[jacquesm]

No, Lego does not recycle. But there is a very lively secondary market.

There was a short period that Lego allowed people to design their own sets and order them through Lego but it was so popular they had to shut it down.

People even buy new sets to sort them out just to get new bricks to combine into their own creations without having to buy them in bulk and not being able to use half of what they buy.

[unityByFreedom]

Well then, it sounds like Lego isn't interested in furthering either a custom or secondary market which could undercut their new sales. That is a business opportunity, no?

Could you make money just buying bulk, sorting out rare parts, and reselling those?

[bonzini]

Lego definitely likes the secondary market, because the Lego market turns out to be pretty efficient.

The price of buying a new (or used) box vs. the price of "Bricklink"ing the parts is usually pretty much in favor of the former, which makes sense since the latter involves more S&H fees.

In additions, new moulds or new colors for existing moulds come up all the time (yet new moulds are all designed in the same system, so that they increase the versatility of Lego rather than Playmobil-izing them[0]). Therefore, advanced fans who design their own creations and buy bricks in bulk do get lots of new Lego boxes. For example the VW Beetle model[1], besides being really cool in itself, had a lot of azure bricks, including many shapes that had never been realised in that color. Likewise for some Architecture boxes.

[0] "New bricks are too specialized" is the Lego version of "HN is turning into Reddit"

[1] http://www.newelementary.com/2016/08/lego-review-10252-volks...

[jacquesm]

> Could you make money just buying bulk, sorting out rare parts, and reselling those?

There are plenty of people doing that but by hand. I figure that's about minimum wage, doing it like this should be quite a bit more lucrative.

[unityByFreedom]

Right?! You've already done the hard tech part. Good luck with the rest man and thanks for sharing. Let us know if you have more. This is fun to see.

[jacquesm]

There will be a part 2 about the software. But for that things need to get a lot better still.

[unityByFreedom]

Cool. I know some folks in Taiwan who would be very interested in this sort of thing. If you ever come through this way, I'm happy to show you around! Understood that your consulting work pays more and takes priority. Still crossing my fingers for part 2 tho :-D

[rbobby]

> Lego isn't interested in furthering either a custom or secondary market

Once Lego's patent expired it tried a fairly shady legal theory that the interconnect shapes were trademarked/trademarkable. They pursued this all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court where they lost unanimously.

http://www.smart-biggar.ca/en/articles_detail.cfm?news_id=15...

[jacquesm]

And justifiably so, especially since Lego had stolen the concept from an English company first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddicraft