I loved going to Valley Faire Mall in San Jose and scooping parts by the pound.
I didnt see any of the lego store by-the-pound model.
An interesting method for sus-ing up what parts they had would be looking into the shipments to-from lego entities in NL and USA - sea shipping bills of lading can be found on import yeti (now obviously unless someone has digitized historic bills of lading, etc (and we all know that ship hands (pirates) and long-shoremen (mob) have famously been the definition of corruption - so we can hardly ever trust any bill of lading...
So you can see that they are ~1,000 lbs per shipment... rounding up - then remove ~30% for weight of packaging and basically you have 750 pounds of plastic bricks - then apply part existance probability and you can see how much of each part is being imported and a costing idea...
We could probably map out all lego sets and shipments with some dilligence.
Should also look at the environmental impact of lego long term. its a LOT of plastic.
Part existence probability changes every couple of months, probably not enough time for you to be able to make good estimates.
LEGO tends to get hoarded, resold or donated, not thrown away. I believe I have more than 99% of all the LEGO I or my parents ever bought, going back to 1976 or 7.
Tell that to my Mother. She threw away all of our 1970s and 1980s legos, transformers, Star Wars, He-man, etc. toys after we left home. Didn’t even donate them - straight to the landfill.
I was surprised by how complete some sets of mine where when they came over. I don't doubt the 99%, although in my case they are not mine any longer as such, but my five year old son's.
Lego stashes do indeed get hoarded for a generation at a time; a lot of it is kept as valuable for the next generation (lucky bastards).
> LEGO tends to get hoarded, resold or donated, not thrown away.
I doubt this. Outside Lego enthusiasts, most people see it as a children's toy which is probably disgustingly covered in saliva and in no fit state for anyone else to touch. It's one of the first things to go into the trash when more space is needed in the attic.
You can put them into a pillowcase and wash in a washing machine.
Given how expensive Legos are many people will gladly pick them up from your place, especially if you live in a city. You can look up Buy Nothing and similar groups in your area on FB.
I loved going to Valley Faire Mall in San Jose and scooping parts by the pound.
I didnt see any of the lego store by-the-pound model.
An interesting method for sus-ing up what parts they had would be looking into the shipments to-from lego entities in NL and USA - sea shipping bills of lading can be found on import yeti (now obviously unless someone has digitized historic bills of lading, etc (and we all know that ship hands (pirates) and long-shoremen (mob) have famously been the definition of corruption - so we can hardly ever trust any bill of lading...
So with that in mind though:
Lets look at the shipments of LEGO https://i.imgur.com/HgLlBuF.png
Nathan appears to be a top importer of Lego https://i.imgur.com/xYDvko5.png
Ships mostly a container a month to LA. https://i.imgur.com/7ZALaMi.png
LegoLand is his customer: https://i.imgur.com/I0oS1wu.png
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But I cant find out contents of shipment .... AH Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/7CjqVBW.png
So you can see that they are ~1,000 lbs per shipment... rounding up - then remove ~30% for weight of packaging and basically you have 750 pounds of plastic bricks - then apply part existance probability and you can see how much of each part is being imported and a costing idea...
We could probably map out all lego sets and shipments with some dilligence.
Should also look at the environmental impact of lego long term. its a LOT of plastic.