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Lego have stated that they have to keep using oil based plastic (ABS) because their attempt at "sustainable" plastics has failed. Specifically they've said the

Lego have stated that they have to keep using oil based plastic (ABS) because their attempt at "sustainable" plastics has failed. Specifically they've said they need Lego to "last generations". That sentence should set off alarm bells for environmentalists, it's not recycling if Lego is mostly dumped after a kid grows up. Lasting generations sounds like BS to me given the arguments against fossil fuel plastic production, banning forever plastics from the environment, and sea and environmental pollution caused by items like bricks or bags. Why should Lego last generations? A PLA type plastic would be non toxic, break down easier and importantly for Lego, also encourage replacement purchases. Lego that lasts 10-15 years, with a discount replacement programme, to my mind, is better than 100+ year old Lego killing animals that eat it, or taking up space in landfills. Anecdotally, most kids don't want old Lego, (just look online at the moms selling old unwanted Lego cheap without instructions or boxes) they want the latest sets, so the justification isn't there either.

altairTF 3y ago
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.
diffeomorphism 3y ago
Further context: https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b7dc https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b... The footprint over the lifetime is higher. Seems like an entirely reasonable decision.
marvinblum 3y ago
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.
avalys 3y ago
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.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  > 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.
Spivak 3y ago
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 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66910573
- cush 3y ago
  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.
- SillyUsername 3y ago
  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...".
  - eichin 3y ago
    Fortunately, the "shareholders" are a couple of the grandchildren of the founder; it is entirely family owned, not publicly traded.
arcade79 3y ago
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.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Yeah, my kids visited their great-grandmother in Australia a few years back, and out came the 1960s legos. Great fun was had.
- SillyUsername 3y ago
  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.
  - arcade79 3y ago
    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.
pjc50 3y ago
? 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.
dudul 3y ago
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.
- SillyUsername 3y ago
  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.
  - dudul 3y ago
    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.
    - seattle_spring 3y ago
      You think someone's parenting abilities are in question because a child prefers new superhero Legos over more generic older sets?
      - dudul 3y ago
        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.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > 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.
crazygringo 3y ago
> ...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.)
cush 3y ago
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.
fleeno 3y ago
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.
303uru 3y ago
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.
- andruby 3y ago
  I’ve put my old lego in the dishwasher (you can use a “net”) and it comes out like new.

altairTF 3y ago

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.

diffeomorphism 3y ago

Further context: https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b7dc https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b... The footprint over the lifetime is higher. Seems like an entirely reasonable decision.

marvinblum 3y ago

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.

avalys 3y ago

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.

bigstrat2003 3y ago
> 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.

Spivak 3y ago

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 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66910573

cush 3y ago
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.
SillyUsername 3y ago
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...".
- eichin 3y ago
  Fortunately, the "shareholders" are a couple of the grandchildren of the founder; it is entirely family owned, not publicly traded.

arcade79 3y ago

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.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Yeah, my kids visited their great-grandmother in Australia a few years back, and out came the 1960s legos. Great fun was had.
SillyUsername 3y ago
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.
- arcade79 3y ago
  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.

pjc50 3y ago

? 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.

dudul 3y ago

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.

SillyUsername 3y ago
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.
- dudul 3y ago
  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.
  - seattle_spring 3y ago
    You think someone's parenting abilities are in question because a child prefers new superhero Legos over more generic older sets?
    - dudul 3y ago
      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.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > 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.

crazygringo 3y ago

> ...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.)

cush 3y ago

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.

fleeno 3y ago

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.

303uru 3y ago

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.

andruby 3y ago
I’ve put my old lego in the dishwasher (you can use a “net”) and it comes out like new.