Friday, November 10, 2023

Lego - responsible company or greenwashing parasite?

An interesting little snippet in the latest Corporate Knights tells of how the Danish company Lego tried to do the right thing and failed.

Conscious of the environmental and carbon footprint of its operations, and determined to do its part in reducing carbon emissions, Lego announced a prototype plastic brick made from recycled water bottles rather than from "virgin" plastic. Lego's production requires a hundred thousand tons of plastic each year, so it was thought that the emissions savings would be huge.

Not so. It turns out that plastic made from recycled PET bottles is softer and actually needs more energy to process it. Furthermore, switching to the recycled plastic would require changing almost the whole factory set-up, a significant carbon hit in itself. It seems that changing Lego's production to recycled plastic is a non-starter.

It has been pointed out, though, that switching to recycled plastic would also be a good way to reuse plastic that would otherwise moulder away for centuries in landfills, particularly as the recycling market for plastics has all but collapsed. (It is estimated that just 9% of Canada's plastic is recycled, for example.) So, the calculus is not just about carbon dioxide emissions, and Lego's decision may be more about short-term profitability for its shareholders than anything else.

It has also been pointed out that reusing is better than recycling, ceteris paribus, and that maybe a better model for Lego would be to rent them out rather than selling them, although it's hard to see traditional customers (or shareholders) swallowing that. Lego does already have a Replay program that donates used bricks to children's charities.

So, responsible corporate citizen or greenwashing parasite? You decide. Lego has said that it is "looking at a circular business model", and is "fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032". But that's 9 years away, and right now it's totally reliant on unsustainable fossil fuels for its plastic gizmos.

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