If you’ve ever played with a competing brand of “interlocking plastic bricks,” you know that Lego’s big advantage is their solidity, their seemingly infinitesimal tolerances that make sure every piece fits just so with every other. The seams turn invisible. The secret to that tight connection (and how painful Legos are to step on): plastic. Specifically, a very tough plastic called ABS, or acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene, three polymers derived from petroleum. So last month, Lego announced that it would launch, later this year or next, a Sustainable Materials Centre—100 engineers, chemical engineers, and materials experts all trying to find an eco-friendly replacement for ABS and other ingredients in the company’s toys. Finding those replacements will be tougher than getting a one-by-one piece off a wide base plate. every Lego block has to be identical to others of its type to within 4 microns, from batch to batch, year after year. ABS also takes color well, so a wall of red bricks looks the same across its entire surface.
You can print on it, it’s durable—important for a toy that gets passed down through generations—and, most of all, ABS can create what Lego calls good “clutch” power, the ability to stick to other bricks until kids pull them apart. Plus, what does “sustainability” mean in this context? Right now, companies can define that word pretty much however they want. No carbon emissions cutoff exists to qualify a material—and even if one did, it’s notoriously difficult to tally up those emissions. A sustainable material could be renewable or recyclable or both (or neither). To Lego, sustainable means changing where their plastics come from—the raw materials, or feedstocks. “The feedstock for plastic can come from many places that are not fossil based—bio-based, renewable or even recycled sources,” says Tim Brooks, Lego’s senior director of environmental sustainability. Part of the new center’s mission will be to test new feedstocks, including ones that are made out of plants.
The center will also work to find a material that itself is recyclable, and that overall will have a lower carbon footprint than its current plastics—accounting for the energy that goes into shipping the raw materials to the plant, running the machines that assemble the toys, and the materials themselves. At a meeting last year, senior project manager Allan Rasmussen spoke about some of the company’s earliest efforts to phase out ABS bricks by 2030. He said they had already tested an impact-modified polylactic acid—a plastic produced from corn—that was “very, very close” to what they needed. But if you’ve ever eaten something hot with a compostable spork, let’s say, you might have noticed that current bio-based plastics almost uniformly suck. It’s hard to make a resilient plastic out of plant starches or carbon compounds spit out by bacteria. In the case of polylactic acid, Lego ran into problems with the blocks’ ability to click and stick. A few weeks after molding, the plastic had lost its original shape.
And it’s not just the iconic bricks that Lego will have to redesign. The majority of Lego’s output is in ABS—it’s the most common material used to build more than 60 billion bricks every year—but Lego uses a lot of other materials these days, too. Technic pegs that need high levels of friction, car wheels and axles need to slide easily against each other, pneumatic air hoses need to be flexible, car tires need to be compressible…and that doesn’t even begin to get into fabrics. Making things even worse for the greenies at Lego, the company packages all of those parts for sale in plastic bags nestled in plastic shrink-wrapped boxes. In fact, packaging might be a better target for sustainability. All that stuff gets thrown away. But when’s the last time you heard of someone sending even one Lego brick to the landfill? Maybe it’s Lego customers who can do the most good—by passing down sets they already own. Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question
The best answers are voted up and rise to the top How could I change this sentence in order for it to sound more natural and easier to be understood by a toddler? I've been using 'unassailable' or 'take them apart' but both sound strange. There's nothing wrong with saying "Take apart your legos*† before putting them back into the box." (Or, equivalently, "Take your legos apart before putting them back into the box.") "Take apart" is a fairly common phrasal verb, and it's about as simple and straightforward a phrase as you can get to express this to a toddler — or anyone, really. *American English usage considers the "lego" to primarily be the block itself, and only by normal pluralization (etc) to be the collection of such blocks. British English is the reverse. Since you put "Legos" in the title of your question, I assume you're using American English, which conveniently is my native dialect. †As a generic term for a type of block toy, there's no need to capitalize it.
The trademark is in all-caps anyway: LEGO®. "Disassemble your Legos" sounds appropriate, but talking to a toddler probably "undo your Legos" sounds easier. Another option is to dismantle your Legos. to disassemble or pull down; They dismantled the machine and shipped it in pieces. Put them together and take them apart Construct them and then de-constuct them Create and start again Put away your Lego You put away toys, and Lego is a toy like any other. Put away your bike, put away your paints, put away your screaming ninja turkey... No one has thought of explaining why the expression unbuild is inappropriate. After all, if we do a belt up, (fasten) we can also undo it. Likewise, you can fix your hair into a bun or ponytail, and later unfix it. We lock the car door when we leave, and unlock it when we come back. Yet, to build and unbuild lego (or legos) will sound weird to many native speakers. If we can assemble an Ikea wardrobe, i.e. we fix the pieces together;
we ought to say: unassemble, when its time to move to a new home. But unassembled refers to the flat pack that we have bought at Ikea, the wardrobe that is in pieces and lies patiently in its box waiting to be assembled. Instead, the correct verb to use is disassemble. English is never 100% logical, why shouldn't a child's construction be unconstructed? The word exists, but unconstructed does not mean unbuild, it means "not (yet) constructed". Well blow me down... I suppose to unbuild something would be like asking a partner to uncook dinner because it was unappetizing, once a meal has been cooked, it cannot be uncooked. In fact, uncooked food means food which is raw, or has not been cooked. So, I think the same theory applies to building. For example, when a sandcastle is built, the action is completed. A sandcastle will not last for days, but it might survive for a few hours, until the heat from the sun dries the wet sand and the castle crumbles, or until it is washed away by the tide.
A different action must intervene, in order to reverse the process of building. And, by necessity, it must be destructive. Destruction, not uncreation, is the opposite of creation. The sandcastle must decay; or fall apart, in order for it to return to its original state. A child's lego construction must therefore be destroyed, in some measure, i.e. taken apart if the lego bricks are to return to their original state. In a similar vein to "take apart," "break up" works well (and, to me, feels more natural) in this context as you are breaking up the whole into its smaller parts. I've no idea if this is a Br Eng - only expression, or more regional than that - but I might say 'Take it to bits' for this kind of situation. I agree take apart sounds the best for a toddler, but what I would say is "put your legos back in the tub/box". The toddler legos come in a big plastic tub. If you bought several tubs then you likely store them all in a bit bin or box. Telling them, then showing them putting the legos back in the tub requires taking them apart, is probably better then trying to explain vocabulary to someone that is barely speaking.