the solutions
they've found so far. $200 million spent in the right places can do a massive
amount of good, far more IMHO than a more sustainable LEGO.

To put things in perspective: each LEGO brick is 47 grams of co2. One
transatlantic flight is about 3 tons of co2. So one transatlantic flight is
equivalent to nearly 60,000 LEGO pieces.

I agree that changes have to come from everywhere to effectively fight global
warming, but I think that there's a limit. At what point do you just not
bother? There's got to be a cutoff. And couldn't 200 million bucks be used so
much more effectively against climate change?

~~~
aiyodev
It’s not about the enviroment. It’s about virtue-signaling strongly enough to
protect their business interests. You won’t see “Lego Buys Carbon Credits” as
a headline on HN.

~~~
threeseed
It's far simpler and less cynical than that.

The majority of people in this world want the world to be clean and free of
the effects of climate change. Companies are comprised of these people. Hence
there will always be internal struggles to "do your part" from employees.
Especially since that often ends up making products that are more sustainable
not just environmentally friendly. And so win-win for everyone.

------
21
> Lego emits about a million tons of carbon dioxide each year

That's about 214133 passenger vehicles driven for one year, or 107980 homes'
energy use for one year according to this:

[https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-
calc...](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator)

Just like the plastic straw ban, it's basically meaningless in the grand
scheme of things, but obviously very important for their brand.

It would probably be much better to invest that money for example in less
polluting ocean shipments, which are a huge problem, but that doesn't have the
"feel good" factor about it.

~~~
craftyguy
Stop treating every improvement as "if it's not a silver bullet, then it's not
worth doing."

Consider for a split second that we may have to make lots of little
incremental improvements to have a large gain...

~~~
elmerfud
I don't believe that's what the original poster was saying at all. It was that
when "going green" the marketing department seems to be one deciding what they
do first rather than the engineering team.

~~~
webkike
This point seems to imply moral imperatives should be ignored if they don't
originate from the engineering department.

------
jacquesm
This is yet another story that shows a complete disregard for the crime that
lies at the heart of the Lego empire: the original design for the bricks was
taken from a company called Kiddicraft, see:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddicraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddicraft)

And for an encore, Lego only acquired the Kiddicraft assets to wipe out this
'inconvenient truth' before suing another company for patent infringement.

Lego is a great toy, but any story about the origin of the bricks should at
least reference the true origins of the brick rather than the Lego white-
washed version.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
It was a very direct and blatant rip off too. See [0]. Lego completely
redesigned what they were intending to produce after seeing Page's product.

Page committed suicide after the business failed in the 50s.

[0]
[http://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875...](http://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Image_Lego%20copies%20of%20Kiddicraft%20Elements.jpg)

~~~
tspike
Wow, I had no idea. That's very disappointing.

> Page was never aware of this, and his daughter has stated that she "was
> relieved that my father never knew about Lego before he died.”

This leaves me with a different impression of the circumstances surrounding
his death than the initial one I got from your comment, however.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Yes, I could have put that more clearly. Kiddicraft were like a UK Fisher
Price of the 40s and 50s - they produced a massive range of toys, not just
bricks. I think they failed and resurrected a couple of times with new owners
keeping the brand name around.

------
DubiousPusher
This is noble but seems a little misguided. Legos seem like they'd have by far
one of the lowest carbon to utility ratios of any toy you can buy. I used the
ones I had as a kid for hours almost every day. I've passed them down to my
kid who uses them daily. More than 99% are in perfect shape and I see no
reason we won't one day pass them onto another generation.

When you're discarding the plastic junk some family member got for your kid
just last Christmas, there probably aren't any Legos in there.

In the worst case, they're high quality ABS so they're more recyclable than
most packaging you bother to sort.

~~~
autokad
wouldn't be surprised if they went to something that was unusable after 3
years and said 'its for the environment'

~~~
Qwertie
Thats the case for apple chargers. I have seen that macbook chargers fail
after about 6 months use because they switched to a plastic that was less
toxic. Conveniently the side of the cable that always fails is the one you
can't remove from the brick so you have to buy a new $100 charger at least
once a year.

------
mk89
I don't understand the negative comments.

Let's suppose for a moment that we lived in a fully environment-friendly
world. If a company decided to use coal or non recycled plastic, we would be
now bashing them. If the same happens in the opposite direction, we think
"well, it's not gonna change anything".

It's the equivalent of 200000 cars, a 60000 people town,.. Who cares. It's
nice, and ethically it's the right thing to do.

~~~
gerbilly
> I don't understand the negative comments.

Yeah, if Lego wants to fund the search for a greener alternative to ABS, we
should all be happy.

If they ever find one, then other companies and the environment could benefit
too.

This is especially true since if the new material satisfies lego's stringent
requirements, then it should be good enough for everybody else.

------
syntaxing
I think my new motto in life is "Every bucket of water starts with a drop"

This applies to so many things in life. Voting, bad habits, and companies
doing things to make the environment better.

------
Groxx
Biggest benefit I can see is that this'll probably lead to a fair bit more
research into recyclable/renewable plastics. That tends to help industry as a
whole eventually, as knowledge spreads.

