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by oulipo 655 days ago
well, honestly I think it'd be better if lego had a bio-degradable brick
2 comments

They did a test run of PLA bricks resembling plants back in 2018

#40320 Plants from Plants

https://brickarchitect.com/2018/40320-plants-made-from-plant...

Trouble with anything biodegradable is it biodegrades while you're using it, you'd essentially have to keep it in a cool, dry place away from sunlight

PLA is extremely hydrophilic too, so if some was kept drier than the rest the fit could be terrible.
why? isn’t it better to keep re-using the brick rather than having something that degrades and can’t be passed along due to shoddy quality?
How much lego gets passed down vs vacuumed up or lost?

(Honest question)

Out of every hundred pieces, maybe 4 get lost or go into the vacuum.

One need only go to charity shops in the UK to see the absolutely astonishing amounts of lego that managed to leave a family.

The “bucket” of lego bricks is a staple in many families with children, with parts coming from other peoples buckets or collations of multiple buckets.

All my lego is with my nephew, but before that it was stored with all my other toys, most of which were discarded as they were deemed unfit to continue: not the lego though.

It’s hard to get actual data on this, but in my sets I only lost about 4-5% of pieces, which is still many, and I only broke 2 or 3 pieces in my childhood.

And I was careless and rowdy, so I’m pretty much worst-case.

Lego very rarely gets wasted. The second hand market is massive even for random mixed bricks.

Prices start around $15/lb and go up from there.

I doubt the ratio is below 95% in favor of reuse. You can find second hand Lego everywhere and are kinda expensive even in bulk.
Everything heads for the landfill eventually