The toymaker had promised before to start making toys with sustainable materials.
The Financial Times it was claimed on Sunday that Lego, the biggest toy company in the world, has given up on a plan to start making its famous bricks out of recycled drink bottles instead of plastic made from oil.
According to the report, the Danish business that makes billions of Lego pieces yearly found that making bricks from recycled polyethene terephthalate (RPET) would lead to more carbon emissions.
In 2021, Lego began looking into the possibility of switching from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which takes about 2 kg of gasoline to make 1 kg of plastic, to RPET. About 80% of Lego blocks are made of ABS. It makes the bricks strong and easy to assemble and take them apart.
“We tried out a huge number of materials. “It is just impossible to find a material like that,” Lego CEO Niels Christiansen told FT.
“It is like trying to make a bike out of wood instead of steel,” Tim Brooks, the company’s head of sustainability, said, describing how hard it was to replace ABS.
Lego is now rumoured to gradually add more bio-based and recycled materials to each part of ABS to make it more environmentally friendly.
“It does not go from not being sustainable at all to being 100% sustainable overnight. Instead, you start by making parts of it from recycled or bio-based materials. Based on that, maybe it is 50%, 30%, or 70%,” Christiansen said.
Lego’s original goal was to stop using any plastics made from oil in its materials for its play sets by 2030. By 2025, the company wants to stop putting its bricks in single-use plastic bags. Instead, many of its collections come in paper packages.
