They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….
as a kid i had one of those “there’s a monster under my bed” moments except real.
every night i would cry about a ghost or something trying to scare me by knocking on my bedroom windows and walls. like, really loudly, every hour or so, every night. only at night. so my dad was like “heh okay kiddo let’s check it out :) ah see? there’s nothing here :)” and left.
until years later he admitted to me that he did in fact hear the unexplainable knocking when he slept in that room one night, and it kept him awake with fear. and suddenly felt awful for not believing little kid me.
imagine your kid being like “daddy there’s a demon in my closet” and you being like ok son lemme just check that for you :). and you open the door and there’s a demon in the closet
Reblogging again because I just realized that if I had this advice in high school I would’ve never made a tumblr account.
Also works for most of those news sites like WSJ or NYT that only let you read a little bit, or block adblockers. Also some disable the scroll bar but if you go to the right side of the console after hitting F12 and look for the CSS element “overflow” and change it from “hidden” to “visible” then you can continue scrolling for free. Might have to click around on different parts of the page to find it, but it should work.
There’s also a Firefox/Chrome extension called Behind The Overlay that does all that with one mouse click. Used it for years; what a time saver.
And if you encounter a true paywall, use Archive.Today to bypass it. Just paste the paywalled url into the blue “search archived snapshots” box near the bottom:
