@JasmineDragon As for the materials, for thousands of years people used wood and metal and clay and ceramic without a problem. If you think a nearly indestructible material is unsuitable for a particular use case any of those other materials should be more than suitable to produce durable goods that can be destroyed or re-purposed as needed. Building things out of paperboard that are meant to be manhandled isn't the wisest idea. The whole point of paperboard is that it's disposable and self-sacrificial. Not an ideal material for a toy. At worst, wood is highly preferable and is made out of the same material anyway.....

Keeping in mind that that paperboard is made of trees, and we all know that absolutely no petrolium, coal, or natural gas is burned in logging, hauling, transporting, processing, refining, treating, or even recycling of paper, right? "Disposable" goods aren't necessarily any more "earth friendly" than plastics. It's like the myth of electric cars. The dream that it runs on cleanly produced energy instead of burning fossil fuels is only a dreamy utopia if you don't look into what producing those disposable batteries for them looks like. Of course that's all stuffed in Guangdong so nobody ever sees it and can dream.

But I'll throw you a bone against plastics: Recycling plastic typically consumes more petroleum than simply disposing of it.... it's a smoke and mirrors act, so I won't disagree that plastics aren't a great choice for most things that aren't long lasting either.

That said, we're here participating on a forum for generational disposable electronics with disposable batteries, with plastic game cartridges. I'm not sure a "save the earth, make payer toys!" campaign is anything but hypocrisy on an electronics forum. We're literally talking about the earth friendliness of using paper as a holder for 3 lithium batteries, an LCD display, 4 seperate circuit boards, all of which are going to be discontinued in 4-7 years, and the stock batteries won't be alive by then anyway.

The biggest problem in my own experience with "plant based plastics" which sound great in theory is that they require a RIDICULOUS amount of plasticizer (toxic chemicals) to hold together, but they separate rapidly with the decaying organic compounds and become brittle generally within 1-2 years. Fine for disposable drink cups that go from production to landfill within a year, but not so good for legos or anything strain bearing.

Still, at the dawn of "3d printing" I wouldn't expect a decrease in plastics use for the time being...they're trying to create a boom!

Regardless, "green" or not, a product needs to be fit for its intended purpose, otherwise it's just wasteful. I don't want to see a pile of Wii Tennis rackets piled up again, but at the same time, cardboard isn't fit for extended handling, and especially not rough handling of delicate parts as kids are going to employ. The idea of "scrapyard fun" is cool.....but not for $20+ in specially made boards. Wood, fabric, ceramic, metal. Arts and crafts feature disposable papers, sure, but they're built to be observed, not used. It just strikes me as a mismatch between materials and intended use.

More cynically, one could say it's designed precisely to appeal to someone like you, the earth-conscious parent who will notice the eco friendly materials without evaluating if the use case for those materials is actually sensible or durable enough to itself be fuel economy efficient. It's such a juicy target in the "target parents" motif for selling to kids.

To be clear, I like the Labo idea of arts & crafts meets video games. I've just handled enough cardboard to know it's just a wrong material choice. And I can also tell kids will still find it appealing and want it, not calculating the disposability of it, and Nintendo knows that the fragility will not affect sales while both keeping the product very cheap to produce, and be able to market it to those earth conscious parents.