Lego, the world’s largest toymaker, has announced that it has abandoned its project to make bricks from recycled plastic bottles instead of oil-based plastic. The company said that the new material would have resulted in higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime.
The challenge of finding a sustainable material
Lego has been looking for a more sustainable material for its bricks since 2021, when it launched a research program to explore the use of recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from drinks bottles. PET is a type of plastic that can be recycled and reused for various purposes.
However, Lego found that PET was not suitable for making its bricks, which require high durability and precision. PET is softer than acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), the oil-based plastic that Lego currently uses for about 80% of its pieces. To make PET bricks more sturdy, Lego had to add extra ingredients and use more energy for processing and drying.
According to Tim Brooks, Lego’s head of sustainability, the project would have caused a “level of disruption to the manufacturing environment” that would have required changing everything in the factories. He said that after all the modifications, the carbon footprint of PET bricks would have been higher than that of ABS bricks.
The impact of plastics on climate change
Plastics are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming and climate change. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), plastics generated 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, accounting for 3.4% of global emissions. Most of these emissions came from the production and conversion of fossil fuels into plastics.
The OECD also projected that emissions from the plastics lifecycle would more than double by 2060, reaching 4.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. This would increase the pressure on the environment and undermine the efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as agreed in the Paris Agreement.
Lego’s future plans for sustainability
Despite the setback, Lego said it remains committed to finding a more sustainable material for its bricks and reducing its environmental impact. The company said it will triple its spending on sustainability to $3 billion a year by 2025 and aim to cut its emissions by 37% by 2032 compared to 2019 levels.
Lego also said it will make ABS more sustainable by incorporating more bio-based and recycled material into its production. Bio-based materials are derived from renewable sources such as plants or algae, while recycled materials are recovered from waste streams or existing products.
In addition, Lego will expand its Replay program, which allows customers to donate their used bricks to children’s nonprofits. The program cleans and ships the bricks to organizations that provide educational and creative opportunities for children in need. Brooks said that reusing bricks is better than recycling them and that Lego is looking at a circular business model that generates revenue from recirculating bricks.
