One of the worlds most loved children’s (and adult’s) toys is hoping to go green.
One of the worlds most loved children’s (and adult’s) toys is hoping to go green. LEGO, the Billund, Denmark manufacturer of colorful blocks and destroyers of bare feet, has offered up $150 million to bring in new researchers to develop a more sustainable product.
LEGO has produced over 560 billion parts since its inception in 1949, but sadly all of those parts were made up from petrochemical-based polymers. This reliance on fossil fuels has long plagued the company and this new venture aims to fix their mess.
Check out how the pieces are currently made in the video below:
“Finding alternatives to the materials used to make these bricks would significantly reduce the Lego Group’s impact on the planet,” said Lego owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen in a Chemical Engineering News story posted yesterday. The company will also steer their product packaging to be made of similarly recycled goods.
Without getting too technical (and trust me, Chemical Engineering News gets pretty technical,) the issue with finding the right plastic comes down to finding the perfect relationship between pieces. LEGO told CEN the the “building-block raw material has to be made to an exact specification so that the blocks lock together and then come apart with just the right amount of force.”
“It is not your run-of-the-mill ABS(acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene),” Kristiansen said – see, told you it got technical.
The results of the investment won’t be coming anytime soon though; LEGO doesn’t expect folks to see the new piece until at least 2030. But they are looking for a few good engineers.
They told CEN they want “people who are good at creating networks,” (not sure if that’s a chemical bond pun, but I hope it is.) The company is hiring lots of new people for the projects from chemists and materials specialists to engineers, and parts designers.
