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Danish toymaker Lego has abandoned its pilot programme to make recycled plastic bricks from discarded bottles after projections suggested that, adopted at scale, the material would ultimately have a higher carbon footprint.
The company introduced its first prototype bricks using recycled PET (rPET) in 2021 as part of the aim to have all of its products made from sustainable materials by the end of the decade.
But after two years of testing, Lego has now scrapped the project as calculations indicated that retooling its factories to process rPET – instead of the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) used to form 80 per cent of its bricks – would ultimately generate more emissions over the product's lifecycle.
"It's like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel," Lego's head of sustainability Tom Brooks told the Financial Times, which broke the story.
"In order to scale production, the level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories. After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher. It was disappointing."
The rPET also requires large amounts of energy for processing and drying, Brooks explained, as well as additional chemicals so it can rival the durability of normal Lego blocks.
