Lego ditches rPET plans: EU beverage packagers express relief as recyclate supplies continue to tighten

27 Sep 2023 --- Danish toy producer Lego is ditching plans to convert its material feedstocks to recycled PET (rPET) after finding that the move would increase its carbon emissions. The company currently uses acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a fossil-based thermoplastic, for its products.

But after two years of searching for more sustainable material, the company has ended its quest, opting instead to attempt to improve the footprint of its ABS, which currently requires around 2 kilograms of oil to produce 1 kilogram of plastic.

Lego’s last attempt at converting its materials entirely was to purchase rPET from the beverage packaging industry.

This tactic, already widely used by the fashion and garment industries, is a controversial method seen by packaging associations as a disrupting force for the European circular economy, as it breaks the hard-earned loop system established by deposit return systems (DRS).

Beverage packaging DRS systems currently produce around 70% of the European market’s rPET%, but producers receive around 30% back – despite continued calls for a priority access system for the beverage market, which could encourage DRS development for other sectors.

Nicholas Hodac, director general of UNESDA Soft Drinks Europe, tells Packaging Insights he welcomes Lego’s announcement, asserting it will “help avoid the further downcycling of our beverage bottles into non-food applications.”

Lego says that using rPET from discarded beverage bottles would increase overall emissions.A fragile loop
Despite the calls on the European Commission to protect the EU’s beverage recycling system, which is nearing a closed loop – as per the bloc’s ambitions for a Green Deal – there are still many other non-food industries using the recycled feedstock that comes from PET bottles to produce their own products, notes Hodac.

“As we have always stressed, closed loops promote true circularity. We need to ensure beverage packaging is recycled in new beverage packaging, when technically feasible and when it makes sense from an environmental viewpoint.”

Hodac says the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive revisions are a vital opportunity for beverage manufacturers to gain priority access to food-grade material for recycling.

“This legal mechanism is key to helping our hundreds of SMEs to access the necessary amount of recycled content to be in a position to meet the EU mandatory recycled content targets.”

Last year, UNESDA announced that rPET was becoming as expensive as “white truffles or gold” due to the boom in demand by lucrative industries such as textile and automation and major F&B players like Coca-Cola and Unilever.

A new opportunity?
Another benefit of Lego’s decision to drop its ambitions of using beverage rPET is that the company may now change course toward incorporating other materials, without potentially breaking an economic loop, into its ABS.

The company explains that rPET is softer than ABS and needs extra ingredients to give it similar safety and durability to the existing plastic and large amounts of energy to process and dry it.

“It’s like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel,” Niels Christiansen, chief executive of Lego, told the Financial Times. “To scale production [of recycled PET], the level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories. After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher,” he noted.

This year, the company announced it would triple spending on sustainable materials to US$400 million per year to 2025 and further invest in circular business models research – particularly reverse logistics and sorting technology.

Ed Kosior, founder of NexTek and NextLoopp, which produces food-grade recycled PP (rPP), says he is now in the process of demonstrating to Lego that rPP could answer the toy maker’s search for an emissions-lowering material alternative to ABS.

Kosior says the price of rPET has actually fallen during the last 12 months, driven by falling virgin PET resin prices from producers in Southeast Asia.

“As a consequence, recyclers in Europe and the US are still seeing demand, but it is coming in at a lower cost, resulting in growing supply that is making rPET production less economical for recyclers,” he states.

“Recyclers are going to be less incentivized to keep growing the capacity of rPET, and what we are seeing is a shift in the balance between investment for recycling and use by brand owners. In effect, brand owners are now evaluating switching back to lower cost virgin and recycled plastics.”

“The fact is that by switching to rPET, Lego stands to save at least 50% on carbon emissions versus opting for fossil-fuel-based ABS. As a consequence, it is not clear how this has been calculated.”

By Louis Gore-Langton

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