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Lego has built an empire out of plastic. It was always thus. The bricks weren’t originally made from wood, or metal, or some other material. Ever since the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, bought Denmark’s first plastic-injection molding machine in 1946, Lego pieces have been derived from oil, a fossil fuel.
The fiddly little parts that the company churns out—many billions every year—are today mostly made from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene, or ABS. This material doesn’t biodegrade, nor is it easily recycled. If a smiling mini figure gets into the environment, it will likely very slowly break down into highly polluting microplastics.
What was once considered a miracle material, so versatile, tough, and easily dyed in a searing array of technicolor hues, has come to haunt Lego, a family friendly brand recently valued at $7.4 billion. Plastic is increasingly taboo and, in the rush to dispense with fossil fuels and protect Earth’s precious natural habitats, there’s a growing urgency to find alternatives, or otherwise reduce plastic pollution.
Things aren’t going to plan. On 18 September, Lego Group CEO Niels Christiansen announced he was joining Danish business leaders in calling for companies and policymakers to “stand together globally for a just and green transition to a net-zero future.” This week, Lego revealed to the Financial Times that its much-hyped project to switch away from ABS and instead make toy bricks from recycled plastic bottles has ended in disappointment. Only two years ago, the company told WIRED it had made impressive progress in developing a suitably robust version of this alternative plastic, known generally as recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET).
“We had worked very hard on it,” says Tim Brooks, Lego’s vice president of sustainability, looking back. “It is hard to color, it’s hard to scale the production of it.”
But there were bigger problems than that. In their quest to make rPET bricks that were rigid enough to clip together firmly, what Lego refers to as “clutch power”, engineers discovered that the material required significant pre- and post-treatment. The process involved extreme drying of the rPET to remove moisture—an energy intensive step. After doing the sums, Lego’s researchers realized that rPET manufacturing, and installing new equipment to make it all happen, would actually carry a higher carbon footprint than sticking with plain old ABS.
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Lego declined to specify to WIRED how much bigger rPET’s carbon footprint, per kg of toy bricks, would be versus ABS, but it has said that ABS requires 2 kg of petroleum for every 1 kg of plastic toys produced. Nearly 200 softer pieces in Lego’s current range are made from biobased plastic, derived from Brazilian sugarcane. Brooks says the company remains keen to pursue the development of a more environmentally friendly version of ABS for its many more rigid parts, for example by incorporating biobased plastic into them. But this is still in development.
“In the future, they should not make these kinds of announcements until they actually do it,” says Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics. Global plastic production has been projected to double in the next 20 years, according to the World Economic Forum, and yet in the US, for example, advocates claim that the vast majority of plastic, 95 percent, is never recycled.
Paolo Taticchi, a corporate sustainability expert at University College London, says Lego can be considered “quite credible” in its efforts to decarbonise because the company has invested so much in this endeavor. For instance, in 2015 Lego put down $155 million to establish a Sustainable Materials Center. Despite the foundering of the rPET work, 150 engineers are still employed there working on alternative initiatives, the company says.
But Taticchi doesn’t mince his words. Today, decarbonisation is not just a nice-to-have: “They are not going to survive as an organization if they don’t find a solution.” Incidentally, last month, Lego reported its operating profits had plummeted by 19 percent, the biggest dive since 2004.
It’s very hard to find a practical alternative to ABS, says Gregg Beckham at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He and colleagues are working on a biobased functional replacement for ABS. Would it have all the special properties required for a top quality Lego piece? “To be determined,” he says, noting that “multiple companies” are now working on scaling up similar technology.
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Awareness is growing of how plastic can persist in the natural environment. Long-forgotten toys made from plastic materials, including possible Lego pieces, have even turned up at a former nuclear missile base in Poland, where the families of Soviet officers once lived in secrecy.
