Lego drops prototype blocks made of recycled plastic bottles as they “didn’t reduce carbon emissions”::Danish toy giant Lego said 2 years of experimentation with blocks made from recycled plastic bottles showed they “didn’t reduce carbon emissions.”
Its because plastics can’t really be fucken recycled. That was another lie to keep the machine going for a few more decades.
Well to be fair they can be, plastic is very recyclable, it’s just more expensive than producing virgin plastic, so it’s not done :-(
Plastic requires heavy sorting to be able to recycle then once that is done a large percentage is not usable, a small percentage can be used again but needs high energy to do so, low quality plastic is illegally imported to a Pacific island country and the waste is burned in fields. Plastic industries have been lobbying to keep this information as quiet as possible and blame the consumer for not “recycling enough” for decades https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-dk3NOEgX7o
It really is not that reusable. Another day in the minefield, another lie is sold.
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If you read into recycling plastics you’ll see that you actually can’t recycle that many because it becomes briddle and unusable. Yes, even those marked as recyclable aren’t up to the quality once recycled.
this is correct less than 5% of plastics even get recycled.
If they had comparable carbon emissions recycling bottles still achieves the benefit of utilizing what might be otherwise abandoned used bottles.
Does that mean recycling PET doesn’t reduce carbon emissions in general, or is there something specific about Lego blocks that makes it less practical?
I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer to your question. Lego blocks are usually made of ABS plastic, not PET, so I though initially the company was doing a thermal breakdown to the hydrocarbon level, then reformulating it into ABS, which I could absolutely be a CO2/energy intensive process.
However this Lego company linked PDF suggests they’re actually making blocks out of PET and not reformulating. This should be a significantly less CO2/energy intensive.
One other thing to consider is how Europeans are approaching “green” initiatives. European methods are generally hyperfocused on CO2 reduction as pollution largely ignoring other types of pollution. As an example, with automobile pollution diesel cars were incentives because they produced less CO2 than gasoline cars for similar distance/work. This ignored the NOX and particulate pollution from diesel which was far worse than gasoline. The statement Lego made here of "didn’t reduce carbon emissions” resonates with that idea.
Back to Lego, even if PET method was only CO2 neutral, using recycled PET could still be a good path to reduce PET plastic from going into landfills or being burned (producing other toxic pollution). However, if CO2 reduction is the only goal, then the program ending isn’t surprising.
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The vagueness of this statement means that they found it to be 0.2 cents more expensive per tonne and didn’t want to take this overwhelming hit to their profit streak.
