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Lego on the Road to Environmental Destruction

Saving the world, or destroying their own?

By SkyringPublished 2 years ago 9 min read
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The Scream (Creative Commons image by Ross Berteig)

The world needs less plastic

Our environment is drowning in plastic. In many cases, quite literally, with marine creatures snagged in abandoned nets, strangled in packaging, stomachs full of plastic bottles, or simply plankton feeding on microplastics at the bottom of the food chain turning into apex feeders full of plastic shit.

Lego, as a producer of products that are pretty much 99% plastic, is conscious of their vulnerability to environmental activism. I don’t think that too much Lego finds its way into landfill, unless it is the occasional forgotten brick rattling up into Mum’s vacuum cleaner, because there is a solid market for used bricks at around $25 a kilo, but if Greta Thunberg ever aimed herself at the Billund behemoth, then the profits would take a crippling hit.

So they are taking action, making bricks from sugarcane, recycled PET bottles and so on. They are committed to making all their products from sustainable sources by 2030.

How’s this working out for them?

Well…

As anybody who has used some older alternate brands will know, making a system brick that fits well with other bricks when new and aged can be a challenge. Lego has been making plastic bricks for a long time and likes to think of themselves as setting the standard.

Since 1963 they have made their bricks from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), moulded to high tolerances. Lego bricks hold fast to each other to make a sturdy model, yet are just flexible enough to be able to be separated by young fingers, albeit with the help of fingernails and occasionally teeth.

Too firm and rigid and the bricks might as well be glued together, if they can be attached to each other at all. Too soft, and anything you build falls apart.

It is a rare Lego brick that does not sit firmly in the sweet spot of firm clutch and exact tolerances.

Use the Force (CC image by STICK KIM)

When Lego is in the business of designing and selling large and complex kits that can contain thousands of pieces and reach significant sizes — the Millenium Falcon kit has 7 541 pieces, and when assembled is 60cm x 80cm and weighs over 13 kilograms — it is vital that all of those parts fit together and hold together firmly under play conditions for many years.

Spaceships that have bits breaking off when whooshed through rumpus room galaxies, trains that fall apart when rolling around the bend, and buildings that collapse when somebody walks past the village are just not going to work, whether for kids having adventures with their minifigures, or adults proudly displaying their city layouts in the hobby room.

For over fifty years Lego has boasted bricks that can hold together and stay the same colour for decades on end. Bricks from the 1960s will happily click together with the latest products from the toy store.

That is, until now.

Lego too fragile to play with

For some years Lego has used a few bricks that are made from different materials for elements such as vegetation. It doesn’t matter if tree branches and leaves bend. Nobody is going to build a bridge or a skyscraper from Lego shrubs.

But now Lego has begun introducing new materials into its mainstream bricks and the results are not good.

Sure, they look the part and are moulded to the same fine tolerances. But when bent, they don’t snap back into the same shape, and they don’t have quite the same “clutch”.

The problems began with a recently-released set: a Volkswagen camping van with a modest 1 332 pieces and a price tag approaching US$250.

This is a set meant to be displayed and enjoyed. It contains many play features, such as opening doors, seats that fold down into beds, a working steering wheel, a roof that pops up and so on.

Reviews on Amazon and Lego are not the usual 100% super-satisfied comments:

Never before has there been such a gulf between how cool a set looks in box pics and the finished item. It disintegrates each time you pick it up! The front wheels fall off if you roll it along, because the simple pins cannot hold the vehicle’s weight. The hinges break. The bumpers and number plates come off endlessly. The pop-top is all mechanism and zero actual space, plus the fabric cover is a pain to put on — and of course it also falls off all the time too. Oh and worst of all, the steering wheel is staggeringly fragile, and requires a complete disassembly of the entire front of the van each time it needs plugging back in. It’s a complete and utter mess from top to bottom and the worst Lego set we’ve built by miles!

This set is in one word awful. I have assembled dozens of Lego vehicles including Technic and more than 300 Sets and this is by far the worst one. The model is EXTREMELY fragile when attempting to get pieces tight. The side panels, the engine door (and placement) the engine itself is insanely poor in it fragility (especially as tight an area your forced to place it in) the engine itself doesn’t snap in place, you need to put 1x8 tile to hold it in. The “bumpers” dont touch them heavier than a pinky or will fall off/ or apart. The only positive I can say is my local lego resale store will give me about 75% of its price, which it going there very soon. I am embarrassed to have spent that much money for this, and display this in my collection.

