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Lego drops plans to make bricks from recycled
plastic bottles

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Posted By: FL_Absentee_Voter, 9/25/2023 10:05:04 PM

Lego has abandoned plans to make its famous bricks from recycled plastic bottles, saying that the manufacturing process would be more polluting than the current production of oil-based bricks. [snip] The toymaker has pledged to use only sustainable materials in its products by 2032 and, two years ago, unveiled a prototype brick made from recycled PET. The plastic was sourced from bottles that are typically used for water or soda. Since then, however, Lego has found that making bricks from the recycled material would require investing in new equipment and involve more steps, which would ultimately lead to more planet-heating pollution than the status quo...

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A rational, responsible decision. The EV manufacturers should take note.

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Reply 1 - Posted by: jalo1951 9/25/2023 10:13:47 PM (No. 1563476)
I'll give them credit for thinking about it, researching it, evaluating the research, rethinking it and coming to a logical conclusion. But somehow the progressives will make them out to be evil doers who are going to destroy the world. I remember reading a research paper that showed that the only thing to recycle that made sense was paper. Everything else would be too expensive and did not save time or materials or pollution. In other words it made sense and the progressives will hate them for their decision.
11 people like this.

Reply 2 - Posted by: DVC 9/25/2023 10:15:20 PM (No. 1563477)
It turns out that recycled plastic is dirty, ugly and structurally weak. Steel and aluminum recycle well, are as goid as new and have always been done. The rest of recycling is pretty much crap and a waste of time, money and effort.
14 people like this.

Reply 3 - Posted by: Omen55 9/25/2023 10:26:19 PM (No. 1563482)
Don't fix something when it's not broken.
11 people like this.

Reply 4 - Posted by: Quigley 9/25/2023 11:37:41 PM (No. 1563505)
If the world were in danger, wouldn’t the cognoscenti shut down nonessential processes like legos, sports, ski resorts, golf courses and ration gasoline etc? Wouldn’t Big Bidet refrain from burning hundreds of thousands of pounds of jet fuel? Wouldn’t they do something? Or at least not fly 1000 private jets to climate conferences that could be done over skype? They never do anything.
16 people like this.

Reply 5 - Posted by: justjana 9/26/2023 1:06:21 AM (No. 1563514)
Whoopsie! Nothing to see here.
4 people like this.

Reply 6 - Posted by: NYbob 9/26/2023 1:42:35 AM (No. 1563519)
Recycling as in reusing works great for glass and metals, but plastic is much more useful if it is converted to energy. NOT by burning, which is tempting because it is easy, but the generation of dioxins is very bad. Better to melt the non PVC plastics found in wiring, hospital waste, bottles, foil food wrappers, tarps, packaging, etc. and use the syngas to power generators or condense it into fuel. Or just dump it all into a landfill, along with other garbage. There everything can generate methane and a toxic goo at the bottom. Tires are another trash product that could be melted and turned back into oil. You would also get about 4 pounds of carbon black and 2 pounds of scrap steel per passenger tire. I know a man who had a business in the western US who melted tires and a few railroad ties, into bunker oil that was sold directly to the railroads. Almost anything carbon based can be converted back into useful industrial products.
6 people like this.

Reply 7 - Posted by: chumley 9/26/2023 7:37:36 AM (No. 1563587)
Too bad the ethanol people didnt look into it that closely. I lost more gas mileage when they switched than the blend saved in gasoline.
3 people like this.

Reply 8 - Posted by: DVC 9/26/2023 8:31:17 AM (No. 1563632)
I worked a technology assistance project in Russia about a dozen years ago where a Russian entrepreneur who owned a rope making company had decided to get into plastic water bottle recycling. He developed machines to grind the bottled into chips, wash them thoroughly to remove the dirt and labels, then melt the plastic, feed it through mixing and rolling equipment, and finally draw it out into long strands. These were twisted together to make binder twine which is used in hay baling machines to bind the bales together. The resulting product was a grey brown ugly stuff - but fine for a purely industrial agricultural application where low cost of the twine was a major benefit. The amounts of water used in the washing were immense, the stink and mess was also immense, and the twine from formerly transparent bottles was a pretty ugly grey brown opaque product. I couldn't see how most consumer products, where a nice color, or even transparency would be desired could be made from this stuff. Definitely second rate stuff. IME, the only kind of "recycling" that works beyond metals, which do very well, is intra factory recycling where paper inside a paper mill, or plastic molding sprues and errors, or other new waste from cutoffs or process upsets could be directly, cleanly reprocessed. Post consumer recycling is a bad idea for anything but metals.
3 people like this.

Reply 9 - Posted by: red1066 9/26/2023 9:20:42 AM (No. 1563680)
In other words, it costs too much to recycle the plastic.
4 people like this.

Reply 10 - Posted by: MickTurn 9/26/2023 9:47:22 AM (No. 1563705)
Likely the recycled plastic is the wrong kind...too soft.
1 person likes this.

Reply 11 - Posted by: Strike3 9/26/2023 10:51:35 AM (No. 1563751)
Translation: Using recycled materials in manufacturing costs more. Lego does not care any more about the environment than they accuse us of not doing. Besides paper, Aluminum cans are easily recyclable, being pure for the most part, but plastics contain hundreds of material types which present quality and manufacturing issues but it makes excellent artificial reefs.
2 people like this.

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Lego drops plans to make bricks from recycled
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Lego has abandoned plans to make its famous bricks from recycled plastic bottles, saying that the manufacturing process would be more polluting than the current production of oil-based bricks. [snip] The toymaker has pledged to use only sustainable materials in its products by 2032 and, two years ago, unveiled a prototype brick made from recycled PET. The plastic was sourced from bottles that are typically used for water or soda. Since then, however, Lego has found that making bricks from the recycled material would require investing in new equipment and involve more steps, which would ultimately lead to more planet-heating pollution than the status quo...
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