Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Lego's new sustainability push: green bricks or greenwashing?
79 Plays2 months ago
Mike, Amy, Karthik, and Anthony talk Lego's new sustainability efforts, discussing why mechanical recycling has failed them, what the shift to mass balancing really means, Lego's sustainability principles, and the long-term role of Lego as an ambassador for plastics sustainability.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Innovation Matters' Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Innovation Matters. It is the podcast about sustainable innovation brought to you by Lux Research. I am Anthony Schiavo, one of your hosts, senior director and principal analyst here at Lux, and I am joined by my co-hosts, Amy Harris, Mike Holman, and Karthik Subramanian. We have a full house today.
Casual Beginnings and Personal Updates
00:00:30
Speaker
We have a lot of interesting news to talk about. um Yeah, it's the podcast that is late to start because it has to drop its daughter off at school.
00:00:38
Speaker
um
00:00:41
Speaker
That's the kind of podcast we are. ah today Today, more than ever, we're we're living up to that vision of of the kind of podcast we want to be. How's it going, people? No complaints. We're really getting truly well and truly back into the to the swing of the school year here. Yeah. We haven't quite gotten a routine perfectly established yet, let me tell you what. um But we're we're getting there. We're getting there, slowly but surely. Still working some kinks out, for sure.
00:01:10
Speaker
Cricket season is back, as you can see I'm wearing my India jersey on. So yeah, some exciting matches coming up. Wow. any Any highlights for the people that the people need to know? Yeah, it's just the first day of the match I started. So um just got over about a couple of hours ago. Strong showing towards the end, another four days to go. Are these ah these are the the international matches or Club Cricket? what Yeah, what are we talking about here?
00:01:35
Speaker
So this is international matches. So India is playing Bangladesh in a test game. five days test Five days. One game is five five days? Yes. Five days. Yes. Wow. we have to We have to redo all the early season, uh, shock and awe over the weirdness of cricket here. And now that we have Amy back, Amy on the podcast.
00:01:55
Speaker
Oh yeah.
LEGO's Sustainability Goals and Challenges
00:01:56
Speaker
Speaking of things being late and things taking a long time, um we need to talk about LEGO's commitment to sustainability. So, some interesting news. LEGO put out this press release a couple days ago, um maybe about a week ago now.
00:02:13
Speaker
um that it has sort of set a new a new set of goals right and sort of given an update on its sustainability journey for its lego bricks it plans to shift away uh entirely from using fossil fuel materials by 2032 that's its goal it says interestingly that it has tried to do basically mechanical recycling with more or less no success. They said, okay, we've tested 600 different materials and none of it really worked. um They didn't say that, but there's no recycled, mechanically recycled material in their product lineup as far as I'm aware. um So that's a pretty good indicator that it didn't work. I think they actually are or have been using some recycled or maybe it was bio-based materials, not for the bricks, but for some of like the, you know, the little like plant thingies that you can, you know, yeah the softer pieces, not the ones that really need to.
00:03:11
Speaker
They're using brass cams biopolyethylene for leaves, and they've tested recycled PET, among other things, for some products. i believe they I believe they did at one point put mechanically recycled PET bricks onto the market very briefly. And of course, there's ABS regrind, you know, in their, you know, their bricks are primarily ah ABS plastic, that's an engineering plastic, it's pretty high performance. They they use regrind, so their their manufacturing waste ends up in their products.
00:03:40
Speaker
But as of right now, I mean, they say that 22 percent of their materials come from renewable and recycled sources. It's not clear how they're actually doing that or how they're actually measuring that, because part of this shift is that they are going to be going to a mass balancing system, right, as a way to account for their recycled content in addition to their non recycled or their bio based content. There's a couple other things I want to get into.
00:04:08
Speaker
um which is which makes it interesting, but that is the ah the basic structure of the story. I believe i just want to say i believe they also want to go towards towards sustainable packaging solutions for their bricks as well.
00:04:20
Speaker
That's right. They've been doing a lot on on their packaging. Recyclable. Yeah. So eliminating a particular the little bags, the little poly bags that keep the bricks together is a big thing for them. Their packaging has actually changed. As someone who is occasionally ah putting together little sets with my daughter, um you know i'm I've been aware of these changes, right?
00:04:42
Speaker
But what if, you know, cause we've had a few, we've been doing a few sets too. I haven't, know they, they, the recent ones we've gotten still have the little, you know, the pieces divided up into several different little plastic bags on the inside. What have they changed yeah on that? They have, I think they are reducing the number of them and I know they have been testing all bag alternatives. I don't think the actual bag alternatives are commercialized yet, but, um, you know, we haven't seen these changes.
00:05:08
Speaker
So yeah, I think the important part, one of the as you said, one of the key things here is the shift to mass
Understanding Mass Balance in Sustainability
00:05:13
Speaker
balance. So as we were saying before we we started recording, if you want to like explain a bit what mass balance is for for somebody else, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar. but mass balance for the people of the land. um Mass balance is basically a certification scheme, right? There's a couple different types, ISCC+, Red Cert, but it's a way of tracking the material that you use in your products.
00:05:43
Speaker
um It's particularly useful when you are blending material upstream. That is to say you are blending feedstocks. So you're going to take your oil and you're going to blend that oil with something else. And then you're going to use that blended oil to make a bunch of different products.
00:06:01
Speaker
um then you can use mass balance to make some kind of claim about what level of content recycled content is in your product. Because you can't physically track the molecules through through the you know cracking process or the the chemical process um the way that you can if you take 100% recycled plastic and 100% petroleum-based plastic, and then you blend them together 80-20,
00:06:30
Speaker
Once you've already made the plastic, you can just say, yeah, this is 20 percent. It's very straightforward. Right. But if you're blending them upstream, there's going to be some variations, there's going to be some fluctuations. And so you need to kind of track it all on paper in order to make these claims. Yeah, yeah I mean, essentially, like if you've got a refinery and you're feeding it with five percent, I assume in this case, we're probably talking about bio naphtha or something like that. Right. So biomass derived. Yes.
00:06:58
Speaker
So 5% bio naphtha and 95% oil goes into your refinery. Then instead of taking all of the output of that refinery and saying, this is 5% biomass, what you do is you take 5% of the output and say, this is 100% biomass or bio based. And then the other 95% you say, it's treated just as normal petroleum based plastic. Okay.
00:07:27
Speaker
So I guess this is going back to one of the earlier podcasts we did when we talked about Google's changing or Amazon and Google's changing um sustainability targets. And I think in Anthony, you had mentioned math balance doesn't work or it's not a great solution. Well, the thing about mass balance is that there's a bunch of different types and flavors. Right. OK. And the way that you do this accounting can change a lot. So in particular, RedCERT and ISCC+, which are used and supported by the chemicals industry, allow what's called free attribution, which is when you blend that 5%
00:08:13
Speaker
of Bionaptha into your feedstock, you can attribute 5% by weight renewable content wherever you want it to go in whatever distribution you want it to be in. So you can say, hey, all the plastics we're making, that's where all the renewable content ends up. You don't have to worry about or think about what is the level of proportionality? What's the actual proportion of Bionaptha in each product?
00:08:40
Speaker
and so This is very valuable because the value of bio-based content is not the same in all of the products that you're making, right? A big refinery complex will produce a bunch of things from really valuable plastics to, you know, asphalt, right? um And other really low value ah fuels, you know, bunker oil, all this junk.
00:09:04
Speaker
And putting 5% biomass equally into everything is worth a lot less than putting all that biomass into you know the plastic that you're going to sell to Lego. So these free attribution mass balance models have the impact in reality of dramatically increasing the on-paper yield of the sustainable product that you actually care about. And they also have the effect of changing or ah creating a gap between the level of recycled or bio-based content that you report on paper.
00:09:46
Speaker
to what's actually physically in the product, right? And they inflate that number on paper, right? So that's why they're controversial. That's why the chemicals industry likes them because it it dramatically improves the value of putting, you know, 5% NAPTA in your process. You can see this here. Creative accounting, right?
00:10:06
Speaker
It's a little bit like Creative Accounting. um You know, Lego says, in 2024, 30% of all resin we purchased was certified according to mass balance principles, so which translates to an estimated average 22% renewable sources attributed to our products. So you can see already there, there is almost a, you know, 50% increase in renewable sources compared to um the attributed ah content, right?
00:10:37
Speaker
But if I were to think about this, I mean the entire concept of mass balance to me, ah you know it's very similar to like the law of conservation of mass kind of principle from chemistry. So shouldn't it be straightforward to actually calculate how much percentage of the bio-based product is actually in your final product because you just have to follow each step. It's not like H2O is gonna become something else and still be water, right? It's still gonna be H2O.
00:11:05
Speaker
And so you can easily find out how many molds of the product you're actually producing and then you could say this has you know maybe 7% of bio-based product. But I guess because it doesn't give that you know the the the ability to inflate it and make it sound like it's actually a green product, that's why they don't do it.
00:11:24
Speaker
Well, there's a couple things. So mass balance is useful because your feedstock input can fluctuate day to day, right? Your feedstock input can fluctuate. So over time, and it can also fluctuate between location, right? So I think it's perfectly fine. There's a lot of mass balancing and different people have different ah views on this. And we'll actually get into that in a second.
00:11:47
Speaker
um But, you know, it's actually quite useful to say, OK, over the last six months, we produced on average plastic with 10 percent recycled content or whatever via mass balancing. And some days it was, you know, 25 percent and maybe some days it was less than that. um But that's a useful thing to be able to say. right theres there's There's some utility to it. right And this is kind of an established thing in certain areas. So something like fair trade coffee or whatever is done with the mass balance approach because the mill that's processing the coffee may not be able to get 100% fair trade beans every day of every week. So they use a mass balancing yeah to to be able to... and you know And the benefit of it is
00:12:32
Speaker
the the good reason to to to do it other than it's you know more profitable for the industry or whatever. ah The good environmental or or a social reason to do it is it does create an incentive for companies to use that bio-nap or that more sustainable, renewable, ah whatever it is, feedstock. um you know if they If they couldn't use a mass balancing approach at all,
00:12:58
Speaker
it it it would be there would be much less economic incentive for them to use any renewable feedstock because they wouldn't be able to to um to get those benefits downstream.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah, and there's just the utility of tracking.
LEGO's Role in Mass Balance and Industry Standards
00:13:13
Speaker
If you're making a claim about something, you need to be able to back that claim up. And a big the the actual sort of nuts and bolts of mass balance is accountant. right It's it's you know just tracking everything on paper so that you can certify that you've actually done the thing you said you're doing and that you know that is legitimate. right So there's a bunch of utility to mass balance, but also it allows you to fudge the numbers. right The interesting wrinkle is that last year, LEGO, along with Perstorp and IKEA and VLUX, put out their own proposal for the EU definition of mass balancing. And that proposal is actually very strict. um It's really quite substantive, right? So they call for, among other things,
00:14:06
Speaker
um
00:14:09
Speaker
I believe ah fuel exempt mass balancing to become the law of the land. So that means any amount of volume that goes into fuel, you can't do that shifting around. So that reduces the amount of effective biobased content you're producing. Um, they even go further, like the actual process, specific production yields are the basis of calculating, uh, product output. So pretty strict in terms of total output.
00:14:37
Speaker
And then no trip credit transfer between companies or between sites even. So when I talked about, oh, you could maybe a one site, you this and you look at all your sites and you say, oh, over the last six months we produced this. They actually don't want that. They say we should only be, it it should be on a site per site basis. um And then there's a number of a number of other sort of you know details within this.
00:15:00
Speaker
um But, you know, they're they're calling for a pretty strict interpretation of mass balance. Certainly this is a lot more strict than, for example, um the European Association of Chemical Companies, whatever that trade group is calling. Yeah, Cefec. Cefec, yeah. Baywatt, free attribution, mass balance, right? And it's certainly much more strict than most other companies who put this into practice. It's not clear to me that they're doing these rules.
00:15:29
Speaker
um that they're following these rules with their current claims, um because this is a proposal for the eu what the EU definition of mass balancing should be. um But I think it's at least likely that they're they're following these rules, at least certain elements of them, probably the facility rules and maybe even the fuel exempt rules. It's entirely possible that there they're following that. They don't specify, but I would imagine that they probably are.
00:15:59
Speaker
So you know as much as this is, I do think this is a weakening of LEGO's sustainability goals, in a certain sense, because their previous sustainability goals were 100% bio-based or recycled without any type of mass balancing.
00:16:15
Speaker
um This is like allowing them, I think, to drive the recycled content up, or the probably more likely the bio-based content up.
00:16:28
Speaker
um And they're doing a they're they're taking about the most credible approach, I think you could take to mass balancing. Like if you're going to do mass balancing, this is probably the way to do it. So as much as I was kind of primed to be a hater here when I saw this news, I actually think that they're they're they're doing a pretty good job. They're doing about as well as you can recently ask to do. And that does make sense to me because LEGO has always had a pretty good track record on sustainability.
00:16:55
Speaker
certainly ah They've been very transparent about their failures, which is something that very few other companies have done, um which I've always appreciated from them. Yeah. and it's sort of you know It's not their fault right that the it's not currently possible to buy 100%, truly 100% bio-based ABS, that's just a ah challenge that the chemical industry has not yet been able to deliver on or been able to deliver on economically. And I don't know, maybe if if Lego were willing to like triple the price that it's playing for the residence or something like that, that it could be done. or But there there are not many people that are willing to pay a premium for that, so it's hard for the industry to justify um investing in that capacity right now.
00:17:43
Speaker
So Lego is paying a premium. Um, I think they were, they reported they were paying a 70% premium for some of their, their plastics. I'm assuming that's for brass games, biope, e which has about a 50 to 70% premium, uh, attached to it, to it compared to other things. Um, but you know, so, so that, again, that's like, again, that's pretty like, uh, impressive, right? Um, you know,
00:18:11
Speaker
I would say that a big part of the challenge for LEGO and one of the things that's most interesting is that actually recycling LEGO bricks doesn't make any sense.
The Recycling Dilemma for Durable LEGO Bricks
00:18:21
Speaker
um because they're very durable, right? like That's the whole thing about Legos is like, you can have Legos from 20, 30, 40 years ago, right? That's still worked really well. And they put a ton of effort into designing their products to you know work that way. in it They're not disposable and that's good. And the fact that you have these Lego bricks in circulation from years ago,
00:18:47
Speaker
is great. like that's That's a very sustainable model of doing things. right and The problem for Lego, I think at this point, is in their sustainability efforts, is that they should really just stop making new Lego bricks entirely, right? um To a great degree possible. They should really like basically start making the designs and focus on specialty bricks and you know then making some base sets to compliment the people who don't have them yet. But like there's so many Lego bricks out in the world. I think there's something like seven Lego bricks in the world for every person at this point. he Seems love.
00:19:24
Speaker
Yeah. There's just a ton of Lego bricks out there. And like it's just not obvious to me that we need that many more. right And so the problem is really a revenue model one for Lego. right like How do we keep making money in a saturated brick environment? Revenue and also just like logistics. right Those 50 billion bricks or whatever it is are not like all sitting in a warehouse somewhere. They're like spread out into hundreds of like basements and storage areas and attics. Yeah. 86 LEGO bricks per person in the world. Excuse me. 86? 86. So there's enough to make basically a LEGO set per person already out there in the world, right? like I guess 86 is a kind of small set. I think the average set is like 150 to 300. But there's a lot of bricks out there already. And the fact they can't really, like you said, corral them in a meaningful way is probably a bigger sustainability problem than anything else.
