Billund
Lego bottles it on bricks: “Toy giant Lego has scrapped plans to make its bricks from recycled bottles, in a blow to its efforts to cut carbon emissions,” says Noor Nanji on BBC News. In 2021, the Danish company said it had developed prototype toy bricks from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, with some other chemicals added, and that it aimed to start manufacturing the bricks within two years. Lego now says using recycled PET didn’t reduce carbon emissions after all, due to the more energy-intensive production process involved. Many of the 4,400 different bricks Lego currently produces are made using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a virgin plastic made from crude oil. Lego maintained it was still “fully committed” to making bricks from sustainable materials.
“It is yet another demonstration of the myriad of technological issues which will have to be solved if we are to get anywhere near net zero by 2050,” says Ross Clark in The Spectator. It also proves the lie to those of a “Panglossian tendency” who fooled themselves into believing
