Lego recently ended one effort to use sustainable plastics to make bricks, but now reports success and a big contract to secure the supply chain. It will replace the oil used in its plastics with a renewable material over the next eight years.
Lego, which sells billions of plastic bricks annually, has tested over 600 different materials to develop a new material that would completely replace its oil-based brick by 2030, but with limited success. Now, Lego is aiming to gradually bring down the oil content in its bricks by paying up to 70% more for certified renewable resin, the raw plastic used to manufacture the bricks, in an attempt to encourage manufacturers to boost production."
If it seems odd to have succeeded so conclusively so soon after reporting failure, it's because there was a largely unspoken criterion to sustainability—that sustainable plastics must be as cheap as the oil-derived ones—that Lego is giving up on.
This means a significant increase in the cost of producing a Lego brick," CEO Niels Christiansen told Reuters. He said the company is on track to ensure that more than half of the resin it needs in 2026 is certified according to the mass balance method, an auditable way to trace sustainable materials through the supply chain, up from 30% in the first half of 2024.
Another motivator: rivals Hasbro and Mattel both recently reported success in bringing sustainable plastics into production. An interesting wrinkle, though, was collectors hating recyclable packaging so much they went back to using clear plastics in the meantime.
