Games Workshop and Plastic Waste, Part 2 - Solutions

 *[Miniature painting content will resume soon]*

The tabletop wargaming hobby has a problem, an elephant in the metaphorical room. 

That elephant is the unspoken, unacknowledged problem of plastic waste by the biggest name in the wargaming hobby - Games Workshop. To be sure, this is a problem that every other plastic kit manufacturer is guilty of, and my solution below is just as applicable to them. I don't know where GW sits in the scheme of things w.r.t. other kit makers, but they may well be near the top by quantity of output. Lego have addressed their long legacy of pumping out millions of kilos of unrecyclable plastic, and now use non-fossil sources for their bricks. Everyone else needs to catch up, ethically speaking.

Empty sprues are synonymous with single use plastic. Have been so from the very beginning. No thought given to making it do more once its usefulness is over. Now, the resourceful model maker CAN do stuff with them, but most hobbyists don't. So, what to do. The talk on the internet is always about recycling, but the infrastructure in the UK is woeful, and sorry tales emerge periodically about UK waste being shipped overseas. UK business has a history of shirking responsibility for sorting out its own mess and unintended consequences. 

There are two solutions the likes of GW can implement to prevent waste. The first, as already stated, is recycling. But left to generic, local authority waste management, sprues are as likely to end up in landfill, or incinerated, than get properly recycled. Recycling will work, if, and probably only if, proper incentives and channels exist to get empty sprues back to Nottingham. OK for the UK, not an option for the the rest of the world. I don't hold any hope for really worthwhile incentives, but a lot of people will do it just the same, because they care.

As for the second, I'll illustrate by recounting my story. Really looking at a sprue was what gave me the inspiration, mixed with some older observations of Kingdom Death plastic kits. 

First, look at a GW sprue, if you have one around. It would help if all the kit parts are already snipped off, then you can focus on what's left. So what is left? Glib answer: a piece of plastic with no useful features (except to the rare few who extract some measure of use from offcuts). But keep looking... notice it yet? 

There in the corner - a string of numbers. So what? 

Now we get to a 'hang on a minute...' thing.

The 'so what' is a solution that pertains to plastic waste as far as Games Workshop is concerned (other companies as well in relevant form). 

Why can't those numbers be in a fancier type face? Ornate. Gothic. Or elegant. So it follows - why can't MORE numbers, or text, or strings of both, cover the ENTIRE sprue?

My point is: if a manufacturer can etch a serial number onto the blank part of a sprue, why can't it also etch other detail on the remainder of a sprue? Why not have rows of rivets, a simple wood texture, names, phrases, icons? It doesn't have to be overelaborate - imagine something like an embossing effect, which can, hypothetically, be done with a single pass at the mold milling stage. 

And there you have it. A solution to plastic waste in the Warhammer hobby is to have sprues that hobbyists can kitbash for decorative bits and pieces. Can't use it? Give it to someone who will. Trade them. Congratulations, you've made sprues that are REALLY USEFUL to the end user.

With further adaptations, this can go much further still, but I'll relate those another day.   

Recycling is an awkward business. We don't have a proper circular economy, that in hindsight should have been implemented decades ago. Companies make stuff, ship it out, and that's that. It doesn't help that we are collectively lazy, deciding that it's too much effort and too expensive to recycle plastics properly. Send it abroad and make it Someone Elsa's Problem.

The only obstacle to innovation is Games Workshop, and their willingness to do something about an environmental problem in which they are culpable partners with other plastic manufacturers.

~Jay