~~~
ezrast
Absolutely. A bunch of people in here are suggesting that the effort is
wasteful considering Lego's current emissions, but this is R&D work that could
have impacts far beyond their current facilities. Given Lego's quality and
durability standards, I'd imagine that anything they're satisfied with will
have a wide range of applications in other industries.

------
orev
To all the negativity: isn’t the root of the carbon problem that there’s no
single big thing that can make a difference? Vehicles need to change one by
one. Power plants need to change one by one. Cattle farms need to change one
by one. Here we have LEGO doing its part, which is all that one entity can
really be expected to do.

Everybody needs to do their part. What is an ocean if not a multitude of
drops?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
This is why I think the only real long term solution is carbon taxes.

------
beloch
Hopefully they have the honesty to stick with ABS if they can't find an
alternative that is actually better for the environment. One fears that, if
they do find an alternative, they'll switch for the sake of public perception
even though it's actually _worse_ in terms of pollution, energy use, etc..

------
nailer
I want Lego to make Technic that's light and strong enough for people to
create actual flying drones.

~~~
m1573rp34130dy
Once you are satisfied with the assembly use glue, epoxy, wax, or chewing
gum...[seriously]

~~~
nailer
Technic doesn't connect with studs if that's what you meant - the life size
Chiron, for example, doesn't use glue: [https://www.lego.com/en-
gb/themes/technic/bugatti-chiron/bui...](https://www.lego.com/en-
gb/themes/technic/bugatti-chiron/build-for-real)

~~~
m1573rp34130dy
i was assuming you were concerned with the assembly coming apart when used,
but now i see your concern, using the technic material itself is similar to
making an airplane out of concrete~yes?

~~~
nailer
Yep I was thinking weight.

------
fmajid
Last week, I went to my childhood home in France and found a perfectly
preserved 40 year old set of Lego Technic from my childhood, and gave them to
my daughter to play with. It's going to be well-nigh impossible for Lego to
test the longevity of a plant-based replacement, accelerated simulated testing
only provides an upper bound.

The only viable option for them would be to find a process to produce ABS
using plant-based feedstocks, a process that will likely be an order of
magnitude more expensive than petroleum-based ABS, at least to start with.

The article mentions PLA (shudder). It's well known filament material for low-
end 3D printing hobbyists, and far inferior to ABS in its physical properties,
not to mention that little problem of being water-soluble. The fact they even
considered that garbage does not augur well of the judgment of whoever is
responsible for the project.

------
mlindner
Rather than trying to re-invent plastics they should just be making the base
stocks directly. In theory you can suck in carbon dioxide and build your own
carbon chains to make anything you want.

Or they could just keep making them as they've always done. Not everything
needs to change, just most things.

~~~
rtkwe
I think right now any way you cut that kind of carbon sequestration it's going
to be more effective and less polluting to use the energy you'd put into that
process another way.

------
BadassFractal
Somewhat unrelated, but I'm really not a fan of that single hard flash look in
the two photos of the Lego staff. Looks like they were going for something
grungy and gritty, but it didn't get executed that well.

------
maffyoo
Im a real cynic when it comes to lego. it has increasingly become a product
that is sold to parents and then foisted upon children. I know a few parents
who claim their kids love lego but empirical evidence seems to be far from
that. We bought lego for our kids but they were (briefly) only really
interested in the characters and we built a few things but minecraft is a way
more interesting way of doing the same thing. Secondly isnt Lego just a
business that becomes obsolete because of technology and 3d printers. How long
before you can just print the thing you want - plastic or not. It seems to me
lego is destined to only have made sense during the late 20th and early 21st
century. we should all get over it... maybe they should have bought minecraft?

~~~
fastball
I loved lego as a kid, and I had access to a PC by 8.

The key, for me, to keep lego interesting was to have a lot of _generic_
legos. In my mind, lego has done a disservice to the power of their own
invention by focusing more on the lego minifigures and things like bionicles
-- which you use to build that one set piece and then don't use much beyond
that.

If you focus on the bigger sets and sets of just the standard bricks, the
limit is your imagination. In my mind, if you're using instructions, you're
doing it wrong.

~~~
fphhotchips
I think there's a nice middle ground in there. You can make the pirate ship,
or the TIE fighter or whatever... And then make a pirate tie fighter, with
wings and a sail! What I never got was the "make a set and then glue it all up
and put it on the mantelpiece" attitude. That's doing it wrong to me.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
IIRC sets used to have instructions for multiple models you could make, which
helped to support the idea of making different things. My kids want to make
the model and put it on the shelf - they're deaf to my protestations.

~~~
fastball
That's why you gotta ignore the instructions from the get go.

~~~
mcphage
The instructions are good at teaching you a variety of ways the bricks can be
used, help understand how to make larger structures from them, etc. And hell,
following the instructions is fun, too.

