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Lego opens $1 billion plant in Vietnam it says will be all green

Lego opens $1 billion plant in Vietnam it says will be all green

CBS News09-04-2025

Lego opened a $1 billion factory in Vietnam on Wednesday it says will make toys without adding planet-warming gas to the atmosphere by relying entirely on clean energy.
The factory in the industrial area of Binh Duong, close to Ho Chi Minh City, is the first in Vietnam that aims to run entirely on clean energy. Lego says it will do that by early 2026.
It's the Danish company's sixth worldwide and its second in Asia. It will use high-tech equipment to produce colorful Lego bricks for Southeast Asia's growing markets.
"We just want to make sure that the planet that the children inherit when they grow up needs to be a planet that is still there. That is functional," Lego CEO Niels Christiansen told The Associated Press.
The factory is an important factor in Lego's quest to stop adding greenhouse gases by 2050. It has a shorter-term target of reducing emissions by 37% by 2032. The privately held group makes its bricks out of oil-based plastic and says it has invested more than $1.2 billion in a search for more sustainable alternatives. But those efforts have not always been successful.
Fast-industrializing Vietnam also aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, so it needs more of its factories to use clean energy. The country hopes the plant's 12,400 solar panels and energy storage system will help set a precedent for more sustainable manufacturing.
The blocks are made from differently colored plastic grains that are melted at high temperatures and then fed into metal molds. The highly-automated factory uses robots for making the bricks to a tenth of a hair's width precision and then packaging them. It eventually will employ thousands of mostly skilled workers to operate the machines. Some have already begun work after being trained in in Lego's factory in eastern China.
Manufacturing makes up a fifth of Vietnam's GDP and consumes half the energy it uses. There are plans to phase out its coal power plants by 2040.
The Lego factory, which spans 62 soccer fields, sets the "blueprint" for making large, power-guzzling factories sustainable while remaining profitable, said Mimi Vu, a founder of the consultancy Raise Partners in Ho Chi Minh City. "Sometimes it takes a big company, like Lego, to take those risks. To show that we can do it ... and we can be profitable," she said.
The factory will benefit from a new 2024 rule known as a direct power purchase agreement, or DPPA, that allows big foreign companies to buy clean energy directly from solar and wind power producers to help meet their clean energy requirements.
The factory will be linked to an adjacent energy center where electricity can be stored in large batteries.
"So even if the sun is only shining during the day, we store the energy and can use it all over. That will cover by far the majority of the consumption of the factory," added Christiansen,
The remaining 10%-20% of the factory's energy needs will be met through agreements with other clean energy producers.
"Lego and Vietnam, we are having the same aspirations. We both want to be green, to play our part in the climate. And I think this, with the solar and battery and DPPA, it is showcasing that it can be done," Jesper Hassellund Mikkelsen, Senior Vice President Asia Operations at the LEGO Group told The AP.
The company will also open a distribution center in Vietnam's southern Dong Nai province to help serve markets in Australia and other Asian countries where it sees an opportunity for growth. Locating the Lego factories in regions they supply helps to insulate them from the
tariffs ordered by President Trump
, Christiansen said.
"Right now, I am probably more observant of what does this mean to growth in the world? Do we see consumer sentiment changing in parts of the world or not, and what would that potentially mean?" he said.
The five buildings in the factory meet high energy efficiency standards. Lego also has planted 50,000 trees - twice the number of the trees it cut to clear land for the factory. It's the first Lego factory to replace single-use plastic bags with paper bags for packaging.
Lego's founder, Ole Kirk Kristiansen, started the company as a wooden toy maker before patenting the iconic plastic bricks in 1958. It is still is seeking a way to make its plastic bricks more environmentally friendly.
Christiansen said Lego bricks last decades and could be reused, though the ultimate ambition is to make them out of more renewable materials. He said a third of the materials used in Lego bricks made last year were from renewable and recycled sources. But that's more expensive than plastic made out of fossil fuels.
"It's not inexpensive at this point in time, but we believe if we ... lean into that, we help create a supply chain for the type of plastic materials that are not based on fossil fuel," he said.

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Greenland and the Antarctic are ‘not for sale', Macron tells Trump

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Shoppers are wary of digital shelf labels, but a study found they don't lead to price surges

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The study was authored by Ioannis Stamatopoulos of the University of Texas, Austin, Robert Evan Sanders of the University of California, San Diego and Robert Bray of Northwestern University The researchers looked at prices between 2019 and 2024 at an unnamed grocery chain than began using digital labels in October 2022. They found that temporary price increases affected 0.005% of products on any given day before electronic shelf labels were introduced, a share that increased by only 0.0006 percentage points after digital labels were installed. The study also determined that discounts were slightly more common after digital labels were introduced. Economists have long wondered why grocery prices don't change more often, according to Stamatopoulos. If bananas are about to expire, for example, it makes sense to lower the price on them. He said the cost of having workers change prices by hand could be one issue. But there's another reason: Shoppers watch grocery prices closely, and stores don't want to risk angering them. 'Selling groceries is not selling a couch. It's not a one-time transaction and you will never see them again,' Stamatopoulos said. 'You want them coming to the store every week.' Electronic price labels aren't new. They've been in use for more than a decade at groceries in Europe and some U.S. retailers, like Kohl's. But they've been slow to migrate to U.S. grocery stores. Only around 5% to 10% of U.S. supermarkets now have electronic labels, compared to 80% in Europe, said Amanda Oren, vice president of industry strategy for North American grocery at Relex Solutions, a technology company that helps retailers forecast demand. Oren said cost is one issue that has slowed the U.S. rollout. The tiny screens cost between $5 and $20, Oren said, but every product a store sells needs one, and the average supermarket has 100,000 or more individual products. 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Ahold Delhaize's Albert Heijn supermarket chain in the Netherlands and Belgium has been testing an artificial intelligence-enabled tool since 2022 that marks down prices on its digital labels every 15 minutes for products nearing expiration. The system has reduced more than 250 tons of food waste annually, the company said. But Warren and Casey are skeptical. In their letter to Kroger, the U.S. senators noted a partnership with Microsoft that planned to put cameras in grocery aisles and offer personalized deals to shoppers depending on their gender and age. In its response, Kroger said the prices shown on its digital labels were not connected to any sort of facial recognition technology. It also denied surging prices during periods of peak demand. 'Kroger's business model is built on a foundation of lowering prices to attract more customers,' the company said. Aguilar, the Arizona lawmaker, said he also opposes the transition to digital labels because he thinks they will cost jobs. 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