Using PET plastic from discarded bottles, LEGO is another step closer to reaching its goal of making all its products from sustainable materials by 2030. The Danish toymaker unveiled a new brick prototype this week that the brand says makes up the first brick to meet the company’s “strict quality and safety requirements.” This news follows the company’s announcement last year that it was making a $400 million investment over three years into sustainability initiatives. LEGO stated that the brick prototype used plastic from discarded bottles from the United States. On average, a one-liter plastic bottle will provide enough raw material for ten LEGO bricks with two rows of four studs.
Each year, LEGO makes billions of bricks, most of them from a plastic called ABS which gives them “clutch power,” helping them to grip together. In its quest to find a sustainable alternative, LEGO has tasked a team of 150 people who have conducted over three years of research, during which hundreds of variations of PET materials and other plastic formulations were tested. LEGO will continue to test and develop the PET (polyethylene terephthalate, which doesn’t degrade in quality when recycled) formulation and decide whether to move to the pilot production phase, which is expected to take at least a year. One factor the company is testing is how the material can be colored. According to LEGO, it will be “some time” before the new bricks are mass-produced for consumers.