Tuesday 10 August 2021

Games Workshop and Plastic Waste, Part 4 - Hard Numbers

So this is now pretty much a crusade. Still shouting into the void, still the One-eyed Man in the Kingdom of the Blind.

Facts matter, and the facts I now have are quite depressing.

Being a scientific sort, I have kept my estimates of waste plastic conservative. "Up to 50%", I have written here or elsewhere. 

Then last Saturday I purchased the Adepta Sororitas Combat Patrol box from my local gaming shop, helpfully allowing me to bypass the 'sold out outline' denial at GW's online store. Useful set for my Sisters project, and saved fifteen quid. 

First thing I did after I opened the box, was to weigh the sprues. 

Canoness (small sprue)        complete - 8g;    empty - 5g;   remaining waste as percentage - 62% 
Sisters A (large)                      79g    46g            58%
Sisters B (medium)                39g    25g            64%
Rhino B (large)                       71g    32g            45%
Rhino T 
(large)                        81g    37g          45%
Rhino Extras (medium)           44g    24g           54%
ADDITIONS:
Aestred Thurga (smallish)      19g    12g        63%

(Percentiles have been rounded down)
(List will be updated as and when more kits are measured.)

Even from a small sample size, this is much worse than my conservative guesstimate, but I suspected it would be the case. Fair to say, that with the exception of larger model kits - the Knights, Daemons, etc - all kits have a waste footprint of well over 50%. Multiply that by MILLIONS of sprues sold every year, and the scale of waste is even more appalling. 

A REQUEST: to anyone who happens across this blog and is willing to help by providing some more data, please do what I did. Weigh sprues as new and when empty & post them in comments. Units are moot, as long as a percentage can be calculated. Thanks in advance.

~J~

2 comments:

  1. Agree with your crusade entirely! I sent a very similar-sounding email to GW a couple of years ago asking if they could mould detail onto sprues or reduce the volume somehow and received a depressingly impersonal email: "Games Workshop takes matters of sustainability seriously" etc. I've signed and will share the petition (thanks for sharing). I wonder if there's something else we can do?

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  2. Hi Simon - wow, you were well ahead of me then. My forays into this problems being very recent and all. For my next post I translated the sketches from earlier into a rendered diagram, with the intention of bringing my blog to the attention of Spikey Bits, who last month published an article about recycling and the Change petition. Hopefully this will escalate things.

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