00:20:17
Speaker
I mean, that could be interesting if, I know people are collecting, ah there's collectors and, um but I'm wondering if there would be a like interest in a return policy and and resale of use Lego. You have a program for this. ah It's the Lego replay program and you can you can send, ah you know, put all your bricks and ship them in, I believe for free to Lego.
00:20:46
Speaker
And they will, you know, essentially, you know, I guess, process them. And I think they mostly donate or entirely donate the the bricks that they have, you know, pieces they get through this program.
00:21:02
Speaker
ah that's what i wanted to and and That's what I wanted to ask about like from this returns program like because they're using recycled content in the upstream part of the value chain. Can this re this material made with partly recyclable material be recycled again? Does it improve recyclability or am I thinking the wrong way? Yeah, I think that's one of the challenges. We really don't know. right so the The polymer certainly degrades over time.
00:21:31
Speaker
right um or or I should say it degrades every time you heat it up. And so if you're melting and remelting, then you're degrading the polymer. but
00:21:44
Speaker
The level of recycling is currently so low that we just really don't have a clear sense of like, even in like PET, right? We don't really have a clear sense of what like a 25% recycled content in every, you know, bottle and then doing bottle to bottle recycling on every bottle. Like we don't know what that does to the material quality. Like probably it's not good, but we don't know if it's like, oh, the maximum number of times is like three in reality or with other applications and better cleaning and there's a lot of companies or not a lot but there are some companies working on like additives that are compatibilizers that stabilize the recycle content like we don't really know what's possible in practice like there's been a lot of people who put out estimates of like oh like It can only recycle plastic like twice or three times before it's completely decroded. And it's like, well, like maybe, but like what if you blend it out and like how how far can you really get is is a big, big open question. And part of the problem is there's no source of recycled APS, right? Like no, like APS is used for really high value little connectors and
00:22:52
Speaker
your car when they plug in little wiring harnesses to other stuff like that's not going into a recycling stream. So there's no way to even like test your your hypothesis here. Yeah, and again, what Lego is doing is they're not actually including any recycled content in their bricks anyway. Yeah, they're at least not mechanically recycled. I mean, they're, they're when you're you that is, I think the other benefit of this type of approach. you're using you You're using mass balance. It's usually because you're doing a chemical recycling process, right? Or you're starting very early on upstream with the with the raw material, the feedstock, the oil, the naphtha that's getting fed into the refinery. And in that case, I think when you're starting with biomass, in Lego's case, I think we're assuming, or or if you did feed in pyrolysis oil from plastic recycling.
00:23:50
Speaker
Um, you're not, there isn't really a chemical difference in the final product in that, with that, with that type of chemical recycling. So you you don't have those same worries about quality degrading in principle. You have lower yields, but you don't have the same quality degradation. And the other thing that Lego could do, you know, there was a startup very briefly that developed a machine vision.
Exploring New Revenue Models for LEGO
00:24:14
Speaker
Like it was like a thing you'd hold up your cell phone.
00:24:17
Speaker
you would scan the Lego bricks that you had and it would like suggest designs and like instructions based on that. It never worked that well and it was never like officially sponsored or like attached to Lego in any way. um But we're definitely getting to the point, you know, this was a couple of years ago and we're definitely getting to the point with machine vision and all these other technologies that That type of design library is definitely possible. um And you know that's a way that LEGO can can shift their revenue model, either by offering that as a subscription service or selling the designs you know for a buck or whatever. You can shift your revenue model away from physically manufacturing bricks.
