LEGO has announced it will pay out of pocket to increase the amount of recycled plastic in its bricks to 50% by 2026.
Estimated to increase the production costs by around 70%, the company’s CEO stated its bottom line will bear the burden as it hopes continued investment by LEGO will allow companies that make recycled plastic monomers to expand and reduce these high costs.
In a bleak year for the toy industry, LEGO’s operating revenue grew 26%. Its strategy of targeting all age groups with sets ranging from Star Wars and Harry Potter scenes to limited-edition sets based on community creativity, to bonsai trees and Lamborghinis for adults, led it to announce record profits this year.
“Our portfolio continues to be relevant for all ages and interests, and this is driving significant demand across markets. We used our solid financial foundation to further increase spending on strategic initiatives which will support growth now and in the future to enable us to bring learning through play to even more children,” Niels Christiansen, CEO of LEGO, said according to the Guardian.
But this isn’t enough for Christiansen, who hopes that an 8-year investment strategy amounting to over $350 million will allow them to replace up to half of the fossil fuels in their plastics with a sustainable resin made out of used cooking oil and food industry waste fats, or outright recycled plastic.
The market, Christiansen says, is still developing, which means these alternatives are two to three times as expensive as using fossil fuels. If you’ve bought a LEGO set recently, you’ll know they aren’t exactly cheap—they’ve really never been cheap, and passing on such high additional costs to the consumer is not an option.
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So Christiansen and the board have decided to take it all out of the company’s revenue, hoping that through financial support and broad publicity, the firms making these sustainable alternatives to oil-based plastics can grow and innovate until such a time when costs may be at parity with fossil fuels.
LEGO has also expanded its Replay program—a recycled supply chain of LEGO bricks and pieces that are repurposed for LEGO sets. The bricks are mailed in by users who no longer want their LEGOS, with shipping covered by the company.
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Over a million pounds of LEGO bricks have already been received through the Replay program, and over 400,000 sets of repurposed bricks have been given to children.
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