LEGO’s latest sustainability solution comes under fire from environmental experts

The LEGO Group is championing its use of the ‘mass balance’ principle in its pursuit for sustainability – but environmental health experts have called the scheme a ‘sleight of hand’.

The Danish company’s latest financial results arrived alongside news that as much as 30% of the resin used to make its plastic bricks is now certified according to ‘mass balance principles’. This accounting method allows companies to track the use of sustainable materials through their supply chain, and is seemingly core to the LEGO Group’s aim to eliminate virgin petroleum-based plastic from its manufacturing process by 2032.

The company scrapped efforts to find a renewable alternative to ABS through plastic from recycled bottles in 2023, as resultant materials apparently lacked the clutch power required for LEGO elements. It’s still pressing ahead with bio-polyethylene, or a plastic derived from Brazilian sugarcane – see its ‘plants from plants’ initiative – but otherwise hasn’t disclosed exactly what makes up the renewable resins it’s purchasing through mass balance principles.

Yet while the LEGO Group may view that mystery material as the magic bullet to its sustainability drive, not everyone shares the same optimistic outlook. “Mass balance is like putting one almond in a cake and calling it an almond cake,” Melissa Valiant, comms director of non-profit Beyond Plastic, told Trellis.

In essence: the amount of renewable plastic inside a LEGO set could be slim to none, but because the overall manufacturing process uses 30% renewable plastic, the contents of the box could technically be labelled as 30% recycled under ISCC (International Sustainability & Carbon Certification) guidelines. This creates an imbalance in consumers’ perception of any given product.

“This mathematical sleight of hand doesn’t have any environmental benefits,” Peter Blair, policy and advocacy director of Just Zero, told Trellis. “It’s just a way to trick consumers into thinking that progress is being made.” The LEGO Group freely acknowledges that it ‘can’t guarantee the level of renewable content in our individual products’, because it’s impossible to separate fossil fuel and renewable materials once they’re mixed.

“As technology around sustainable materials continues to develop, we believe certified and traceable mass balance is the best option to stimulate production of sustainable raw materials and ultimately increase the sustainable material content in our products,” the LEGO Group states. “We’ll keep increasing the amount of renewable raw materials we buy from our suppliers as they become available, as this means that over time the amount of virgin fossil materials needed for the production process will decrease.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council’s Director of Plastics and Petrochemical Advocacy Renée Sharp has also described mass balance accounting as ‘complicated and confusing’. There are multiple types, some apparently more problematic than others, and from her extensive blog post it appears that the LEGO Group’s approach may hew closer to the more favourable method of mass balance accounting.

This process simply tracks physical recycled content through a rolling average percentage, which aligns with the LEGO Group’s claim of 30% of its plastic coming from renewable resins in the first half of 2024. But Sharp argues that it’s less transparent than physical separation and segregation of plastic types, which would presumably allow the LEGO Group to know the exact makeup of the materials in each of its boxes.

Mass balance accounting is perhaps more problematic for plastics intended for packaging, however. Sharp points to an ISCC label that uses a looping arrows symbol alongside a claim that the product is ‘30% recycled plastic’, which together imply that the product in question is both partly comprised of plastic waste and can itself be recycled – but neither of those things are actually guaranteed by the label.

LEGO pieces themselves are never really expected to be recycled – the company is instead placing an emphasis on passing on bricks, such as through its current Made To Be Played campaign – while the LEGO Group is well on track to remove single-use plastics from its packaging by 2025. Paper bags are starting to appear in boxes in many countries, while Collectible Minifigures have long since switched from foil bags to cardboard boxes.

According to some experts, though, those efforts are coloured by the LEGO Group’s adoption of the mass balance model at the other end of its manufacturing process. “Using mass balancing is a way of achieving [its] goals a lot more easily but it also, I think, dilutes the significance of what they’re trying to do,” Lux Research’s Anthony Schiavo told Trellis.

The LEGO Group is currently on track to reach an even split between virgin petroleum and renewable resins by 2026, which will mean ‘a significant increase in the cost of producing a LEGO brick’, said CEO Niels B. Christiansen. He added that the company is preparing to ‘bear the burden’ of that extra cost rather than pass it on to fans.

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Author Profile

Chris Wharfe

I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.

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