00:25:04
Speaker
right um
00:25:08
Speaker
But it's still challenging because obviously as a company, you have a lot of investment in making in making bricks, right? That's your whole thing. And um it's not easy to just stop doing that. So terms in terms of like, you know, the kind of the implications of this, do we see, you know, this leading to more opportunities?
00:25:33
Speaker
in mass balance? I mean, is that is that where the where this industry where the industry is going to be trending sort of at least in the near term? um I think this is a pretty clear indicator for applications like cell phones, right? Where you are using these high performance, you know, for anyone who's using these high performance engineering plastics, right? um I think this is a pretty clear indicator that mass balancing can work and that mass balancing is probably the ah path forward for you, especially um You know, because if Lego does this in a way that's, you know, like I said, they're doing this in a way that I think is probably the best possible, right? They're doing a pretty strict ah fuel exempt mass balancing. They're doing pretty strict rules around where they're sourcing the waste from and how they're tracking it. They're doing some pretty strict rules about proportionality.
00:26:20
Speaker
If that catches on and that becomes accepted and people, consumers accept this type of certification and this type of approach, um then you can really see it expand. right And you know there's a lot of applications, particularly automotive and electronics that use a lot of engineering plastics.
00:26:35
Speaker
um that have a consumer-facing component and some strong sustainability goals. you know Apple is a good example of of a company that is, I think, committed to making 100% recycled phones at some point in the future. Automotive, similarly, they have a desire to reduce their carbon footprint. They have a desire to increase their recycled content.
00:26:53
Speaker
So you know I think this is a really good ah test. This is a really good sort of bellwether for for all that stuff. And it's that because they're doing it in a way that I think is right, I think they have an opportunity to actually succeed, unlike some other some other people.
00:27:11
Speaker
Yeah, automotive is the one that I think about a lot because that's obviously really, I mean, compared to Lego, is Legos are cool, but it's, you know, the total volume of plastic we're talking about. It's pretty, pretty small and in the in the world. If you started seeing this being adopted in automotive, reuse a lot of these these engineering plastics that could really drive a lot. And I do think something they can, I mean, it's one of the things that's always been interesting for me, like when we work with automotive companies, ah you know obviously electrification and self-driving and these kind of like big industry trends are are a big theme, but there's a lot of discussion about materials and how can we source more sustainable materials, whether it's plastics, whether it's aluminum, whether it's like upholstery and fabrics and stuff like that. So that's that's something to watch for. And I think from the consumer perspective, like if mass balance is the is the kind of most viable option for a lot of these corporations moving forward,
00:28:03
Speaker
I think there's opportunities as well to educate consumers about what mass balance is. I'm just looking at our um trends platform here. I've typed in the word mass balance.
00:28:14
Speaker
And we can see consumer maturity at 4.9%. It's in the new ideas stage. So this means there's ah consumers don't have consensus over what mass mass balance means. It's not a mainstream concept yet. And so very few consumers would would fully understand what what mass balance refers to. um So I think as corporations start to adopt this approach, there there also needs, especially if it's direct to consumer, um there there needs to be more education ah for for the public to help people understand with ah without falling into the trap of greenwashing, because I think whenever there's any um sort of calculation going on, consumers are quite skeptical.
00:28:59
Speaker
I was just about to ask that specifically because if you think about it, mass balancing from the outset just looks like creative accounting. And if you look at Lego sales, I believe adults buy more Legos than kids and adults are becoming more ah you know cognizant of sustainable trends. And so explaining mass balance, do you see that becoming kind of a negative driver to not buying more Legos because they feel that in reality, their products are not as sustainable?
00:29:28
Speaker
um I don't have the solution here because I think there's a a fine line to walk. Consumers don't want to feel like they're just um being bombarded with kind of vague terminology. um so you know We've seen this in other industries where terms like natural, now they they can be quite skeptical of the term natural because they're understanding that natural can mean many different things for many different companies and it's not a regulated term.
