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Lego My Planet

Weeniekind’s Great Dream of making Legos out of Earth-friendly recycled plastic has failed. The End is near.

Lego, the enormously popular building-block set, has its famous bricks made out of — brace yourselves! — Earth-killing PLASTIC. Based in Euro-weenie Denmark, Lego has spent years trying to do something that violates the laws of both nature and of man, namely: they tried, and failed, to make Lego bricks out of recycled plastic. Nothing they have tried has the precise *snap* needed, and so the Earth is now doomed to be consumed in flames and floods, leaving future insectoid historians to wonder, millions of years from now: “Was it worth it?” Steve Green says yes. YES IT WAS.

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50 replies on “Lego My Planet”

I have dabbled in plastic injection molding. There’s a lot going on with the process; it is hard to do well. The tolerances of the finished bricks are remarkable, and there is no draft, no sink holes, no flash. As Steve said-Even if they could achieve the same perfection with recyclable plastic, the bricks wouldn’t snap together the same way because the 2 materials have different physical properties e.g. elastic moduli. I promise you there were engineers at Lego who knew this wouldn’t work before they even tried.

I promise you there were engineers at Lego who knew this wouldn’t work before they even tried.

Said another way. An enormous amount of R&D went into selecting the resin that Lego ended up using. They went through many, many iterations; and have likely tried and rejected many others over the years for a myriad of reasons. Yes, they knew using recycled materials would be a challenge they couldn’t overcome.
I have used injection molding for some very tight tolerance parts. The material selection is the most critical part of the process. It is not, oh let’s just use this.

I have some of the LEGOs that my Dad played with in the ’50s and they work fine with the LEGOs I have from childhood and adulthood, as well as the sets my wife and son have. Yes, we all play with LEGOs when given the chance. My wife did not grow up with them.
For those how like LEGOs (so, not Bill), the sound of the bricks against bricks (like dumping out the bricks) is a unique sound that is pleasing to the LEGO fan.
The other nice thing is that LEGO bricks and sets keep their value, so if you have bricks or sets you do not want, donate them or sell them like Scott did–don’t just put them in a yard sale with a ridiculously low price–unless you want to lose money and make someone very happy they took advantage of you.
The other nice thing about LEGOs is their longevity. I am glad that the bricks I have from my Dad and my life will be enjoyed by my grandchildren–or some other children eventually.

If you drill down into their policies and agendas far enough, you always find that they hate humanity and want to see much of it destroyed. Except themselves and their iPhones of course. This is an ultimate form of puerile egocentric selfishness. They basically want the planet for themselves and advocate the elimination of anyone not in their tribe.

The Left has managed to make a virtue out of hating their own species. Which is something found nowhere else in all of Creation. Most of their other aberrations stem from that basic deviancy.

This is off-topic for today’s discussion but I noticed a couple of days ago that John Voight from Midnight Cowboy has taken the place of the Gorn in Bill’s office. Did he say why and I missed it?

The Gorn is on his military reserve training on his homeworld. He will return after subjugating some human colony worlds and eating a few of his surplus children.
John Voight is getting ready for his interview with Bill, soaking up the atmosphere in the office and depleting Bill’s store of Ho-Ho’s.

I think the simplest form of recycling is to repurpose some of the containers that goods come in. Lots of stuff comes in a sturdy, attractive or at least utilitarian container that can be used again rather than tossing it in the trash. If you already have the container and it’s a useful sort, then putting it back in service keeps it out of the waste stream.

I think a lot of people would be encouraged to do this by one simple, economically viable, ecologically sound move. Pass an ‘eco-law’ that the labels have to be stuck on with an adhesive that makes them easy to remove. So the container can be cleaned up, relabelled and put back to use.

As it stands now it takes a razorblade, dynamite, gigawatt lasers and an Archangel or two to get those damned labels off. Just make it easy to peel them off so we can use the container again rather than toss it.

