Sustainability and the Everlasting LEGO Brick

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The LEGO brick is in many ways a forever toy, designed to last generations and work with all iterations. But that’s not only a good thing.

It also means that the hundreds of billions of LEGO bricks and elements in the world need to stay in the hands of people playing with them instead of finding their way into the wild.

The LEGO Group estimates that about 97% of all LEGO set consumers hold onto their bricks or pass them on to families, but the LEGO Group also worries about the remaining 3%, and that fuels the company’s deep investment in environmental sustainability efforts.

The LEGO Group’s environmental sustainability efforts are deep and eclectic, including repurposing bricks for play and education in schools, reducing the company’s carbon footprint, and even reexamining what the bricks and the packaging that holds them are made of.

“We want to make sure that, when people buy a LEGO product, they know that we are doing our very best to make it as environmentally neutral as possible,” said Tim Brooks, Vice President, Environmental Responsibility at the LEGO Group. “Our ultimate goal is to really have zero environmental impact in both our operations and in the products – the bricks and the packaging.”

The company is already essentially carbon neutral thanks to heavy investments in solar power that put panels on the roof of nearly every factory and often on land around them. The LEGO Group’s parent company has also invested in offshore wind farms, and they’re investigating geothermal energy.
In terms of the LEGO bricks and elements themselves, the company is tackling the use of plastic in several ways.

Working with the World Wildlife Fund and Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance, for instance, the LEGO Group is testing out a way to use more sustainable forms of carbon to create something called bioplastics.
Also, in 2018, the LEGO Group started production on a range of more sustainable elements made from plant-based plastics, which were being sourced from sugar cane. That first push included leaves, bushes, and trees. The goal is to use sustainable materials for all packaging and core products by 2030.

“We want to make our bricks from even better sources of more sustainable plastic,” Brooks said. “There’s two routes you can go: You can use bio-based plastic, where you can grow the building block for the plastic, or you can use recycled materials, and we’re looking at both.”

He said the company has about 150 different shapes made from the bio-based polyethylene material.
“In about 50% of our boxes, you’ll find at least one of those shapes today,” Brooks said. “Ultimately, that particular project and that material is about a lower carbon dioxide source of materials. So you can reduce the carbon dioxide emissions by about 20% when you use sugar cane. But, of course, that doesn’t say anything about the end-of-life of the plastic.”

In that case, the LEGO Group is testing the creation of plastic bricks using recycled plastic bottles.

“We did plants from plants, and now we’re doing bricks from bottles,” he said.

The challenge there is that, unlike those polyethylene elements, the bricks are made out of ABS plastic, which is a very rigid, stiff material. He added they also have to ensure that the plastic they are recycling is absolutely safe.

“We have made bricks,” he said. “They are in a lovely shade of grey at the moment, and we’re looking at how we color those bricks. We can make a couple of thousand of those bricks at the moment. What we need to figure out is how do you go to millions of bricks, and how do you scale that production?”

The company is also rolling out LEGO sets that use paper bags instead of plastic ones.

While those initiatives are all taking place internally at the LEGO Group and focusing on the creation of toys, there are also some initiatives focused on what happens to LEGO bricks after they’re purchased.

The company recently teamed with a nonprofit, First Book, on an initiative called LEGO Replay. The idea is to repurpose LEGO bricks that people no longer want and get them into the hands of people who can make better use of them.

“We did a lot of surveys around how people play with their bricks, and we found that 97% of people actually know what to do with their bricks. They know to keep hold of them or to donate them,” Brooks said. “But how do we go after the 3% of those people that we really hope are not throwing them out. That was where the idea of Replay came from: How do we reuse and replay the bricks?”

Under the program, people can ship cleaned and separated LEGO bricks and elements to the LEGO Group on the company’s dime. Once they arrive, the bricks are sorted, checked, and then sent off to donation partners that find them new homes.

“We have been able to reach about 3,000 educators across the country with the Replay boxes from the Replay program,” said Fist Book’s Jenna Grubman. “That’s over 91,000 kids and over 50,000 boxes of LEGO bricks going out.”

The bricks and elements end up in classrooms run by educators like Jill Arbini, a kindergarten teacher in the Webster Groves School District in Missouri.

Arbini received 30 boxes of the bricks and used them as powerful tools for education and increasing social interaction between her students.

“LEGO bricks have completely changed my classroom,” she said. “It’s something we would have never been able to provide as a teacher on our own. And just the STEM opportunities and learning opportunities we’ve had since then have been fantastic.”

The LEGO Group’s many environmental sustainability projects, which range from reexamining materials to reducing the carbon footprints of factories and finding a new life for old bricks, are why the toy company is ahead of the curve in such an important area, said The Toy Book Editor-in-Chief James Zahn.

“I think [environmental sustainability] is extraordinarily important, not just for the LEGO Group, but for the toy industry in general,” Zahn said. “Even a few years ago, sustainability was a buzzword. But now we have finally crossed over a line where sustainability really isn’t a trend anymore. It’s just the way that things are going to be. And we’re on an accelerated calendar now for when that’s all going to happen.”