Not just a few sour gripes

Although tribal Lego fans refuse to say anything negative about their obsession, the trend is clear. This is not just a few bad bricks or a few bad eggs. This is something systemic.

What really seals the deal is a review from “Tips & Bricks”, an outfit that is 100% solid hard-core Lego. They give this set zero points. Out of 100.

Our score on the first slide is not a mistake — read through the slides to find out why, from our copy, we cannot recommend this set in any way and were therefore forced to score it 0/100.

The whole review is worth reading but for me the key point is this slide:

The evidence - Tips and Bricks

After decades of using a winning formula, there has been a change in Lego bricks. So what, you might say. Assemble the model carefully and leave it on display.

That’s not how system bricks work. Children get a tub of bricks and build and rebuild them hundreds of times. They get bent as part of normal play but if they spring back into shape, that’s not a problem.

If they stay warped and no longer work properly, then Lego’s legendary attention to detail extending back to the Sixties and beyond is at risk. If the bricks won’t stay connected over a timespan of minutes, let alone a lifetime, then something is seriously wrong.

But it’s just the one kit, right?

That’s not how Lego 0perates. They might occasionally produce specialised bricks for a specific design but the basis of the system is that sets use regular bricks. a 2x4 block, a 4x6 plate, a 1x4 tile — these and so many more are ubiquitious. Lego produces them by the million and when assembling the parts for a set just pull the required parts out of bulk storage.

The same problems are showing up in other recent releases. The new Star Wars AT-AT, a flagship build at 6 785 pieces and a AU$1 299 price is attracting negative comment.

…you just have to look at it for something to fall off! Picking up up to move from build table to display shelf (following instructions on how to do so) resulted in a bottom panel falling off which now for the life of me can’t be reattached and has resulted in the rest of the bottom coming apart too :(

Was very excited to see this model come to life and could not wait to get my hands on it. That is the end of anything good I have to say. This set is very terribly executed, parts fall off for absolutely no reason, I have constantly been having to go back two and sometimes three steps and start over as the pieces that dislodge cannot be accessed,the worst was the installation of the head and that is where I have walked away, would not attach in any way shape or form, no way to grip it without dislodging even more pieces and finally dropped it to the floor absolutely disintegrating it, so, I have a body with legs attached and I probably will not finish it…

My guess is that it’s not the designs at fault but the bricks. Lego designers work with access to vast stores of bricks. They don’t call up production to get the newest pieces; they just reach into the brick bins in the designer workroom to find what they need. Bricks that have been around for years and used for thousands of prototypes.

They build a new set a dozen different ways, tweaking the details, aiming to optimise the build, always with the end customer in mind. These guys have years of devoted experience under their belt and they don’t get hired in the first place unless they are already experts.

So they design a new bus or spaceship or three story house, get a solid build, have management sign off for production, and then it goes into the system and the bricks that go into the bags in the merchandise are the newest hot off the moulds, that have the new formula. What worked for the designers and tester with the sturdy old bricks is not what the customer gets. The expensive model falls apart and they feel ripped off.

Chinese bricks are better

The biggest complaint — IP issues aside — about non-Lego system bricks is that they don’t have the same high standards. They feel “plasticky”, they don’t clutch well, the colours are off.

I can vouch for this being consistently true for Mega bricks. They use a different formulation, a softer plastic. To my Lego-tuned fingers they are abhorrently foreign and I will not have a bar of them.

The same was true of the other brands that jumped on the system brick bandwagon once Lego’s patents ran out. Initially they had the same feel or worse.

This is no longer true. Apart from not having the Lego logo on the studs, bricks from other manufacturers have the same look and feel as Lego, being made from the same ABS plastic. I don’t bother maintaining a “Lepin Colony” of alternate brands because there is no point; they all work the same.

I only pay attention to branding if I want to produce a model for my local Lego User Group. They are heavily supported by Lego and do not condone any other brand.

But where, I ask, is the incentive to buy Lego bricks if the Chinese bricks are now better? I don’t want my models falling apart. If I build a bridge to run my trains over, then it had better be solid and sturdy.

Lego may have made a major stumble in its quest for environmental purity. Already falling behind in some key niches (such as modular buildings) and completely abandoning the military sector, they had better pick up their feet or risk a major hit to their core business: the simple connecting of two bits of plastic to each other.

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About the Creator

Skyring

Retired cabdriver

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