While ABS may be the most well-known plastic used by LEGO, they actually use a wide variety of plastics. Here’s an example of all the kinds of plastic used by LEGO provided by BrickNerd guest contributor Ryan Howerter.
The quality of Lego helps, you shouldn't ever really need to be throwing them away. The problem I do have with them is the excessive use of single use plastic in their packaging. So many plastic bags in all their sets. I'm sure they said they were sorting that out but I'm still getting packages full of plastic bags! It can't be that difficult to sort that out and repalce those with some cardboard boxes or paper bags!
They have started moving to paper bags in some of the newer sets, I believe). Not to mention the CMF being now in cardboard boxes, but that's going to be a disaster.
Having formerly worked in the plastics industry, it was interesting to read just how many different types of plastic LEGO has used and is currently using.
Neat! This is a very comprehensive writeup! I found this part particularly interesting:
Modern Technic bricks with pins, such as 42929, are dual-molded so the brick part is ABS and the pin is PA (this is why they show up in BrickSet as “multicombination”, even though it’s the same color throughout).
I didn't know dual-molding was possible, and I've never noticed a visible seam or difference in colouration.