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Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing
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- BadassFractal 8y agoSomewhat 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.
- comiskey1905 8y agoWhy is this article related to IT?
- eganist 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > On-Topic: [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- danso 8y agoLegos have been a popular gateway for kids to engineering and tech. The article itself talks about the materials engineering challenge in reformulating the blocks.
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- jacquesm 8y agoThis 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.
- Numberwang 8y agoThere were lot's of similar companies at that time. This is a silly thing to get upset about.
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- Gustomaximus 8y agoWhat bothers me more is having started their business this way, they are heavily litigious to companies that make products compatible or similar to Lego. Its good to see they generally lose these cases. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone
- rjsw 8y agoMy grandfather made some coloured injection-moulded bricks for his children before Lego but didn't bother to patent the design. We still have some of them in the family.
- jacquesm 8y agoThat is extremely interesting. Do you have any pictures and do you know exactly when this all happened?
- rjsw 8y agoThe blocks were made from polyethylene [1], the history section of the wiki page states that it was reserved for use in RADAR sets during WWII, this would have been how he got access to it as he was responsible for the design and manufacture of the British RADAR transmitters. I have been told that he was the first person to try putting colouring into LDPE. This may have been after the Page design though, my mother was the eldest child but wasn't born until 1941. I think we contributed some pictures to the UK Materials engineering society, will ask. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
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- 21 8y ago> 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-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... 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 8y agoStop 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 8y agoI 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.
- threeseed 8y agoAnd what evidence is there of this ? Because it sure sounds like you just made this up. In most companies these policies have come from the CEO down largely because there has been significant demand coming from (a) employees, (b) consumers and (c) shareholders.
- webkike 8y agoThis point seems to imply moral imperatives should be ignored if they don't originate from the engineering department.
- ddingus 8y agoWho knows? Could be the product of lunchtime chats about the world, their place in it, etc... many people in the company may have contributed with marketing making a move.
- owenversteeg 8y agoSounds 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?
- pedasmith 8y agoOTOH: it's a high-profile company with exacting requirements for its pieces. If they can convert, companies that might have been on the fence ("it's too hard! our requirements are special! nobody else is doing it") might jump in, too.
- aiyodev 8y agoIt’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 8y agoIt'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.
- DubiousPusher 8y agoThis 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.
- whatshisface 8y agoFurther, making plastic out of petroleum is a form of direct carbon sequestration. Carbon sitting on the floor of a kid's room or inside of a landfill is not warming the atmosphere. It is normally burnt!
- rtkwe 8y agoIt's not though, because if it weren't being used for Lego/plastic products in general we wouldn't just burn it it'd just be left in the ground (or potentially make other oil products slightly cheaper depending on the volume of plastic we're talking about). We burn about all the oil we want for the price right now so anything not used in plastic would just not be extracted.
- whatshisface 8y ago>We burn about all the oil we want for the price right now so anything not used in plastic would just not be extracted. That's simply not the case. If you have two consumers competing for the same resource, the price is kept high and the supplier works to produce more while both consumers work to consume less. If one of the consumers is removed, the other has less of an incentive to conserve and the supplier has less of an incentive to produce. If the demand for oil to be used in the chemical industry went down, slightly more oil would be burnt and slightly less would be produced. If the price of oil fell due to a weakening chemical industry demand, oil-burning enterprises would become more proftable. The lower the price of oil, the cheaper renewables must be to compete. Further, if it was true that the demand for oil to burn was totally inelastic, carbon taxes would be pointless from the outset because raising the price of consumption wouldn't reduce it.
- coderdude 8y ago> “It is important,” said Mr. Brooks, “that we can make a toy that doesn’t jeopardize” children’s future. That's a weird looking quote. The last two words (children's future) aren't really part of what he said? Was that something the writer added or changed to make it more clear, or more evocative? If so, shouldn't it say [children's future]?
- Groxx 8y agoBiggest 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 8y agoAbsolutely. 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.
- nailer 8y agoI want Lego to make Technic that's light and strong enough for people to create actual flying drones.
- m1573rp34130dy 8y agoOnce you are satisfied with the assembly use glue, epoxy, wax, or chewing gum...[seriously]
- nailer 8y agoTechnic 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/build-for-real https://www.lego.com/en-gb/themes/technic/bugatti-chiron/bui...
- m1573rp34130dy 8y agoi 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?
- m1573rp34130dy 8y ago...i think the lifesize chiron also has some non technic parts, such as steeltubing chassis ?
- nailer 8y agoYep I was thinking weight.
- maffyoo 8y agoIm 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?
- msie 8y agoI'm an adult and was given a small Lego kit as a gift. Only took me 20 minutes to put it together but it was so fun to problem solve and manipulate things in real life. 3D on the computer will never match the experience for a long time.
- fastball 8y agoI 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 8y agoI 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.
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- syntaxing 8y agoI 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.
- mlindner 8y agoRather 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 8y agoI 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.
- mk89 8y agoI 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 8y ago> 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.
- beloch 8y agoHopefully 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..
- orev 8y agoTo 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 8y agoThis is why I think the only real long term solution is carbon taxes.
- fmajid 8y agoLast 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.