Where is lego manufactured ? The company announced Wednesday plans for a 1.7-million square foot plant in Virginia, which will employ roughly 1,800 people once its completed in 2025. It will be the Danish company’s seventh global factory and second in North America — the other is located in Monterrey, Mexico.
Lego previously had a US factory in Connecticut, but that facility closed in 2006 because the company said kids prefer playing with electronics. Times have changed: Like other toy makers, Lego is in the midst of a pandemic-induced boom as families look for entertainment at home.
Its sales jumped 27% last year driven by new store openings in China and customers flocking back to its reopened shops. The family-owned company said it had outpaced the toy industry in all major markets during the year, when sales of its plastic bricks totaled more than $8 billion.
“More and more families are falling in love with Lego building and we are looking forward to making Lego bricks in the US, one of our largest markets,” said CEO Niels B. Christiansen in a statement.
“Our factories are located close to our biggest markets which shortens the distance our products have to travel,” said Lego COO Carsten Rasmussen, in the statement. “Our new factory in the US and expanded capacity at our existing site in Mexico means we will be able to best support long-term growth in the Americas.”
Christiansen also noted that Virginia was chosen for the carbon-neutral factory because it allows them to “build a solar park which supports our sustainability ambitions and provides easy links to country-wide transportation networks.”
The company has long been a target of climate advocates because of its plastic bricks and packaging. The company ramped up its sustainability efforts in recent years. It announced in 2020 that it plans to package its products in recyclable paper rather than single-use plastic. And last year, Lego unveiled a prototype brick made from recycled plastic.
The Story of the LEGO Brick
With the mission of ‘inspiring the builders of tomorrow’ the LEGO Company is a global organisation some people dream of working for.
The LEGO Company are no strangers to allowing people to see what goes on inside their organisation. With the hit LEGO movie released in February 2014 and their new ‘Brickumentry’ being released in the USA this week, the LEGO group are bigger than ever.
Most recently they allowed Channel 4 into their head offices and factories in Denmark in a documentary called ‘The Secret World of Lego’, a programme that showed millions of viewers how the LEGO brick has changed the lives of many children and adults.
The Lego Brick
Founded in 1932, the LEGO groups is a privately held, family-owned company with headquarters in Denmark, USA, UK, China and Singapore. Since its inception the iconic LEGO brick has made LEGO one of the world’s leading manufacturers of play materials.
In 2012 alone, 45.7 billion bricks were produced at a rate of 5.2 million per hour. Additionally of the number of bricks that were sold in that year was enough to stretch round the world at least 18 times.
The success of the LEGO group is undeniable with every person on earth owning at least 86 LEGO bricks on average.
Young or old you have played with LEGO but how many of us know how it is actually made?
The Process
LEGO bricks and elements are manufactured at the group’s own factories in Denmark, Hungary, Czech Republic and Mexico.
LEGO bricks are plastic injection moulded and so the process starts with tiny plastic granules. Inside the moulding machine these granules are superheated to around 230 degrees Celsius and are fed into moulds inside the machine. The machine then applies hundreds of tons of pressure to make sure the bricks are shaped with perfect accuracy, they are then cooled and ejected. This process takes only 10 seconds to carry out, due to it being almost completely automated.
The moulds used in production are accurate to within 0.005mm and this accuracy means that only 18 elements in every one million products fail to meet the high quality standard.
This whole process was shown in ‘The Secret World of Lego’ and can be seen in the trailer below.
As a company specialising in rapid tooling and plastic injection moulding, it was great to see the service being promoted by one of the biggest companies in the world. Not only does it allow people to appreciate the process behind these kind of products but it educates the future generations and those who may need to invest in these processes in the future.
The incredible manufacturing process that brings us Lego
A factory in Billund, Denmark, uses autonomous robots and precision machines to make 36,000 Lego pieces per minute, or 2.16 million pieces every hour. In fact, according to Gizmodo, the factory’s recent totals reach 1,140 units per second, or 36 billion per year.
This Bloomberg Business video shows a tour of some of the automated factory features:
Forming the mixture
The process starts in the half-kilometer-long warehouse where silos hold raw plastic granulates. The silos process 60 tons of material every 24 hours and are connected to molding machines that use a series of pipes to push the granulate mixture – a diesel byproduct – into a permanent tin-pitched rumble.
All of the basic Lego elements start out as plastic granules composed primarily of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene – material Lego is trying to get away from. A highly automated injection molding process turns these granules into recognizable bricks. The making of a Lego brick requires very high temperatures and enormous pieces of equipment, so machines, rather than people, handle most of their creation.
When the ABS granules arrive at Lego manufacturing facilities, they’re vacuumed into several storage silos. The average Lego plant has about 14 silos, and each can hold 33 tons of ABS granules. When production begins, the granules travel through tubes to the injection molding machines. The machines use very accurate molds with a precision tolerance as little as 0.002 millimeters.
The machines melt the granules at temperatures of up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, inject the melted ABS into molds and apply between 25 and 150 tons of pressure. After about seven seconds, the new Lego pieces cool and fall onto a conveyor. At the end of the conveyor, they fall into a bin.
When the bin fills, the molding machine signals a robot to pick it up and carry it to an assembly hall. In the Billund factory, eight robots move 600 bins of elements per hour. In the assembly hall, machines stamp designs onto bricks and assemble components that require multiple pieces. The machines assemble the components by applying precise amounts of pressure to specific parts.
Roaming robots
The molding machines produce more than 2 million pieces per hour, creating color- and bar-coded boxes that go through a series of quality testing.
Transport robots roam around answering the call of the central mainframes – the brain of the Lego body – that control every aspect of the process at all times. If the mainframes stop the production of the machine, a signal is sent from a sensor to the robot, alerting it to harvest the crop of bricks. The robot then travels down the aisles autonomously, picking up boxes and leaving empty ones so production can resume.
Robots, conveyors and towers of boxes
The robots then put the boxes on conveyors, which move them into the storage areas. There, the cranebots lift them and place them in towers of boxes. There are four of these storage areas in the Lego factory, and no humans are inside, said Gizmodo. The mainframes know what is inside at all times and order the cranebots to retrieve boxes and send them to decoration and packaging, where Lego sets take their final form.
Completing the childhood memory
The Lego brick storage buildings are where Lego pieces go one of two ways: straight to the packaging lines or into decoration. Decoration is the most expensive part of the Lego process, according to Gizmodo, as that is where pieces are painted with incredible precision by machines.
In the packaging lines the pieces are distributed by dumping them into the machine, which separates them one by one and counts them using optical sensors before placing them in a generic small box.
Along the way, high-precision scales measure the weight of the box. The computers know exactly how much a box has to weigh at any stage, indicating that the correct number and kind of pieces are inside. If there’s a variation of a few micrograms the alarm signals and an operator grabs the box, sorts the pieces, and puts it back into production.
Once the box is complete the contents are dropped into the plastic wrapping machine, which makes a bag with the pieces inside. The box is then dropped inside another box and passed to another production line, where more bags are added until all the set pieces are in place, ready to be packaged and sent to shops all around the world.
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