I feel that compared to virtually every other use of plastic, Lego is probably the most benign. Compared to other toys, it is better built, lasts longer, doesn't need batteries, doesn't use obsolete/deprecated protocols, isn't fashionable / faddish, and is therefore typically used for a long time by a child through the years and then frequently reused by several people/families/generations.

My son is still playing with basic Lego bricks that were my older cousin's bricks in the 80's. The amount of plastic waste we've caused and gone through in the last 40 years is many many many orders of magnitude higher than those few sets :|

our kids lego goes back th the late 70s. some may even be older because already then we were getting lego second hand. my dad kept our lego and passed it on to my kids, and when they grow up i will do the same and keep the lego for my grandkids.

we'll pass this from generation to generation until the plastic degrades to unplayability.

It is a concern that they also hold. They are working on some sort of fix [0] (I warn you their website is annoying). One quote from their website:

"The LEGO Group aims to send zero waste to landfill by 2025, and in 2018 recycled 93% of all waste from our operations. Additionally, 100% of all plastic waste produced during the moulding of LEGO® bricks was recycled. This includes reusing some of the plastic resin in our own processes, as well as sending some of the waste to suppliers to be recycled and turned into other plastic products."

This is just an overview of their plans but I also remember seeing an interview with their CEO talking about how many different types of materials are trying to address the waste.

[0] https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/responsibility/sustainabi...

Zero waste is a great goal but not the full picture. If Lego is getting thrown out after each kids out grows it then it'd be a pretty big waste problem. Luckily because they last a long time and are perfectly inter-operable I don't think that many get just tossed. I see a lot resold and reused.

Lego last long and are repurposable. I personally think they are not really meant to be built according to instructions in the long term. It's the same way a framework is not meant to do a todo app. It's something the kid does on first pass when learning how the system works, before starting on the actual cool stuff.

There's kind of two types of sets made today the play sets for kids and display sets for adult collectors. I do agree though that LEGO isn't really plastic waste because most of it doesn't get thrown out and kids collections get reused and resold to collectors and are relatively rarely thrown out.

in my experience the original model is built once and then rarely ever again.

There's usually no reason to ever put Lego blocks on the trash heap. They last forever and they're easy to resell locally by the bag when you're done. There's also a vibrant global secondary market of online used Lego block resellers (Bricklink, etc.).

My kids play with the bricks I used to play with as a kid. So usually they last for at least 2 generations. And in between, lot's of cousins have played with them.

How many other plastic toys have such a long replayability?

LEGO announced that by 2030 they want their bricks to be made sustainably and from recycled materials, so we’re getting there! https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/responsibility/sustainabi...