Winning again. Lego is having trouble going Green.
The only realization more painful than finding a Lego piece with your bare foot is that producing those blocks sustainably is hard.
The Danish toymaker informed the world yesterday that it’ll have to abandon its plan to manufacture its trademark bricks out of recycled plastic bottles, since it would increase Lego’s energy usage.
- When Lego first announced the bottles-to-bricks idea two years ago, it estimated that material from a one-liter-sized bottle could produce approximately 10 bricks.
- But the shift toward recycled materials would require major carbon-intensive changes to the company’s current brickmaking process, which uses oil-based plastic. And the sample blocks just weren’t very good.
Building (green) blocks
Lego has been trying to engineer bricks from various eco-friendly materials (including corn and wheat) with limited success. The pieces must be easy to click together and pull apart and durable enough to withstand play from generations of boisterous builders.
Don’t tell the sweet-toothed toddlers in your life, but Lego has pulled off using sugar cane to create bioplastics for softer elements like trees and bushes.
Never back down, never what? Lego said it won’t give up experimenting with different ingredients and that it still aims to make its bricks sustainably by 2032.
