Renowned toy manufacturing giant LEGO recently unveiled its first building brick made from recycled plastic bottles. The company aims to use sustainable resources for manufacturing its popular building sets in the future. So, the development of the new bricks made from recycled plastic is a significant step to enable the company to achieve its sustainability goals.
The Danish toymaker announced the environment-friendly bricks via an official press release. The initial product is a prototype of a LEGO brick that uses PET plastic from discarded bottles, complying with the company’s strict quality and safety standards. As per the company, engineers and material scientists tested over 250 variations of PET materials and hundreds of other plastic formulations to develop the new prototype brick.
The company states that over 150 people are working to develop sustainable solutions for LEGO products. The new sustainable bricks were developed using recycled PET sourced from US suppliers that use US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) approved processes.
Now, coming to the design, these LEGO bricks are not that different from a standard Lego building brick. As per the company, a one-liter plastic PET bottle is enough to make at least ten 2 x 4 LEGO bricks. The company has used its patent-pending formulation process that uses a “bespoke compounding technology to combine the recycled PET with strengthening additives.” This makes the new bricks as strong as the standard LEGO bricks. So, these will hurt the same if you stepped on them!
Coming to the availability of the new sustainable LEGO bricks, the company states that “it will be some time before bricks made from a recycled material appear in LEGO product boxes”. The company will continue to test and develop the PET formulation. Following this, it will decide whether to move the development to the pilot production phase. These testings and developments, as per the toymakers, will take at least another year.
