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To be fair to Lego, which I agree is crazy expensive, they have tighter tolerances in flaws than NASA does. I work in manufacturing, through a different type, and tolerances that tight mean a huge amount of your production becomes scrap.
You could discuss the whether perfectionism is worth the waste, and that's a valid point, but Lego is at least delivering a solid product
What a rediculous, and untrue, comparison to make. NASA (1) isn't a consumer manufacturing company, (2) makes an absolutely insane variety of types science experiments from space telescopes to supersonic planes, (3) absolutely makes/uses parts with orders of magnitude tighter tolerances than Lego holds.
This. Lego has amazing tolerance for a toy, but isn't leading across the whole of the injection molding industry.
They make plastic though. Surely they recycle the scrap
Lego bricks are made using virgin plastic, which I assume means all scrap is not recycled and used to make more Lego.
Some parts, like flexible parts and transparent parts are made using more sustainable materials, whether that consists of some recycled material or plant derived plastics.
When trying to find differences between virgin and recycled scap plastic all I get is AI crap product comparison sites and various companies trying to sell their recycling system...
What downsides is there to recycling your own plastic scrap, which you have had full control over the entire time. I would imagine trying to color match with consumer waste plastic is a nightmare, same with moisture (at least that's an issue when printing). But if you have a bunch of plastic in an homogeneous color and you grind it up to make something of the same color, and you've had the scraps in a controlled environment, then what more issues are there?
The plastic will be grounded up and re-used, that's 100%, but it still requires quite a bit of virgin pellets to be mixed in. Here's why:
- Used plastic is dirty. Even if it just came off the belt as a brand new part, it already has dust, oil and other residue. Just a little bit, but it's not as good as a virgin material.
- You cannot grind down parts into perfect pellets, and that will cause feed rate variations.
- Additives inside like dyes degrade when heated. Multiple extrusions will change product appearance.
This, unfortunately much of what is given to a recycling plant is still ultimately thrown out, there are some exceptions, metals for instance
Still takes time to run the recycling systems and therefor money.
Also, think of it this way - you spend $X per 1000 bricks, but you can only sell 10% of those bricks. The remaining bricks get melted down at a cost of $Y. You then spend $9X/10 to produce another 900 bricks, of which only 90 are sellable. Rinse and repeat until all bricks are viable. You'll have spent a hell of a lot of money producing the later batches.
Lego's competition has been improving their quality in the last few years, to a point where I'd argue some are on par or better (Cobi, Mould King, Xingbao).
At the same time Lego has started to produce in China like almost any other competitor and their quality has lapsed somewhat. Especially color accuracy has allegedly been shite, even in some VERY expensive sets.
Lego just isn't worth an almost 100% premium, imo. If you're in Europe check out Bluebrixx and Cobi. One makes licensed Star Trek sets, the other licensed cars like Škoda, Opel, Fiat, and others.
This is news to me, but I have been away from things for a while.
Once I worked out that Lego work to the same tolerances as the transistors in a Pentium II CPU. It's probably a better example than NASA as NASA makes huge things that don't require submillimetre tolerances and tiny precise instruments that couldn't have been made a couple of decades ago.
Except there are competitors by now with equally good tolerances and overall part quality that still cost half as much, so that can't really be the reason
I dare say that Fischertechnic/Meccano would've been a more durable solution in all those cases.