Admittedly this wouldn’t make a lot of difference due to the size of the waste stream and the tiny portion thereof which is domestic household trash but … It’s an easy, cheap and useful thing that I’d think the eco-nuts would jump at. They’d get to feel smug about “getting something done” and I wouldn’t need Divine assistance getting those damned labels off.

Every time I mention this to a leafy-eyed planet pandering Liberal they shrug it off. I don’t think their real agenda is to save Mother Gaia, I think most of that is just a gimmick to advance some other imperative.

There are some stores that allow you to refill your containers, mostly cleaning products I think.

Recycling seems to me to be just wasting one form of energy to save another. If you wash your cans/glass bottles/plastic containers, you’re wasting water to recycle those items. And I wonder how much energy is required to recycle any item. It’s going to take energy to melt down and reprocess all those recyclables.

One of my pet peeves is the bottled water companies reducing the amount of plastic in a bottle, making them virtually impossible to open without squirting it all over yourself. I wish they’d go back to bottles with more plastic in them!

When my parents had to replace their washing machine a few years ago they bought one intended for commercial use. It’s not as bad as the crap you buy at the big box stores. Funny how entertainment devices keep getting better, it’s as if someone wants to make sure we don’t get anything done.

I was a sailor once. I’ll stop eating beef when the enviro-mentalists clean up all the floating whale crap.

I prefer Hellman’s* over Best Foods, ya’ filthy Californy deviant. I hates Miracle Whip no matter which coast it’s served on. It’s too sweet and it’s NOT mayonnaise at all.

Hehehe … Read that in Yosemite Sam’s voice for extra points, ya lop-eared varmint.

It doesn’t even say the word “mayonnaise” anywhere on the jar. It should say “Cloyingly sweet, disgustingly thin, sickeningly pearlescent, clotted, clabbered, slimy, smelly, terrible mayonnaise counterfeit designed for sissies with weak taste buds and no stones” but I don’t think there’s enough room to fit all that on the label.

I wouldn’t have a jar of the crap in my pantry. Though I always have an extra 48 oz jar of Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise for a spare in there. Can’t be too careful about that stuff. If I ran out and needed to borrow some from my sister she’d probably put Kraft Miracle Whip in an unmarked container in an attempt to poison me. I could die just by running out of mayonnaise and imprudently borrowing out of desperation.

(* They’re the same exact brand, same exact product. Hellman’s on the eastern half of the US and Best Foods on the western half. The fact that the company puts a boast instead of a real name on the label in California tells you what they think sells mayonnaise in the Land of Loose Nuts**.)

{** Buckminster Fuller is reported to have said “They turned America on edge and all the loose nuts rolled to California”.***}

[*** Buckminster Fuller was a really smart guy.]

Hellmans >>>Miracle Whip
At the bottom of the scale; however, is Fluff.
Most disgusting product ever conceived.
Whipped Marshmallow??? Really??
It doubles as spackle, so it’s got that going for it.

Ha, never heard of the stuff. So I’ll take your word for it and give it a pass if it ever comes by.

Here at the local Walmart grocery store they have some stuff called “bacon jam”. It’s jam made from bacon as you may have surmised. I love bacon but I’ve never tried this. I can’t work up the nerve to go for it. Might be the best thing ever, might be an unholy alliance from the darkest pits of hell. Someday I’ll steel myself up real good and give it a go.

Thanks for the feedback Harry. If the stuff in the attached picture is what you recognize as the “good” brand I’ll get some and try it. This is what they have where I shop for groceries and it’s not cheap. It’s just under $8 for a 9 oz. jar.

If it’s not the stuff you recognize, no harm no foul. I’m just back where I was before.

At the very least you’re offering me a chance to resolve this particular dilemma.

I was thinking the same thing. Might pick up a jar for ant & fly bait. Then put Terro in it for the ants and when it attracts flies I can zap ’em with my Bug-A-Salt.

I love that gun and use it a LOT but it gets salt all over the place. So I have to be careful where I shoot it. Salt, humidity and electronic components do not make for a joyous day. So far I’ve managed to avoid frying any expensive receivers, amplifiers, keyboards or TV/monitors and etc.

