Lego desperate: major change in popular bricks failed

There are probably only a few children in Switzerland who have never played with Lego blocks. The colorful building blocks from Denmark have inspired millions of children for over 70 years and are now a must in every daycare center.

Thanks to a wide range of collectible packs, Lego allows you to create everything the hearts of young and old children desire, from Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series to enormous tree houses and your own Minecraft world. However, a bitter decision of the famous company is unlikely to impress the parents.

Since 2018, the Danish company has been investigating a way to produce the world-famous stones from sustainable materials in the future. The original plan was to convert all production to recycled plastic or bioplastic by 2030.

Just a few years after this decision, Lego had to halt a major recycling project. The reason given was that the sustainable version caused even higher CO₂ pollution than the conventional production method.

In concrete terms, this concerns the use of recycled plastic bottles for further processing into Lego blocks, which the toy giant has tested on the basis of a prototype. “It’s like trying to build a bicycle out of wood and not steel,” said Lego’s sustainability spokesperson, commenting on the research approaches.

So more material and energy was needed to process and dry the recycled plastic than conventional plastic. Moreover, this method of production would require the entire factories to be converted in such a way that the company’s CO₂ footprint would have increased enormously despite recycling Lego bricks.

The traditional properties of the famous bricks are apparently also problematic for Lego’s sustainability goals. The recycled plastic prototype would therefore have been much softer than the well-known version.

According to its own information, the company employs more than a hundred people to improve its own climate footprint. Despite testing “hundreds of materials”, no sustainable solution has yet been found for the production of Lego bricks.

The traditional Lego block consists of 80 percent of so-called thermoplastic terpolymers, which require approximately two kilos of processed petroleum per kilogram. Tons of CO₂ are released every year during the extraction of oil.

As a sustainable alternative, the group has now announced that it wants to make the terpolymers it contains more sustainable. A total of three billion dollars will be invested in the sustainability strategy. Even if Lego promises not to pass these extra costs on to consumers, many climate-conscious families are already skeptical about alternatives in the toy market.