LEGO Recycled Brick One of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2021
Photos used with permission. ©2021 The LEGO Group.
Earlier this week, TIME Magazine released “The 100 Best Inventions of 2021.” The LEGO Recycled Brick made the list in the “Toys and Games” category due to their incredible work to improve sustainability.
As Rebecca Katzman reports, almost half of the PET plastic in the world ends up in landfills. The LEGO Group hopes to take some of that plastic and turn it into LEGO bricks. Additionally, by 2030, they hope to make all LEGO bricks from sustainable sources. It took the LEGO Group over three years and more than 250 variations of PET materials to find the right fit. The recycled bricks will hopefully make their way into LEGO sets in the next 18 to 24 months. About 100,000 metric tons of plastic resin are currently used every year in LEGO sets, so this prototype brick can really make a difference.
From Plastic Bottle to Prototype Brick
Let’s take a closer look at how the LEGO Group takes a plastic bottle and turns it into a prototype brick.
1. Grind PET plastic drinking bottles down into flakes.
2. Clean and granulate the PET flakes.
3. The PET plastic granulate is strengthened.
4. Test specimens are made from molds using the granulate to evaluate the mechanical properties.
5. Bricks are made from molds which are tested for quality and performance.
6. The prototype bricks go to the quality testing lab for more extensive testing.
7. Need to determine how to color the prototype bricks.
8. Build the production setup for manufacturing the bricks.
9. Find a LEGO brick from recycled PET in your LEGO set!
Here is a great infographic showing all of the steps:
LEGO Group Sustainability
The LEGO recycled prototype brick is part of the LEGO Group’s push towards more sustainable products. Furthermore, they will invest up to $400 million over three years to 2022 to accelerate their sustainability. This recycled prototype brick is just one of the many examples of how they will accomplish this. See below for many more ways the LEGO Group is improving sustainability:
- Partnering with Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden to provide “Build the Change” activities to over 10,000 children in China to increase their interest in sustainability.
- Providing “Building Instructions for a Better World” to the leaders at the COP26 summit.
- Partnering with Volvo to create an electric prototype construction vehicle from a LEGO Technic set.
- Providing the LEGO Replay program to donate and recycle old LEGO bricks.
- Starting to use paper bags in LEGO packaging by early 2022.
We applaud the LEGO Group’s sustainability efforts and can’t wait to see these recycled bricks in our LEGO sets soon!
