The kids have grown up so the Legos have piled up. What’s a parent to do?
Now there’s a solution that puts used Legos into the hands of other kids who can enjoy playing with them. The new Lego Replay program accepts all used bricks and donates them to non-profit organizations around the country.
The process is simple: Parents can download and print this shipping label, box their unwanted bricks, and ship them free of charge to a facility that will inspect, clean, repackage and distribute them to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston and Teach For America.
“Lego covers all costs of shipping,” explained Tim Brooks, Vice President of Corporate Responsibility for Lego. “Find any old box, get your Lego bricks and pop them into the box, print out a label and you’re done.”
Brooks said the program has been in the works for a number of years, prompted by the frequent inquiries from customers about how to recycle their Lego bricks.
“We’ve always said, ‘Don’t throw old Legos away,’” Brooks said. “They’re such a durable and high-quality toy that don’t need to be recycled. We want consumers to reuse the bricks. And we want to give consumers a way to reuse those bricks that does some social good and passes those bricks on to kids who might not be able to afford Lego or need some play.”
Lida Jennings, the executive director for Teach for America Los Angeles, said the Lego Replay program will put Legos in the hands of numerous children, for whom Legos were previously out of reach because of cost.
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The donated Legos, Jennings said, will be used in classrooms by Teach for America in math and engineering-themed lessons for fourth through eighth graders.
The new Lego Replay program is the latest in Lego’s ongoing sustainability initiative. By 2025, the Denmark-based company aims for all of its packaging to be sustainable. By 2030, Lego aims to make all of its bricks using sustainable, plant-based materials.
Lego has not changed the template for its bricks since 1958, meaning that any bricks made in the last 70 years are compatible and can be reused, and intermingle with 21st century bricks.
“I can’t think of many products that you buy off the shelf today that work absolutely with what you bought in the 1950s,” Brooks said. “We are already proud of Legos as a durable toy that can be built and rebuilt time and again. Now we want to see what we can do about sustainability.”