The giant LEGO made an important decision for your business: from now on, you will no longer produce your toys with recycled plastic. The decision had been made in 2021, when they looked for an alternative to ABS.
ABS, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), is made with plastic derived from Petroleum. The alternative they had found was RPET – recycled polyethylene terephthalate.
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However, despite the issue of sustainability, the company realized that the decision was not the best for production.
(Image: disclosure)
The company's CEO, Niels Christiansen, recently announced the change to the newspaper Financial Times. According to him, although the initial exchange aims at sustainability, RPET actually results in greater CO2 emissions.
This is because, according to him, for production with recycled plastic, it is necessary to change all the machines on the production line.
“It's like trying to make a bicycle out of wood instead of steel,” summed up LEGO's head of sustainable development, Tim Brooks. Today, they use more than 2 kg of oil to make 1 kg of plastic. And ABS is used in more than 80% of the company's blocks.
The company also states that all blocks created with RPET are not as resistant as ABS, which leads to another issue: the durability of all products.
In other words: the sustainability exists in production – in theory – but, in practice, toys will last less and, therefore, require repurchase.
Christiansen continued, assuring that the switch will happen gradually to other plastics, and the company will continue to look for other forms of production that are good for the environment.
In their promises, by 2032, they intend to reduce their gas emissions by up to 37% compared to 2019 – and more sustainable materials play an important role in this change.
Still, the failure with RPET was hard on the company, which chose the product among the most of 250 possible variants, and had also already passed all European and American regulations.