And don’t forget all the Lego in the ocean. Every month or so, Tracey Williams, an author and founder of the Lego Lost at Sea project, catches up with local fishermen in Cornwall, England, who save bits of Lego that have got trapped in their nets. In 2020, she co-authored a study that suggested dinky little pieces of ABS Lego could remain in the sea, generating microplastic particles, for between 100 and 1,300 years.
Some of the parts collected by Williams are as much as 50 years old. However, most originate from a lost shipping container that was stuffed with nearly five million Lego pieces. A rogue wave hit the vessel Tokio Express in 1997, causing cargo to tip into the water.
“You can only really tell that they’ve been lying at the bottom of the sea for 26 years by the marine life growing on them,” she says. “They do survive remarkably well.”
The weathering of recovered pieces varies, but, remarkably, some are in good enough condition to be used again, despite their lengthy sojourn beneath the waves or stuck in sand dunes. And that, the sheer durability of ABS, may just provide Lego with an answer, or part of an answer, to its problems.
“We want to ensure that the bricks have the longest possible life,” says Brooks, as he lays out the goals of Lego’s Replay initiative, in which secondhand Lego pieces are returned to the company, sorted, washed, repackaged and—at present—donated to children. Lego declined to clarify exactly how many people are employed in this effort, which is currently live only in the US and Canada. The scheme sometimes requires disassembly of Lego sets, and sorting of bricks both by machine and by hand. Quality control is key. “We once found a little Lego pirate treasure chest with a set of children’s teeth in it,” says Brooks.
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What sets Lego apart from many other toys is that it is often, if not always, kept by a family for many years. Perhaps even passed on from generation to generation. Bricks made decades ago remain compatible with those produced today.
Last year, Christie Klimas, who studies sustainability at DePaul University, co-authored a paper estimating the environmental impact of various children’s toys, including three Lego sets, a Barbie doll, a Jenga game and two plush dog toys. The study made multiple assumptions, including about the transportation required for each item, and estimated that the largest Lego set, a Star Wars fighter ship, had the highest greenhouse gas emissions of all the toys—due to the volume of ABS. A Lego spokesman describes the work as “flawed” and says assumptions about the playing time associated with the toys (20 hours) do not represent the long life of its products.
Klimas points out that the analysis was based on international standards for product life-cycle assessments, and, in additional estimates provided to WIRED, she adds that once the three Lego sets are played with for between 32 and 64 hours, the carbon footprint of each product, per hour of play, becomes “practically negligible”, despite the considerable size difference between them (they ranged from 61 g to 374 g).
However, the original analysis did reveal certain trends, she says, including that plastic, in particular, appears to be associated with a higher overall environmental impact for a product. Take the plush dog toys, one of which required a battery. “The nylon casing—the plastic component, not the battery—really grows the impact of that stuffed animal,” she says.
Many people who spoke to WIRED mentioned that they have kept Lego for many years, or even sold it on. UK-based artist Andy Morris, who makes artworks out of Lego, sold his own childhood collection to help pay for university. Now he designs custom sets and dioramas that people purchase as gifts.
In 2021, economists in Russia estimated that the value of secondhand Lego sets grew by 11 percent year over year, on average, with some fetching many times their original price after just a few years, further indicating that it wouldn’t be quite right to judge Lego in the same league as more ephemeral, or disposable, applications for plastic.
“We’ve done a pretty good job as a society of vilifying all plastics, I don’t think that’s right,” says Sharon George, a senior lecturer at Keele University. Carefully developing a market around the existing Lego bricks out there in the world, reducing the production of new pieces, or maybe even renting out Lego sets, could all help the company lower its environmental impact, she suggests.
Lego acquired BrickLink, an online marketplace for new and secondhand pieces, in 2019 and its Replay initiative, if it can be scaled, could vastly increase the circularity of these toys.
Enck, upon hearing of the existence of the Replay scheme, expresses enthusiasm. “That’s wonderful,” she says, emphasizing the need for Lego to simultaneously reduce new ABS plastic production. “I think that’s the future.”
