Lego Promises More Sustainable Bricks by 2026
Lego has been working for years to make its plastic bricks from more sustainable materials.
Some of its softer pieces have been made with material sourced from sugarcane since 2018. And Lego says its transparent pieces now contain 20% recycled material from artificial marble kitchen counters.
But billions of Lego bricks are sold every year. And most of those bricks — like nearly all plastics — are made from resin that comes from petroleum.
At the end of August, Lego CEO Niels Christiansen told Reuters that his company is now on track to ensure that, by 2026, more than half of its resin is certified according to the "mass balance" method. This is a system for tracking the amount of sustainable material in plastic.
Plastic resin can be made by mixing renewable and recycled materials with new petroleum products. Under the mass balance method, if, say, half the input materials in the supply chain are sustainable, all the output products can be sold as 50% sustainable — even if those input materials are not used equally in each product.
So some of those output products could actually contain 70% sustainable material, while others contain only 30%, for example.
Lego gets its resin from an external supplier that makes it by mixing things like used cooking oil and plant oil with new petroleum products.
Lego says 30% of the resin it purchased in the first half of 2024 was "certified according to mass balance principles." The company estimates this means an average of 22% renewable sources are "attributed" to Lego products — though it says it can't guarantee what amount of sustainable material is actually in a particular piece of plastic.
Christiansen's announcement comes a year after Lego abandoned attempts to make bricks from recycled drinks bottles.
The mass balance method is controversial. While promoted by industry, it's not recognized by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which certifies products based on the actual weight of the materials in the final product, not the mass balance of the overall inputs.
