Lego's billionaire owners to double $1.6bn climate portfolio

Kirkbi, the family office of Denmark's billionaire Kirk Kristiansen family, plans to double its climate investment portfolio over the next five years and put a substantial share of it into plastics recycling.

Kirkbi Climate manages 10 billion Danish kroner ($1.6 billion), invested across the energy transition, land use and recycling. Plastics recycling is "an area where we plan to invest heavily," chief executive Anupam Bhargava said, with future commitments split roughly between energy and recycling and concentrated in a handful of EU countries.

The European Union's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation requires all packaging to be recyclable by 2030. That deadline is creating demand for recycling capacity and technology that does not yet exist at scale and a market for whoever builds it.

Kirkbi is also changing how it invests. After more than a decade in climate, the fund is taking a more active approach, seeking stakes large enough to give it "real influence" at board level rather than passive positions.

The family's toy company has struggled with the same material. In 2023 Lego abandoned an attempt to make bricks from recycled PET bottles after finding the process would have increased carbon emissions rather than reducing them, a rare public admission that a sustainability initiative had failed on its own terms.

The bricks remain made from virgin plastic. The family office is now investing in the industry that would have to solve that problem.

Kirkbi holds the family's controlling stake in Lego alongside its investment portfolio, and functions as both the owner of the company and the vehicle through which the Kirk Kristiansens deploy capital elsewhere.