Lego has given up on its most publicised attempt to replace plastics derived from oil with other materials after discovering that the new substance increased carbon emissions, illustrating the difficult trade-offs that businesses must make in the pursuit of sustainability.

The largest toy manufacturer in the world revealed two years ago that it had tested a prototype block made of recycled plastic bottles instead of ABS, which is now used in around 80% of the billions of pieces it produces each year and is based on oil.

However, utilising recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) would have resulted in more carbon emissions over the course of the product because it would have required new machinery, according to Niels Christiansen, chief executive of the family-owned Danish firm, who spoke to the Financial Times.

Instead, Lego has chosen to work to reduce the carbon footprint of ABS, which now requires 2kg of petroleum to produce 1kg of plastic.

“In the early days, the belief was that it was easier to find this magic material or this new material” that would solve the sustainability issue, Christiansen said, but “that doesn’t seem to be there. We tested hundreds and hundreds of materials. It’s just not been possible to find a material like that.”

Lego’s new strategy serves as a reminder of the challenging choices businesses must make in the area of sustainability, where competing goals like ending the use of fossil fuels and cutting carbon emissions may be incompatible.

The Danish toymaker originally set a goal of getting rid of all petroleum-based plastics by 2030 from the roughly 20 materials it uses in its playsets. It got off to a swift start in 2018 by switching from polyethylene derived from oil to a polyethylene derived from plants. This plastic is used in around 20 various parts, including trees and bushes.

By 2025, it plans to completely stop using single-use plastic bags to package its bricks; instead, many of the sets it currently sells come with paper containers.

Replacing ABS, a substance that gives the bricks durability and ease of assembly and disassembly — what the toymaker terms “clutch power” — has proven to be far more difficult.

According to Tim Brooks, head of sustainability at Lego, RPET was softer than ABS on its alone and required additional ingredients to match the safety and durability of the current plastic as well as significant energy to process and dry it. He compared it to attempting to build a bike out of wood as opposed to steel.

 “In order to scale production [of recycled PET], 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,” he added.

By gradually introducing more bio-based and recycled material, Lego is now attempting to make each component of ABS — acrylonitrile butadiene styrene — more sustainable.

“It’s not going from being 0 to 100 per cent sustainable from one day to the next, but you start with elements of it being based on either bio materials or recycled materials. Maybe it’s 50 per cent, or 30 per cent, or 70 per cent based on that,” Christiansen said.

However, he acknowledged that it would be more difficult to communicate with customers at first because it would be impossible to determine how much each set’s emissions had been lowered.

However, Lego’s CEO claimed that the company’s new focus was the right one and would help it achieve its goals for 2032, including a 37% decrease in emissions compared to 2019 and the use of only sustainable materials by then.

By 2025, the company wants to spend $3 billion a year on sustainability, and Christiansen acknowledged it may reduce its profit margins because it wouldn’t pass on the greater cost of purchasing sustainable materials to customers.

According to Brooks, Lego is now looking for lower emissions and potentially circular materials that may be recycled and reused instead of having a sole focus on sustainable resources. “RPET is a great example of why we’re not trying to be so dogmatic,” he continued.

Enabling the billions of bricks that are currently sitting in kids’ bedrooms for reuse or recycling into new ones is another major aim.

In the US and Canada, Lego launched the Replay project. It will launch in Europe the following year. Participants donate their LEGO bricks, which are then sorted and cleaned before being sent to charitable organisations.

Before launching a more commercial service in which customers could make money by returning their old sets, which could then be reused and packaged as new sets, Brooks expressed the hope that Lego would have solutions for the best way to collect and sort the bricks in the next two to three years.

“It’s better to reuse than recycle. So we’re looking at a circular business model — how do we earn revenue from recircling bricks. It’s quite a shift in thinking and ideas,” he added.

(Adapted from FT.com)