Inside the LEGO Factory: How robots & machines make LEGO

In this factory in Billund, Denmark, autonomous robots and precise machines can make 36,000 LEGO pieces per minute… that’s 2.16 million pieces every hour or 19 billion elements every year… if not more. Recent totals are higher: 1140 elements per second or 36 billion per year. This Bloomberg Business video gives us a tour of some of these automated factory features: Inside Lego’s Robot Factory Where Toys Get Made.

Here are more incredible LEGO statistics:

• The LEGO® name is made from the first two letters of the Danish words LEG GODT, meaning “play well”.
• Laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in 2012 would stretch round the world more than 18 times.
• To reach the moon you would need to build a column of around 40 billion LEGO bricks.
• The first minifigure was produced in 1978. Since then more than 4 billion have been made – making it the world’s largest population group!
• 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the Earth with the moon.
• It would take 1 billion minifigures, lined up in a single row to wrap around the Earth’s circumference one time. Today there are enough minifigures to wrap around the Earth at least 4 times.

Related reading: “By 2030, LEGO bricks will no longer be made from ABS, the oil-based plastic in the 60 billion blocks the company makes each year.”

Want to see more? MentalFloss pairs the 2014 factory visit above with the classic How It’s Made LEGO video below:

On this site: Watch more factory videos, more how things are made videos, and more LEGO videos, including James May’s Toy Stories: How to build a huge LEGO house, one of our favorites.