I’d like that trend to continue into the indefinite future but some of these denizens of Beelzebub escape because I can’t blast ’em when they land in the vicinity of the heat vent or other openings in equipment. Trying to hit them on the wing is even worse.

Where I live there are nearby properties (nearby = a few hundred yards) with livestock. Mostly horses and chickens. Their effluvia is prime breeding ground for flies. Flies which for some reason will not stay home and insist on visiting me. They completely ignore the mat in front of my door that says “Go Away”.

Point being — Having something that draws flies to a particular spot besides the obvious fecal material attractor would be a plus. I could lurk in ambush over the bait and light ’em up with the salt shot projectiles going in a harmless direction.

Crap ACTS. Great reply. I spent all of Sunday driving my wife from Central Coast of CA to Las Vegas so she could attend a 5 day quilting retreat. 9 hours. Radio off, didn’t listen to the news, had maps working on my phone and that’s it. We got into the hotel, I fire up the usual suspects, DailyCaller, Breitbart, Bonginoreport, then head to Townhall and PJ Media, and finally to the Network sites. Crap. Just Crap. All our BWDC banter, all the back and forth, it was fun. Then I saw the news today.
I feel like I was force fed a 55 gal barrel of ….
Miracle Whip.

Gack @ a 55 gal. bbl. of Miracle Whip!

You didn’t say so I’m not sure which news you’re talking about but …

The war in Israel has been featuring prominently in the news since it began on Friday. So if that’s what you’re referring to, yeah it’s bad news.

As it stands now, it’s not an existential threat to Israel. The tragic slaughter of innocent Israeli noncombatants is horrible but the IDF will stomp the living crap out of Hamas long before the tangos can threaten the actual existence of the nation of Israel. The Israeli forces are steadily and inexorably pushing Hamas back to Gaza and will have Gaza contained shortly if that hasn’t already happened by the time I hit the “Post Comment” button.

Like I said — “As it stands now”. Which assumes that some other bordering Arab nation doesn’t decide to attack while the Israeli military forces are preoccupied with Hamas and the Gaza. Syria would be a candidate for doing that, Jordan and Egypt would be very unlikely to participate.

While the deaths of innocents is always tragic it’s a reality of war. Especially a war initiated by evil people expressly intending to target noncombatants.

Hamas is going to have a hard time convincing the world that the coming Israeli retaliation is not wholly and righteously justified after launching itself on a course of war crimes and atrocities. Antisemites might hit that bait but no reasonable person will.

So far even Hezbollah in Lebanon is staying out of the fight and that really says something. If it’s too disgusting, illegal, atrocious and barbaric for Hezbollah then that gives a good insight into what the parts of the world who don’t hate Jews by default is going to think of the matter.

Another thing to consider is that while Iran resources Hamas with weaponry Iran for the most part controls Hezbollah. So if Iran isn’t forcing Hezbollah into the fight that’s also an indication of what’s going on.

Historically Hamas has provoked Israel then skittered away like bugs to hide behind their own civilian population using them as human shields. When the Israelis hit back, despite the tremendous humanitarian efforts they make not to kill Gazan civilians, there are still inevitable civilian losses. Subsequently Hamas parades images of dead civilians and funerals before the world in a massive propaganda campaign. There’s no doubt they’ll try that in this case too but I don’t think that’s going to generate the sympathy they have reaped in the past.

While the slaughter of innocents is always tragically horrible, those people will be avenged and the perpetrators destroyed. Hamas has bitten off more than it can chew and justice will be served upon them. Mourn the dead but don’t get in a funk about this war. Evil people do evil things to good people but in this case it’s going to cost the evil people a lot, perhaps their very existence, for doing that.

I could say a lot more about this but I don’t even know for sure if this is the news you’re referring to. I may have missed something else that’s going on but that’s a biggie in the news cycle right now. Being a military conflict it grabs and holds my attention. I worked and lived in that part of the world so I know it well. I watch that region pretty closely.

