No Lego made from PET bottles: Manufacturer abandons recycling project
Not stable, durable or sustainable enough: Lego is cancelling the project to make Lego bricks from PET bottles. However, research into sustainable materials is continuing.
A team of up to 150 employees is currently working on new materials at Lego. The aim: to produce as many building blocks as possible using as little petroleum-based plastic as possible.
The Danish manufacturer has been researching prototypes made from polyethylene terephthalate
(PET) since 2021. (PET). The idea behind it: Lego bricks could be made from recycled plastic bottles. And these in turn could simply be recycled.
PET bricks with higher CO2 emissions
Now the project has failed, report Guardian and Financial Times. PET itself is not scratch-resistant, durable and robust enough to achieve the same quality as the Lego bricks currently available.
The plastic therefore had to be enriched with additives and hardened. This in turn worsened the energy balance to such an extent that the PET bricks produced higher CO2 emissions than the previous material, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene copolymer (ABS). As these problems could not be solved, the project has now been cancelled.
Lego wants to continue researching replacement materials and triple its sustainability expenditure to three billion US dollars by 2025. Lego already uses a dozen different types of plastic. However, around 80 per cent is made of ABS. One kilogramme of this material requires two kilogrammes of crude oil to produce. And unfortunately, ABS has so far been difficult to recycle and reuse.
Source: Lego
Making used materials more ecological
In order to achieve its sustainability goals, Lego wants to tackle this issue. As ABS can currently hardly be replaced quickly and easily with PET or other materials, the energy balance is to be improved by mixing it with recycled material or bioplastics.
Swatch, for example, has proven that this can work. With a mix of ceramic and plastic made from castor oil, the Swiss manufacturer has been able to replace petroleum-based plastic in some models. However, not all colours are possible here either and the consistency of the surface is rougher - but this is less of a problem with watches than with building blocks.
Lego itself also uses an ecological plastic, namely bio-polyethylene (bio-PE). However, only for around 150 soft accessories such as trees, plants, leaves and bushes.
Cover photo: Lego39 people like this article
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