Lego has officially opened its $1 billion factory in the industrial area of Binh Duong, outside of Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam, where it has committed to making toys without producing harmful emissions, making it the first operation of its kind in the country. This is part of the company’s greater plan to operate solely on clean energy by next year.
The facility will operate using high-tech equipment to efficiently meet growing demand in the Southeast Asian market while also meeting the country’s sustainability goals, as Vietnam hopes to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, which will be a challenge given the rate of industrialization taking place. Lego is setting the standard and will be a model to follow.
While this is the first facility in Vietnam to run entirely on clean energy, it will be the Danish company’s sixth globally, and the second one in Asia, as it continues in its efforts to stop adding greenhouse gases by 2050. By 2032 it hopes to see a 37 percent emissions reduction.
“We just want to make sure that the planet that the children inherit when they grow up needs to be a planet that is still there. That is functional,” Lego CEO Niels Christiansen told The Associated Press.
The iconic Lego bricks are made from oil-based plastic using a highly automated process which allows for outstanding repeatability and consistency, so the company continues to seek out sustainable alternatives, spending more than a billion dollars to do so—but it is not a simple task.
Lego will be able to take advantage of a 2024 rule that came into effect that enables the factory to establish a direct power purchase agreement (DPPA), which allows large foreign companies to purchase clean energy directly from solar and wind power producers to meet their clean energy requirements. In this case, the factory will be linked to an adjacent energy center where energy can be stored.
“Lego and Vietnam, we are having the same aspirations. We both want to be green, to play our part in the climate. And I think this… is showcasing that it can be done,” Jesper Hassellund Mikkelsen, Senior Vice President Asia Operations at the LEGO Group told The AP.
As part of its sustainability efforts, all five of the buildings at the factory operate in accordance with high energy efficiency standards, which is supplemented through the planting of trees. Lego planted 50,000 trees, which is twice the number of trees it cut to clear the factory lands, and it is the first to implement paper bags for packaging instead of single-use plastic.
The goal is for the blocks to be manufactured entirely using renewable materials, but as it stands, only about a third of the materials used last year were derived from renewable or recycled sources.
