With the hype of the release of the LEGO Star Wars UCS Millennium Falcon (75192), this piece of news was overlooked. It has been announced that The LEGO Group has become the Number 1 company in regards to reputation on corporate responsibility according to RepTrak 100. This comes a couple of months after LEGO was named the second most regarded company overall.
According to the survey, The LEGO Group surpasses Microsoft and Google who was at the second and top spot, respectively, last year. Chief Financial Officer Marjorie Lao said,
We are honoured to see that our efforts to positively impact the planet resonate with people all over the world. We feel a huge sense of responsibility to inspire and develop children through play while leaving a significant positive impact on the world children will inherit. It is part of our DNA as a company, and we will continue to set the bar high for ourselves to do better.
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Huh. That’s pretty surprising to me. LEGO packaging strategy is incredibly inefficient and adds a lot of cost/fuel/pollution to ship what essentially amounts to cardboard boxes of air all over the planet. I really wish they would work toward optimal box sizes that are just large enough to fit the parts and no larger. The closest I’ve seen to achieving this are the Architecture sets. I get the “marketing value” of a big box to justify the big price tag, but I think that argument is overblown.
It’s also padding and protection for the contents. A tiny “efficient” box would probably result in more broken pieces.
I think that’s a pretty big stretch. It’s just ABS plastic, and current packaging doesn’t include any padding – it’s just dead airspace. Much more fragile payloads ship in the 100’s of millions of units each year in small packages without any major fallout. Take just about any consumer electronics product (e.g. smartphones) as an example.
Smaller boxes are a win-win-win: Good for the environment, financially better for Lego, and better for us consumers (takes less storage space, less chance of box damage on new sets).
My 2 cents! 🙂
Air padding is why chips come in huge bags with mostly air.
That being said, I have no idea how well sealed Lego sets are, and whether air cushioning has any impact on them.
Fair point. Although Lego boxes are not air tight. And Lego bricks/elements are far more robust than a potato chip. 🙂 Have you watched any Lego set drop tests on YouTube? It’s not that often you see parts breaking, even under extreme conditions. It does happen, but Lego elements are incredibly well-engineered and designed to take a lot of abuse, and thus be a toy we can pass down to our kids. I have sets that are 40 years old!
LEGO actually tried a “green box” program a few years ago, with a few selected boxes sized more appropriately to their contents. It was a marketing disaster, and almost no one was willing to pay the same price for a smaller box. I guess we’ve all come to associate certain box sizes with certain price points. Not sure if that’s on LEGO or the toy industry in general, but you can’t say they didn’t try.
Interesting! Would you be able to point me to a few set numbers that utilized the smaller packaging?
I couldn’t remember any off-hand, but I got lucky and found one on eBay. It was 4432 Garbage Truck, and as of this writing you can find listings for both size boxes to see the difference. It’s a little hard to tell from the pictures, but on the smaller box the image of the truck overlaps the blue City border.
Thanks for that!
I assume this statement was made before the UCS Falcon’s release? LOL.