Zurich-based Direct Air Capture (DAC) company provider Climeworks announced today that it has signed a new 9-year carbon removal agreement with the LEGO Group.

The new deal also includes a carbon removal agreement with KIRKBI, the Danish family office for the Kristiansen family, which owns The Lego Group. The combined agreements are valued at over $2.8 million.

The new carbon removal agreements follows the launch by the LEGO Group last year of a series of climate-related commitments, including a pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, to work with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to develop emissions reduction targets covering Scope 1 and 2 emissions, as well as Scope 3 supply chain emissions, which account for 98% of the company’s carbon footprint, and to invest over $1.4 billion in environmental sustainability initiatives over the next three years.

The LEGO Group said that while its priority will remain on reducing emissions from its factories, offices and stores, and supply chain, direct air capture and storage will become part of its portfolio of initiatives to address its carbon emissions, and that the new agreement will help support Climeworks as it scales its carbon removal solutions.

Annette Stube, Chief Sustainability Officer at the LEGO Group, said:

“We were the first large toy company to announce a science-based emissions reduction target in 2020 and we want to continue to lead the way in finding innovative solutions for the challenges we face. This is why we are working with innovators like Climeworks – their technology, as part of a varied programme of initiatives, can help us and society as a whole realise the net-zero future that is needed to protect our planet for generations to come.” 

DAC technology, listed by the IEA as a key carbon removal option in the transition to a net-zero energy system, extracts CO2 directly from the atmosphere for use as a raw material or permanently removed when combined with storage. According to the landmark 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change mitigation study, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods scaling to billions of tons of removal annually over the coming decades, with DAC positioned to potentially account for a significant portion of the total.

Founded in 2009 by Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks has emerged as a leading DAC provider. In 2022, the company raised nearly $650 million in an equity funding round aimed at scaling its DAC capacity. The company has since started construction of “Mammoth,” a new 36,000 tonne-capacity DAC facility, which it recently stated was near completion, and it is also participating in a series of large-scale DAC projects chosen receive grants of up to $1.2 billion by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Jan Huckfeldt, Chief Commercial Officer of Climeworks said:

“We’re proud to partner with a sustainability leader like the LEGO Group who takes bold steps to make net zero happen. We see demand growing across diverse sectors, including consumer goods, which shows that carbon removal rightly has a place in every company’s net zero strategy.”

Michael Skou, Head of Strategy and Sustainability at KIRKBI, added:

“In addition to our ongoing efforts to reduce own emissions, we want to explore and support impactful climate solutions that have the potential to permanently remove and sequester hard to abate greenhouse gas emissions. Through our long-term partnership with Climeworks, we hope to be a part of scaling a promising and innovative technology that can make a difference in tackling climate change.”