Working towards sustainable LEGO® bricks and elements
We’re working hard to find solutions to make our products from more sustainable materials by 2032. In fact, some of the LEGO® bricks and elements you know and love are already made with recycled and renewable materials! Whether it’s using sugarcane, recycled kitchen worktops or experimenting with fishing nets, we’re leaving no brick unturned in our mission to make our products more sustainable.
Our unique challenge
LEGO® bricks bought years ago fit perfectly with bricks bought in the future. All bricks – from yesterday, today and tomorrow – fit together and they last for generations without losing their ability to stack together, something we call ‘clutch power’. The high performance we expect from our bricks means any material used to make them must always meet our rigorous safety, quality and durability standards. Our bricks and elements are manufactured to extreme levels of precision and safety for children.
We encourage our builders to pass on bricks they no longer need to friends, family, charities or local schools – helping to ensure LEGO bricks are played with again and again. For anyone that doesn’t know what to do with their LEGO bricks, we are trialing take-back programs like LEGO Replay, which gives LEGO fans in the UK, US and Canada the chance to donate their old bricks. Together, we can make sure no brick goes to waste.
Sustainable materials
bio-PE
Since 2018, we’ve been making flexible parts like LEGO flowers, botanical elements and minifigure accessories out of bio-polyethylene (bio-PE) which is made from sugarcane. We source this from Brazil using guidance from our partner WWF, and make sure that the sugarcane we buy grows at the same rate as we use it, and doesn’t compromise food security. We make more than 200 different elements from bio-PE and around half of our LEGO sets contain at least one of these elements. Sweet!
arMABS
Our transparent elements, like lightsabers, windscreens and windows contain 20% of recycled materials from artificial marble kitchen worktops. We have over 500 different arMABS elements, which will feature in over 60% of our LEGO sets. Clearly genius!
ePOM
We’re designing our robust, rigid LEGO elements – such as our axles – to be made with a plastic called ePOM. The process of making this material uses cutting-edge technology to mix renewable energy and CO2 from bio-waste. We hope to start using this new material from 2025.
Recycled prototype brick
In 2021, we had an exciting breakthrough and created a protype brick made from PET plastic bottles. However, after two years of continuous development it did not deliver the overall carbon reduction required to realize our ambitions.
We’re proud of our achievements with the prototype and will apply the learnings as we continue to develop new materials and explore other ways to make our bricks more sustainable.
Our mass balance approach
Mass balance is a way to increase the amount of renewable input in the materials we buy. Our suppliers mix virgin fossil sources with certified renewable sources (like used cooking oil or plant oil) to produce the material for LEGO products.
This approach helps us to start the transition to using more and more renewable raw materials, but it’s not the end goal. Our ambition is that by 2032, our products will be made from more materials that are renewable or recycled. But right now, there aren’t enough quality recycled and renewable raw materials available. So, until then, we will continue to join forces with industry to develop solutions and do our part to drive demand for high-quality, certified and traceable raw materials.
And that’s not all!
Behind the scenes our committed colleagues have been testing over 600 materials in our mission to make our products more sustainable. Some materials will work, others won’t – that’s the nature of innovation. But any material we use must always meet our rigorous safety, quality and durability standards.
