What?? No.

It makes no difference. What matters is the ENERGY. Not the atoms.

We have absolutely no shortage of atoms, we have an unlimited supply of those.

What matter is the energy inherent in the oil. And I see absolutely nothing in this press release about where the energy comes from.

Do we have an unlimited supply of petroleum and the bandwidth to extract all of it at a reasonable price? Because, last I checked, that stuff is used for a lot of other things that is not "making Legos".

Or is this just the "well, if all power isn't green it's just so futile" argument in a fetching hat?

> Do we have an unlimited supply of petroleum and the bandwidth to extract all of it at a reasonable price?

Pretty much yes. As long as you have a source of energy we have effectively unlimited supplies.

I said it to you in another post: It's the energy that matters, not where the atoms happened to last sit.

Its about the footprint of the production.

The problem here is that prior processes in this field needed alot more input energy and they have relied on conventional power input. They actually had worse footprints despite "producing plastic from thin air".

I understand that part, and I understand opportunity cost. I don't understand the frankly nastily-phrased assertions of "greenwashing"; even if it is currently inefficient due to using additional conventional power, that's not likely to stay the case over time, and I think it's a much longer row to hoe to assert that over a reasonable time horizon it would remain inefficient enough to make it less viable than continuing with current practices.

Meanwhile, it looks like Lego-the-company is pretty heavily involved in the development of sustainable energy sources to use and to offset their own power usage[0].

[0] - https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2017/may/100-pe...

If it is inefficient to a degree, that they have a bigger footprint then standard production it is a huge problem. They arent running a study on the possibilities of this kind of plastic production, they used it in production environment. If they are creating more pollution this way despite labeling themself sustainable it kind of is greenwashing.

We're talking about the effects over a time horizon, though, not instantaneously--the instantaneous conversation is both misleading and uninteresting. Five years from now, their sustainable energy production/backing outpaces their usage, and they're still using the same process--does it magically become not-greenwashing at that point? Was it retroactively not greenwashing?

Don't get me wrong--of course greenwashing is a thing that exists. But so does unwarranted cynicism.

I think you start your argument from the point, that sustainable energy is around the corner. I have to point out, a lot of people have thought that way for a long time. The instantaneous effect is very important if there isnt sustainable energy around the corner. If it isnt, this is plain and simply an extremely inefficient way to produce plastics.

Creating plastics from non petroleum sources is of course a great process, but it wasnt developed by Lego. Others arent using it because they produce actually a bigger footrpint with this "sustainable" process".

If I dont miss anything, Lego adapted to that process before there was a positive impact or even before a non negative impact is a realistic prediction.

You are missing the point. Sourcing atoms through a plant will never be environmentally better just because the atoms touched a plant.

It's energy that matters, but this press release doesn't mention that at all (and I bet it's because this new process uses more, not less, energy).

If they save energy because the plant puts the atoms in the right configuration, that would be something. Are they? I doubt it, because if they were they would have said it.

Energy is substitutable, but the raw materials have externalities, yes, in both energy and other costs? If you are using petroproducts, you are perpetuating everything around petroproducts, from the costs of extraction (human, environmental, energy) to their externalities (pollution etc.) to the fundamentally scarce nature of them.

Using more energy in a way that can be ramped into more sustainable sources (if it currently is not sustainably sourced--but, again, Lego seems to be at the least offsetting their energy use in toto) with fewer externalities is not the same thing. There are functional curves to look at here with more variables than what the raw count of joules that the process itself uses.

This is carbon and hydrogen we are talking about. A more sustainable, more common, more easily sourced, material doesn't exist (other than nitrogen and oxygen).

You can get it from anywhere.

Getting it from a plant changes absolutely nothing.

Here's the part you are missing:

Do you know why, if it's so easy to get, they most commonly source it as a petrochemical?

It's not because oil is an especially great source, it's because when you do so you save energy. Because that oil has energy, and you can use it while making your product.

To source your atoms elsewhere, then burn oil to gain energy needed to modify your product is backwards in environmental friendliness. You are adding another layer of inefficiency to oil usage.

> There are functional curves to look at here with more variables than what the raw count of joules that the process itself uses.

That's what they want you to think "look we are making environmental progress". It's not so. Sourcing carbohydrates is easy. Energy is hard, and they've made no progress there.

It's the same idea behind bio fuels, some of it is effectively solar energy. The solar energy is used by the plant to take CO2 from the atmosphere and grow. Then this is used to make bio-stuff. If later that bio-stuff releases its carbon into the atmosphere... Well it was already there to begin with, not hidden underground. At worse, and if you don't count the energy used to transform the plant material into plastic/fuel/..., this it's carbon-neutral as no new carbon atoms are released into the atmosphere.

Now I've heard people argue that in the end the energy cost to transform the plant into this bio-stuff negates the benefits from growing the material versus digging it out of the earth but I don't know enough about the subject to know who's right and who's wrong.