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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

The amount of plastic in LEGO is a drop in the bucket compared to: Plastic packaging for food and goods, bottled drinks, car parts (panels etc; remember that a car is completely trash after ~20 years), plastic in shared goods such as school chairs and airplane cabins. So, it's simply not worth worrying about.

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I was at an event were the organizers praised themselves for caring about the planet, sustainability, and for how green they were.

They were also serving cookies individually wrapped in plastic.

I once saw for sale a new copy of "F**k Plastic", wrapped in plastic.

Without knowing anything about them, the amount of plastic they saved could easily be many orders of magnitude greater than a few hundred cookie wrappers. You're placing more importance on the cookies just because they're more visible.

Cellophane, or plastic?

One of the two is biodegradable.

No idea. Looked it up, it turns out a lot of what we think is cellophane is actually plastic, so doubly no idea.

This is a strawman. If we want to stop using fossils, it doesn't matter which use-cases we stop first. The main general problem in veening off fossils I see is that economies will crash and there will be wars if we regulate away use of fossils. So that's not going to happen any time soon.

However, LEGO is a completely optional/luxury aspect that won't affect economies at large, so perhaps it's better to start there. There are probably many of these "drops in the bucket" that together form something impactful.

You could remove LEGO completely and it wouldn’t take us any closer to solving real problems. It’s just a waste of time.

Plastic has so many use cases that probably all of them individually is a drop in the ocean. Starting to actually do something is what matters.

Yepp, thanks. The keyword really is "starting." Everything and anything is a start, no matter how small it looks in isolation.

Being an expert in LEGO waste reduction makes nothing for being an expert in plastic packaging reduction. The multiplier is tiny for LEGO and huge for coming up with ways to replace drinking bottles, shampoo bottles, and everything that is single use.

The solution is not to remove all the luxuries (LEGO), the solution is enabling our basic necessities to work without plastics.

(Reducing LEGO is a "vitamin" and reducing single use packagin is "aspirin" in SAAS parlance, if that makes sense. It's good that LEGO takes responsibility for their own stuff, I'm not shitting on them.)

Your way of thinking is how we get into useless campaigns like stopping plastic straws.

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