How Lego improved recycled plastic brick

Not only does the brick have to hold its shape and maintain that clutch, it also has to be made in games of all generations, Brooks says, as these materials change over time and change shape. Standard Lego bricks are tested using high and low temperatures, butter and fake saliva to ensure they remain intact for decades of use.

With the new PET brick, however, Lego has cracked. Well, ia. “Now we need to work out how to tighten the clutch a little bit and how to add colors to the brick,” Brooks says. “When we do that, we’ll go through the shapes and determine how many ABS bricks can be replaced with PET.”

Here’s the key, of the approximately 3,500 different shapes that Lego creates, 2 x 4 brick is the most popular. If the company can replace this component with a recycled plastic version, the use of fully sustainable materials in its products by 2030 will have a major impact on Lego’s environmental impact. We have what we call “high-level runners.” Brooks says, for example, we know that most sets will be 2 x 4, we certainly know a lot each the set will have 1 x 1 point. That’s the most common brick we make. “

“ABS is extremely rigid. Very rigid, very precise, very hard. PET is less rigid, less hard, and less accurate, which is why we need to use an impact modifier with PET. That’s different here. We are using a different type of PET with the added “secret sauce” waiting for the patent. So you’re seeing a PET we’re changing to work in ABS mode. ”

Gregg Beckham of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and in 2018, along with John McGeehan of the University of Portsmouth, designed an enzyme. It digests PET, is impressed with Lego’s progress.

“ABS is an amazing material. It is very versatile because you can change the relationship between A, B and S. There are many versions of ABS plastic that you can make depending on how you formulate it. We literally touch it every day, ”says Beckham.“ PET, on the other hand, is a challenging formulation that has the same properties as the ABS materials you would find in Lego brick. It is certainly a challenge for polymer science. This is very exciting. “

Why it took so many decades for plastic production to get here, Beckham says, even though we would have liked to shake the magic wand and make it so, in many cases the task is misleading. “This is the basic science and engineering of materials. It needs to know how to meet the same types of properties of materials that come from recycled plastic materials or become recyclable themselves,” he says. “In the case of ABS bricks, they are not made of recycled plastics, nor are they recycled at the end of life. This could potentially address both of these challenges at the same time. “

The new PET brick prototype has another benefit: it has a 70 percent carbon reduction compared to virgin ABS material brick.

Curiously, while new eco-friendly plastics are still being developed, the real environmental benefits can be brought about by the development of ways to recycle things that we can’t do today. Things like ABS. “Currently laboratory research is thinking about using advanced recycling approaches that are able to break down these long chains of polymers into their building elements,” Beckham says. “Then clean it and turn it into the same quality plastic that was of the same quality as virgin plastic or recycle it into something that has a higher value.”