10 Facts About Lego | The Last One Will Blow Your Mind

Have you ever wondered how many Lego bricks it would take to build a tower to the moon or if anyone has actually tried? Well, how about which country buys the most Lego sets in relation to population size? Well, you’re lucky because here are the top 10 most interesting Lego facts you may not know. 

Read to the end for a bonus fact that may blow your mind.

Lego’s Manufacturing Precision

As the largest toy company in the world, Lego’s manufacturing process is so precise that only 18 out of every 1 million Lego bricks produced are considered defective and must be thrown out. Only 0.002% of Lego bricks are faulty after they’re created. To meet this strict percentage, the molds that Lego uses to produce Lego elements are accurate to within 0.05 millimeters. That’s less than the width of a single human hair. 

Which Country Buys the Most Lego Sets?

Germany buys the most Lego sets per person compared to their population size. Surprisingly, this title is not held by Lego’s home country of Denmark. 

Now, why is this? Germany is one of, if not the cheapest, places in Europe to purchase Lego sets. On the other hand, some neighboring European countries, such as the Netherlands, pay a 20% premium compared to the Lego sets sold in Germany. Overall concerning currency, the three countries in the world that have the most affordable Lego prices are:

• The United States
• Germany
• Hong Kong

This is based on economic factors, such as population wealth, buying power, and availability.

How Many Lego Bricks Have Been Made?

More than 800 billion Lego bricks have been produced since 1958, enough for every human on earth to have 101 Lego bricks. This is based on a January 2021 world population of 7.9 billion people. So basically, everyone on the planet could choose between a Lego Jurassic world by plane rescue mission set or a Lego star wars rebel Alliance battle pack. 

A Weird Fact About Lego Building Combinations

If you only had a handful of six, two-by-four Lego bricks, how many different combinations could you make? Well, the number is probably higher than you may expect with these six Lego bricks. 

You could combine them in a total of 915,103,765 unique ways. Almost a billion! That’s a lot of individual structures. Even crazier, if you wanted to build each of those within your lifetime, and you live to be 100 years old, let’s say that means that you would need to complete one every 3.45 seconds of your entire life to accomplish all 915 million designs.

How many Lego Sets are Sold?

For every second that passes, seven Lego sets are sold by retailers around the globe. 

However, during the holiday season, from November through December, approximately 28 Lego sets are sold every second – that is a lot of Lego. 

Imagine how busy Lego’s warehouses and distribution centers must be during the holiday season. It must get absolutely insane. 

Ironically Lego is also the largest tire manufacturer in the world, beating legacy tire makers, such as Bridgestone, Michelin, and Goodyear. The number of tires that they produce, you may ask? 318 million Lego tires per year. 

That number was reported by Lego themselves in 2011. And as Lego’s popularity continues to surge as the largest toy brand, I can only assume that number will be higher in 2022. 

What Were the First Modern Minifigures?

The first modern Minifigures (or minifigs) were released in 1978 for the Lego town space and castle play sets. These were designed by Danish Lego designer Jens Nygaard Knudsen who had come up with the idea of having torsos, legs, and arm pieces interchangeable and posable/moveable. 

What Does the Word Lego Mean?

The name Lego is an abbreviation of the two Danish words “leg godt” meaning “play well.” By taking the first two letters of each Danish word and placing them together, we return to the brand name we all know and love: Lego. 

How Many Lego Bricks to Reach the Moon?

The moon is approximately 240,000 miles away from earth. So how many Lego bricks would we need if we wanted to construct a Lego tower that would reach the moon? According to Lego themselves, a stack of 40 billion Lego bricks would be necessary to reach the moon. 

Now that would require 5% of all Lego bricks that have ever been produced. I mean, no biggie, right? So you still have 95% left over. 

Well, what about Venus? I’m not sure why we’d ever want to build a Lego tower there, but if we did, it would require 26 trillion Lego bricks since it is approximately 653 times the distance to the moon. 

Oh, and Mars. You want to go there with a Lego tower, okay? 

To get to the red planet, we would need to stack 32 trillion Lego bricks on top of each other. Wow. That’s insane. 

And definitely not practical. 

How Many Lego Bricks are Produced Per Year?

Did you know that every 3 seconds, over 4,000 Lego bricks are created worldwide in Lego’s numerous factories in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico, China, and the Czech Republic? 

That’s right, on average, Lego produces approximately 36 billion individual Lego bricks per year. That works out to be around 125 million pieces per day, 5 million pieces every hour, or 1,300 Lego pieces per second. 

The Lego.com Website

Here’s your bonus Lego factoid during the first quarter of 2021, Lego’s main website, lego.com, received approximately 90 million visits. That’s a lot of people visiting the site. 

That’s it for today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this article and learned something new and exciting about Lego.