Lego Is Now Replacing Plastic Bags With Recyclable Paper
The company wants its packaging to be sustainable by 2025, so the crinkly bags have got to go.
The bricks in today’s Lego sets are packaged in many tiny, numbered plastic bags. The toy manufacturer uses millions of those bags every year. The business is beginning to not use single-use plastic bags anymore, with the aim of making their packaging sustainable by 2025. They will start packing their bricks in recyclable paper next year.
Tim Brooks, the Lego Group’s vice president for environmental responsibility, says, “We want to make recycling our bags as simple as possible for builders. We decided to make the bags out of recyclable paper because plastic recycling facilities are not very common and vary from country to country.”
The company tested various new packaging materials to find something that would be environmentally friendly, sturdy enough to hold Lego bricks, simple to pack into boxes, and appealing to kids. “We tested about 15 different prototypes with hundreds of kids and parents,” says Brooks, “The prototypes’ shapes, materials, and graphic designs varied. People will see both white and brown paper bags, as we begin testing the paper bags in Lego boxes.” The company will continue to test the new design while introducing the new bags over the following five years.
Paper has the unintended benefit of being more enjoyable to unwrap, while also eliminating the waste problems associated with plastic. Single-use plastic bags allow builders to see the contents of the loose bricks, but In testing, they discovered that kids enjoyed the suspense of opening the paper bag, because they don’t get that preview.
The company will invest $400 million over the next three years to speed up its transition towards sustainability, which will include converting to carbon-neutral operations and increasing business circularity. Around three-quarters of Lego’s carbon footprint comes from the extraction and refinement of oil to make the bricks, so the business wants to stop using oil-based plastic by the end of the decade, and using plastic derived from sugar cane.
Lego is interested in making their company more climate friendly and are working to make a difference. What else Lego is doing, you can read on the official Lego website.
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