Lego’s sustainability shift draws questions, doubts

After fits and starts over the past nine years, the Lego Group plans to break free of virgin petroleum-based plastic by 2032. “Renewable and recycled” materials will make up the more than 100 billion bricks it sells each year, according to the company. 

Lego’s use of “mass balance,” a controversial method for tracking materials, along with record profits is helping its Aug. 28 goal to halve the use of fossil plastics 2026 and eliminate them entirely by 2032. A mix of renewable raw materials, including plant oils and recycled oils or fats, is supposed to feature in all Legos by 2032. The brand plans “over the coming years” to purchase more than half its materials from “sustainable sources,” according to its latest earnings statement.

Lego’s profits leaped by 26 percent in the first half of 2024, to $1.2 billion. The company provided answers to questions for this story but declined to be quoted directly.

In 2015 Lego launched a 15-year, $150 million journey to explore alternatives to petroleum. The Billund, Denmark company appeared to be making rapid progress with recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and sugar cane-based plastics, until that effort seemed to stall in 2023.

Ninety-nine percent of Lego’s footprint comes from Scope 3 supply chain emissions. A new Supplier Sustainability Program ties into Lego’s deadline by 2032 to slash carbon emissions by 37 percent, reaching net zero by 2050.

Although renewable plastic resins bring a nearly 70 percent price premium over fossil resins, Lego can absorb that without raising toy prices, CEO Niels Christiansen has said.

“Lego has a clear line of sight to how it’s going to do this,” said Anne Clawson, head of policy and government affairs practice at Cascade Advisory in Washington, D.C.

What’s inside Lego bricks

Lego has tinkered with 600 materials to replicate the qualities that enable its bricks and other elements to appear in 60 colors and 3,400 shapes.

Since 1963, Lego has made toy bricks from acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene, fossil-fuel-based monomers that form ABS plastic. This plastic, also found in high-performance automotive and electronics parts, enables rigid Lego bricks to clamp together, whether out of the box or decades old.

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Lego, which is privately held, declines to describe its “sustainable” materials in detail. Its recent steps in this effort include:

• Purchasing 30 percent of resin certified mass balance under ISCC Plus certification in the first half of 2024. That’s an average of 22 percent renewable and recycled sources. In 2023 Lego bought 18 percent certified mass balance resin, or about 12 percent sustainable sources.
• Using bio-polyethylene, derived from Brazilian sugarcane, in 200 botanical and minifigure toys. 
• Ending in 2023 the use of recycled PET plastics. Lego cited the high costs and emissions of retrofitting its plants in announcing this decision. PET, a polyester used in soda bottles, also lacks the “clutch factor” that binds the toy bricks.

Mass balance: greenwashing or building a market bridge?

Finding materials with the right “clutch factor” for its interlocking bricks is one challenge. Another is nailing down ingredients with a lower carbon footprint than the plastic Lego has sourced since 1963.

Mass balance, which offers a way to track the amounts of materials as they move through supply chains and into products, has come under fire recently. The EPA in August barred household cleaners using its Safer Choice label from using mass balance to describe recycled content in packaging. Food companies have used mass balance for years to label organic content. Consumer goods companies, including Lego and Crocs, have also begun to use it.

But the third-party ISCC Plus certification method, used by Lego, creates a misalignment between what a product’s label says and what’s actually inside the product, according to Anthony Schiavo, senior director and principal analyst at Lux Research. For example, if half fossil fuel plastics and half renewable plastics blended to produce a batch of Legos, the box could advertise 50 percent renewable plastics — even if the bricks inside only contain trace amounts of renewable material.

“Mass balance is like putting one almond in a cake and calling it an almond cake,” Melissa Valliant, communications director of the Bennington, Vermont-based non-profit Beyond Plastics.

“As technology around sustainable materials continues to develop, we believe certified and traceable mass balance is the best option to stimulate production of sustainable raw materials and ultimately increase the sustainable material content in our products,” states Lego’s website.

“This mathematical sleight of hand doesn’t have any environmental benefits,” said Peter Blair, policy and advocacy director of Just Zero, based in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. “It’s just a way to trick consumers into thinking that progress is being made.”

“Using mass balancing is a way of achieving those goals a lot more easily but it also, I think, dilutes the significance of what they’re trying to do,” Schiavo of Lux said.

Toy company competitors

Nevertheless, Lego is far ahead of other big toy companies on sustainability. By 2030, Barbie and Hot Wheels corporate parent Mattel seeks to reduce one-quarter of its plastic packaging and achieve fully recycled, recyclable or bio-based plastic materials in products and packaging.

Hasbro, maker of Nerf and Star Wars action figures, reversed its 2019 goal to eliminate plastic windows, shrink wrap, blister packs and other packaging by 2022. Instead, it is using bio-based or recycled PET plastic.

Lessons for other brands

Other companies can learn from Lego’s efforts, said Clawson of Cascade Advisory: “If you’re maybe a second or third mover … you can try other tactics and maybe have fewer lessons learned and failures of your own before you land on something that works.”

Among the three major takeaways, according to Clawson:

1. Lego embraces incrementalism. “They didn’t just look at their 2050 net zero goal and say, ‘That’s impossible,’” Clawson said. “They said, here are some things we can do to make noticeable improvements year over year.”
2. Lego has been transparent. “To able to say, ‘We’ve tried 600 different things, and here are the lessons we’ve learned’ … was really powerful,” Clawson said. “Because now instead of saying, ‘Gosh, Lego, you’re letting everyone down,’ you’re really appreciating all of the work and effort that they’ve put into a really hard problem.”
3. Lego is working with its suppliers. On July 3 the company launched its Supplier Sustainability Program to help cut the 99 percent of Lego’s emissions that originate from its supply chain. Multinationals such as Lego can benefit small suppliers with fewer resources, according to Clawson. “Sustainability is a license to operate and a requirement of how we do business, including how we select our suppliers,” Lego Group Chief Operations Officer Carsten Rasmussen stated July 3.