You nailed it. That’s what had me last night. Good to read your comment and yeah, I just saw that they IDF was already bombing hideouts for Hamas. I had read somewhere last night Hezbollah had also joined in attacks, but that was early reporting and could be erroneous. Thanks again for the comments. Different perspectives, different experiences, help for understanding a situation.

It’s difficult to interpret the news coming out of the Eastern Med at the best of times and this is anything but.

The latest information I could dig up, which is current as of about 35 minutes before I started typing this, is that Hezbollah is NOT operationally involved in the conflict. Yet.

The key word there is “operationally”. Meaning that Hezbollah has not joined Hamas in attacking Israel as an organization.

There are “sympathetic” shootings and violence happening all over Israel and especially on the West Bank and the Lebanese border. Those are the usual nuts and barbarians that crawl out of the woodwork whenever something like this is going on. Those are not an attack by Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Again, YET.

Hezbollah as an organization may decide this is a great time to launch a few rockets or allow plausibly deniable operations to kill Israelis — But just because they would feel a need to show solidarity with their Islamic “brothers” in Gaza.

That said, while the two groups, Hamas and Hezbollah don’t really like each other all that much, they hate Jews even more. So the situation is volatile in that regard.

The important thing to note strategically is that this attack by Hamas took quite a bit of planning and organization. Probably in the neighborhood of months or more. It also took quite a while to stealthily introduce infiltrators and create access venues where Hamas combatants could get out of Gaza and go to work killing innocent people. So this is not something where someone woke up a few days ago and said, “Hey, lets go kill every Jew we can lay our hands on.”

The attack would have been far more effective had Hezbollah attacked from the northern border at the same time. That would have halved the Israeli response in the Gaza area. Which would be exponentially significant to the results of the attack.

Which did not happen. Though it’s very likely some effort was made early in the planning stage to get Hezbollah involved from the north. Which means that inferring that Hezbollah at some point told Hamas “No, piss off” is the most likely scenario.

At the end of the day, those two organizations do not trust each other. So it could also have been that Hamas didn’t approach Hezbollah to join the attack for reasons of operational security.

Contrast that with the current hostilities in Ukraine where the Allies do trust each other and are coordinating responses across many agencies and national boundaries. That gives you some scale pertaining to the differences between a bunch of backstabbing militant rabble and an actual no-shit military operation.

That doesn’t meant the backstabbing rabble is inconsequential but it does make them much less consequential than they might have been.

As I said, I can go on with this topic for quite a while. It’s a lifelong area of interest and involvement with me.

I don’t know where your sympathies lie in this matter, where mine are should be more than obvious.

That said, there are also much larger ramifications and effects at stake here too. Iran is a wild card and the U.S. has slowly been drawing down our Naval footprint in the Persian Gulf. Importantly the U.S. Navy is no longer maintaining a patrolling carrier task force in the Gulf region. Iran may see that as encouragement to do who knows what.

There are also Biblical and spiritual considerations. I’ve been studying Christian Eschatology most of my adult life but I don’t generally get into that much here for what I think are obvious reasons. This is not a ministry, it’s a political venue in case the reasoning isn’t clear.

This could be a spark that sets off a powder keg. I don’t know if that’s the case any more than anyone else does. I’m just viewing and analyzing this from a real-world military and intelligence perspective. The socio-political, spiritual and any other ramifications have yet to manifest themselves so until then speculation in those domains is completely vain.

um, no. PET is not PP. Sorry.
I did learn something from Scott, about the ‘clutch’ effect where you can measure the load required to uncouple two joined Lego pieces. Never thought about the importance of that until seeing this episode. Good on Lego for considering the issue, conceiving the test and building the machine, then logging countless samples and testing each for thousands of cycles until the results fell out of specification.
I’m shocked it was as high as 30,000 cycles, but then again, those pieces need all the clutch they can get to deal with the likes of a…
Steve Green…..

Now if we could only convince Bill to bring back “Hair of the Dog” or “The Week in Blogs”.

