LEGO has set some very ambitious environmental goals for its company. The toy-building giant has begun investing a $1 billion into moving away from the use of plastic in their products over the next 15 years. They have also put close to a billion dollars into wind farms.
The company has spent over 6 billion Danish Krone (over €800m) on two offshore wind farms, including a 25% stake in the Burbo Bank Extension wind farm in the Irish Sea off the coast of Liverpool.
That facility went live last week and will provide electricity for more than 230,000 British households.
With the opening of the Burbo Bank Extension, LEGO was able to reach the 100 percent renewable goal of creating renewable energy sources that would match their own energy consumption. Their original plan was to reach that goal by 2020.
Besides new renewable energy sources, the LEGO Group also works on other activities within the environmental agenda where it has achieved an increase in energy efficiency of more than 30% in the last five years. Another environmental improvement has been made through the introduction of new smaller LEGO boxes in 2014. This has saved approximately 6,000 tonnes of cardboard and reduced the company’s transportation needs by approximately 3,000 trucks which equals an accumulated saving in CO2 emissions of 10,000 tonnes.
The Burbo Bank wind farm has been expanding for almost 10 years now and according to the Independent, uses the world’s 32 largest wind turbines to create the power.
Each 8mw (megawatt) turbine is 195 metres tall, higher than London's Gherkin tower, with blades that are 80 metres long, and one rotation produces enough electricity to power a home for 29 hours.
LEGO produced the world’s largest LEGO turbine in order to celebrate the milestone, and while that’s really neat, it would be a touch “neater” if they hadn’t used a reported 146,000 plastic bricks. But this is more good than bad and the Earth will need all of the convincing we can muster if she is going to let us continue to live here.
You can watch a video about building the world’s largest LEGO wind turbine below.