LEGO announced plans on Wednesday to increase the use of renewable plastics in the manufacture of its signature bricks, reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. LEGO has set a target of 2032 to reach its goal of using fully renewable and recycled materials.
All LEGO bricks are made from resin, which is a mix of new plastics made from fossil-based feedstocks and renewable materials. The company says it is working to increase the proportion of certified renewable or recycled materials, meaning less oil is used in the bricks used to make everything from Titanic replicas to Hogwarts Castle.
LEGO says it has tested over 600 different materials over the past eight years to make its bricks more sustainable – with varying degrees of success. To make its bricks, the company uses a production process called “mass balance,” which mixes pure fossil fuels with renewable materials such as cooking or vegetable oils.
In the first half of 2024, an average of 22% of the materials used in its products came from “renewable and recycled sources,” up from 12% in 2023, LEGO says.
The transition to more environmentally friendly materials comes at a price, however. According to Reuters, LEGO is paying 70 percent more for the renewable resin. However, the Danish company says this will not affect the prices customers see in the toy store.
“The cost of these materials is not passed on to consumers – it is absorbed by the LEGO Group in our bottom line,” the company said in an emailed statement to CBS News.
The announcement was made as part of the company’s earnings report for the first half of 2024. According to a press release to CBS News, LEGO’s revenue increased 13% and consumer sales also grew 14%.
“We achieved double-digit growth in both sales and profits and made significant progress in increasing the proportion of sustainable materials in our products,” CEO Niels B. Christiansen said in a statement.
More than 300 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide every year, but only a small portion of it is recycled, according to the Department of Energy. And of the 48 million tons of plastic were produced in the USAonly 5 to 6% is recycled. Plastic is notoriously difficult to recycle because it comes in different types that cannot be mixed together. In addition, it is more expensive to recycle plastic than to produce new plastic.
Oil and gas companies that produce plastics say they are making progress toward a renewable future. ExxonMobil, for example, has partnered with cities like Houston to conduct “advanced recycling.” But as CBS News senior national and environmental correspondent Ben Tracy points out, the project has been slow to get off the ground and has faced resistance from critics who say the method is not a viable solution to the plastics problem.
The industry has been criticized in the past for misleading recycling claims.
Melissa Valliant, communications director at Beyond Plastics, said LEGO should look at other materials to make its bricks or abandon the material altogether given the negative health and environmental impacts it has.
“Recycled plastic may be even less safe than conventional plastic in terms of health risks,” she said in an email to CBS News, citing findings from a United Nations report. “Replacing the new plastic in LEGO bricks with bioplastic is unlikely to be safer or more environmentally friendly,” she said.
The famous plastic LEGO bricks have been around for 75 years. Originally called “Automatic Binding Bricks,” the toy was invented in 1949 after the company got its first plastic injection molding machine.
LEGO was founded in Denmark in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. The name is an abbreviation of the Danish words “leg godt”, which means “play well” in English.