Less than 2% of the refuse stream generated by humanity is domestic household waste. That means that no matter what you yourself do, you are never going to contribute more than a miniscule fraction of a percentage to the garbage being generated on planet Earth.

Subtract from that the even lower percentage of “recyclables” each household generates. If even the generous estimate of 50% of all household garbage is recyclable and every bit of that was recycled it would amount to less than 1% of the refuse stream.

So whatever efforts you make personally towards recycling are completely ineffective. If you’re recycling you’re doing it to make yourself feel virtuous not to save the sea turtles from getting plastic straws in their nose holes.

Now … You can feel virtuous if you want but if you’re not honest about your false virtue you’re lying to yourself too.

Bald faced hypocrisy is not the problem with this recycling thing. The problem is there is only so much manpower and wealth that can be committed to the issue of dealing with the waste stream.

We absolutely need to invest in technology and infrastructure for dealing with the waste stream. We need better landfill tech like liners that will never break down and leach what’s in the landfill into the groundwater. We need better processing of combustible materials so we can reclaim some of the energy that went into making them. Etc.

We need clean water and clean air because those things are a requirement for life. Not just human life, all life.

Wasting effort and money on recycling insignificant amounts of waste so that people can feel smug about themselves is destructive to the planet.

Recycling only makes sense where the recycled material is cheaper to “mine” from trash and apply to new items than just digging/piping the stuff out of the ground. Recycled vehicles melted down for steel to be used in other applications, or to make more vehicles, is a good example. We have already created the steel, all we need to do is invest the energy to smelt it down and reshape it. This represents a lower energy investment than mining iron ore and refining it into usable steel.

If it’s not economical and profitable to recycle something there’s no reason to do so. The net impact of unprofitable recycling is negative.

Where I live the local government that operates garbage collection ceased recycling efforts two years ago. Now we all have blue garbage cans that are useless AND the local government has made no plans to pick them up. Presumably because then they’d be stuck with thousands of recycle bins they’d have zero use for. (You can’t use them for regular garbage cans either, the trucks won’t empty them if you put them out on the road on garbage day.)

Clearly even the recycling bins are not capable of being profitably recycled. The whole effort was a waste of a LOT of time and money but at least here we’re not dumping tax money into that particular black hole anymore.

I know this is going to offend some people but if you’re industriously sorting your recyclables, peeling labels off bottles and cans then washing them, or any other of that sort of thing … You’re accomplishing nothing at all but making yourself feel good.

Even paper and corrugated cardboard cannot be economically recycled and that is probably the best candidate of all the recyclable materials but it’s still a net loss. There’s more economic gain in using paper and cardboard for fuel than there is in repulping it and making new paper products from it. Either way, it’s still a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of the total garbage that has to be managed somehow. So tiny a fraction that it is insignificant. Which means it’s costing more than it’s worth for you to use tax money so you can feel good about yourself.

Idea for Right Angle – Maybe discuss your individual studio set backgrounds as I see the battleship in the background amongst many other items. I’d love to hear about the collectibles.

Agreed. I cannot begin to figure out the odd blue panels on the door behind Scott. Why aren’t they symmetrical? Why do they look like insulation? What are they for?

Those odd blue panels are acoustic panels. They deaden sound reflections so audio is clearer. Scott either has them because he listens to really high fidelity music in that room or more probably because his microphone was picking up echoes from behind where he sits.

It could be that the panels are doing double duty as soundproofing keeping noise out as well as reflections down.

Big flat surfaces, like bare walls and especially doors, tend to act as large diaphragms bouncing sound all over the place. You don’t notice it in your house because you’re used to it, electronic gear really picks that kind of thing up and makes it very noticable.

Panels like that come in all shapes and sizes. They are used to “flatten” the acoustic environment.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t be interested in a tour of their studio rooms myself. I just happen to know what that kind of panel is for.

Those are sound deadening panels. They break up the sound so it doesn’t reflect back and make the audio bad. Ever see a sound studio with egg crates on the walls.