00:29:52
Speaker
um and so there needs to be consumers want to feel like they really understand what these terms mean. um At the same time, if all of the math is explained, I mean, maybe not everyone wants to understand all of the math, it's a little too complex. And, um and when the math is explained, it, you know, it does kind of feel like maybe it's just changes happening on paper, or there's some creative accounting happening. So I think one of the most important things is that it's coming from Lego and not from someone else. right so like When you think about the the chemicals industry, we've looked into like what's the consumer perception of the chemicals industry. There's skepticism and distrust of their business practices. There's fear about you know the health impacts of producing chemicals, and there's you know concerns that they're just like doing the will of big oil. right like That's what people think of when they think of the chemicals industry. right
00:30:46
Speaker
and so for a chemicals company to be like, hey, this is our new thing mass balancing. The immediate reaction of people is like, oh, you're like lying to me and possibly trying to get me cancer. and like That's just where people are at. But Lego, it's like a lot of warm and fuzzies. right you know People have a very different relationship with Lego, both because it's not a chemicals company and also because it is such a well-known brand and something that people have a lot of nostalgic attachment to. all this stuff, right? So Lego as the brand ambassador here is just a very different vibe than BASF or Dow or whoever is the brand, Eastman is the brand ambassador, right? Lyondell Basel. These are companies that have, at best, very neutral. Like the best they can hope for is like a neutral reaction, right, in the marketplace. And a lot of them, it could be a lot worse than that. So
00:31:41
Speaker
having that be the ambassador for this and doing it in a way that is responsible, I feel, is very important. right um And that's why I think it could create change for other companies. Yeah. LEGO is definitely ah like a household name, a name that um consumers do trust.
00:31:56
Speaker
And I think also, as you mentioned earlier, Anthony, um the fact that Lego has been pretty open about its failures as well helps to build trust in consumers that that they're not just trying to ah greenwash that they've they've actually been open about the things they've tried and the things that haven't panned out um entirely, I think is something consumers appreciate that companies that are candid about successes and failures. Well, um,
00:32:25
Speaker
Yeah, damn. I don't know. Well, look, if Lego does any of that stuff, we will talk about it here on on the podcast. We should really try and get someone from Lego on the podcast, but maybe that's a different story. That would be great. I mean, this is our second Lego episode, right? we did we or The second one where we've talked about Lego anyway, we did one about a year ago or nine months to ago, something like that. We did. We did.
00:32:52
Speaker
But yes, it's a leading company and in a lot of these in in in a lot of ways on this. So it's it's definitely definitely worth following, you know even though it's not as big a volume of plastics or emissions or or whatever. I do think it's got a chance to be a bellwether here.
00:33:10
Speaker
For sure. And like I said, they do a really good job with transparency, which is, as a podcast or something, I appreciate. significantly Because it gives me a lot to talk about, right? They could basically be doing all this stuff in a much less transparent way. There's really no legal or, you know, ah other reason for them to be doing it other than that, you know, it's just their commitment to their principles. So as much as maybe we're sort of ragged on them in various ways, like they are doing a pretty good job.
00:33:36
Speaker
All right. Well, look, if you want to hear about that in the future, you can get all the updates by subscribing to our podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps. That's right. Apps. We've got Spotify. We've got Apple podcasts. We've got overcast FM. We've got a bunch of other things, not Google. Apparently that's going, going away or gone away. Um,
00:34:02
Speaker
Shocked to hear that Google is killing a moderately successful product. Anyway, um you can also like and rate the podcast. We do appreciate that. It does help us out. Follow us. Check out our website. We have a blog, www.luxresearchinc.com. And yeah, we'll see you next week.
00:34:20
Speaker
Innovation Matters is a production of Lux Research, the leading sustainable innovation research and advisory firm. You can follow this podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want more, check out www.luxresearchinc dot.com slash blog for all of the latest news, opinions, and articles. so