Lego’s billionaire owners want to ditch plastic (yes, really)
The chief executive officer of Lego says it’ s difficult to know the financial implication sofa plan—backed by one of Denmark’ s rich est families—to no longer make toy bricks fromplastic.
“It’shardtosay,” Niels B Christians en said by phone from Lego’ s headquarters in western Denmark .“I’ m not even sure that we currently yet can live up to the quality that we want. Butit’s an agenda that we want to drive and an agenda that our owner is behind. We want to become a leaderonthis.”
Controlled by Denmark’ s billionaire Kirk Kristian sen family, Lego brought in Christians en as CEO in October. The family is behind a plan to make all of Lego’ s colorful building blocks from sustainable materials, such assugarcane, by2030. Theshift, whichwas announced in March, is part of a global effort to fight plastic pollution and the threat it poses to marine life in particular. For now, the Danish company has started to offer small plant-based Lego sets as gifts in connection with large purchases. Christians en says it’ s not yet clear whether the shift can be brought about without hurting profit margins. The feeling at Lego is that there’ s been a“breakthrough” on the path away from plastic production, but there are still manyunknowns, hesaid.
“I think it’ s too early to say whether it will be necessary” to sacrifice profit to achieve the company’ s sustainability goal, hesaid.“Butwe won’ t compromise on our quality .”
Christians en, who used to run Danish engineering giant Dan foss, was brought in by the Lego family to help trim the organisation after years of rapid expansion left it overly complex and difficult to steer.