In addition to what ACTS(TM) and Michael noted, the odd configuration is due to the physics at work with sound waves. Every time you reflect a sound wave at 90 degrees, you drop the sound level by 3 dB. That may not sound like a lot, but since it is a logarithmic scale a 3 dB reduction is actually a halving in sound intensity.
Thus Scott’s panels reflect the sound wave up or down, or right or left. Then if reflects off the ceiling / floor / wall before it returns to his mic, at approximately 25% of the intensity at which he spoke.
Bill likely doesn’t need this as his space is much larger, distance also helps reduce the dB level.
Steve doesn’t have the high quality mic that Scott does.

I wonder if the 3dB reduction can be achieved in a crusher building which generally run around 110 dB and may require double hearing protection (plugs and muffs). 3dB would be enormous in that environment since it is mostly galvanized in a metal structure.

Excellent question. Would presume this is a large building, so how far from the crusher would you be measuring. Or outside the building? If outside the building, there should definitely be something that could be done especially taking into account what wavelengths are being attenuated.
Inside is tougher, that needs a real specialist.

May not work very well – I believe I hear truck traffic in the background occasionally. If I had to bet, it sounds like the trash pickup.

Having lived through the whole “life cycle” of recycling, from the initial excitement of using existing product and repurposing using less resources to today’s closures of massive recycling centers because there is nobody buying their stuff at a profit, we tend to get discouraged. When I lived in an area where we drove down and sorted recyclables, it used to feel like we were “doing good”. When they quit asking for glass, ostensibly because we weren’t good at keeping clear glass from green from brown from blue, I knew things were not going well and I felt deflated. Now I think they only do recycling for show, allowing us all to have an outlet for virtue signaling.

I have always felt recycling was a scam. I agree green waste should be separated for composting. I agree paper and corrugated cardboard should be separated as there is a clear and convincing process to introduce into existing commodity streams. Aluminum, tin, steel, copper and such ferrous and non-ferrous materials are readily used as feedstock. Where I struggle is plastics and glass that are SUPPOSED to have commodity value but fluctuate based on regional markets such that recycle companies are often stranded with less value than it takes to transport to a location where value can be realized. In my tiny mind, I feel if recycling is legitimately valuable, we should get paid at our curbside pickup for the valuable commodities we are separating specifically so someone else downstream is able to capitalize on that value, yet we see none of that value on our monthly invoice from our curbside pickup.

I think the real reason is that Legos made from PET don’t give the same pain factor when stepped on with bare feet as those made from ABS.

That Lego actually used this phrase: The recycled material didn’t reduce carbon emissions.
Steve – it’s not just the cost of the tooling. When you take into account the energy needed to change the bottles into something they can use to mold Legos, the cost in energy is huge.
The same is true for Solar Panels and Wind Turbine Blades. And that is without taking into account the cost in energy or landfill for disposal. Turbine blades were, 10 years ago, just buried in the ground.
If you take into account the energy cost of mining battery material, EV is also not carbon friendly.
And this is if you even believe that CO2 is a problem.
Recycling is not environmentally friendly the way that we do it.

STRONGLY agree. The emission impact of mining for EV materials is HUGE, whereas iron ore for Internal Combustion Engines and petroleum manufacturing is tiny in comparison.

The dirty little secret about recycling is that more often than not, though we separate, and on trash pickup day two separate trucks come around to collect, the stuff all gets dumped together in the end. I’m not sure about Rhode Island, because the Johnston Landfill is supposedly a state of the art facility, and world famous. But my brother lives right over the border in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and his trash pickup guys have told him that it all gets dumped together.

Seems to me that a lot of paper, and plastic could be recycled into kilowatt hours. If it can’t be recycled into product, because there is no market, why can’t we burn it instead of piling it all up into a mountain?

Here in SW VA my local town collects trash and recyclables. The guys who pick up have told me that they all get put together in the end as there is no place to send the recycling.
When I was a teen we had true recycling: We brought the bottles back to the wholesaler who cleaned them and refilled them. Same for milk jugs. These were glass and except for breakage lasted many cycles.

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