Inside a Lego Factory, Where Christmas Wishes Come True

Lego employs more than 20,000 people around the world -- more than a quarter of them in Billund. Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP
Lego employs more than 20,000 people around the world -- more than a quarter of them in Billund. Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP
TT
20

Inside a Lego Factory, Where Christmas Wishes Come True

Lego employs more than 20,000 people around the world -- more than a quarter of them in Billund. Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP
Lego employs more than 20,000 people around the world -- more than a quarter of them in Billund. Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP

As a boy, Samuel Tacchi was crazy about Lego cranes. Now he designs them, under cloak-and-dagger secrecy, at the Danish group's headquarters where Santa has filled his sacks for decades.

At its ultra-modern flagship building in Billund, a visit to the offices where the design work is done is out of the question -- the company is fiercely protective of its trade secrets, AFP said.

But Tacchi, a 34-year-old Frenchman, lifts the veil a smidgen on the creative process, standing at a display featuring some of the brand's colorful toy kits.

"I always start with a little sketch on paper about what I have in mind", says Tacchi, who designs for the Lego Technic series.

"Then I start to build the technical layout: the drive train, steering, and starting to build with the function. And then I dive into the styling."

"Then afterwards we dive into the computer."

His office is a child's dream come true, chocka-block with Lego Technic pieces.

"We have an elements shelf behind our backs. It's easy to reach and fix some elements, build them together and see if (our idea) works," he says.

In his seven years with the company, Tacchi has helped create around 25 kits.

- From start-up to multinational -
A family-owned company, Lego employs more than 20,000 people around the world -- more than a quarter of them in Billund, which is also home to its oldest factory.

Here, in a huge hall where robots move about like in a choreographed dance, hundreds of thousands of pieces are manufactured each day.

Colorful plastic is molded into familiar shapes: bricks, figurines, hair, dragon wings and tires (Lego is reported to be the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world!)

Sorted and stored by model in large crates in an adjoining warehouse, the pieces are then sent to other factories to be included in kits.

While everything is made of plastic today, the toy empire was founded by a carpenter very conscious of the quality of the wood he used.

In 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, Ole Kirk Kristiansen began making wooden toys, winning the favor of Danish children with his yo-yos.

"He sold the yo-yo to every child in Billund and... (when every child had one) he couldn't sell anymore. But he still had them laying around," explains Signe Wiese, Lego's resident historian.

"So instead of throwing them out or just leaving them, he reused them. He split the yo-yos in half and he used them for wheels on wagons."

Four years later, having given up on carpentry, he named his new company "Lego", a contraction of the Danish "Leg godt", which means "Play well".

With a shortage of raw materials after World War II, Kirk Kristiansen gradually turned towards plastic and invested his life savings in an injection molding machine.

"He was really fascinated with the technology and the machinery and the material itself," says Wiese.

"So for him, it seems to have been a pretty easy decision, in spite of the fact that everyone was actually advising him against it."

The idea for the bricks came later.

Initially they were made without Lego's famed "clutch power" -- the mechanism that makes it possible to click the bricks together.

The design was patented in 1958, paving the way for an endless catalogue of figures, shapes and kits.

Now, Lego is the biggest toymaker in the world, ahead of Japan's Bandai Namca and US groups Hasbro and Mattel, according to market analysts Statista.

This year, Lego says its catalogue of toys is bigger than ever before, but refuses to disclose the exact number. Another trade secret...



Australia Sweats Through Hottest 12 Months on Record

Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File
Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File
TT
20

Australia Sweats Through Hottest 12 Months on Record

Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File
Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File

Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a weather official said Thursday, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching.

Senior government climatologist Simon Grainger said the rolling 12-month period between April 2024 and March 2025 was 1.61 degrees Celsius (34.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above average -- the hottest since records began more than a century ago.

"This is certainly part of a sustained global pattern," he told AFP.

"We've been seeing temperatures since about April 2023 that were globally much warmer than anything we have seen in the global historical record."

The previous hottest period was in 2019, Grainger said, when temperatures were 1.51 degrees Celsius above average.

"That is a pretty significant difference," Grainger said.

"It's well above what we would expect just from uncertainties due to rounding. The difference is much larger than that."

The record was measured on a rolling 12-month basis -- rather than as a calendar year.

Australia has also recorded its hottest-ever March, Grainger said, with temperatures more than two degrees above what would normally be seen.

"There has basically been sustained warmth through pretty much all of Australia," he said.

"We saw a lot of heatwave conditions, particularly in Western Australia. And we didn't really see many periods of cool weather -- we didn't see many cold fronts come through."

Sickly white coral

From the arid outback to the tropical coast, swaths of Australia have been pummeled by wild weather in recent months.

Unusually warm waters in the Coral Sea stoked a tropical cyclone that pummeled densely populated seaside hamlets on the country's eastern coast in March.

Whole herds of cattle have drowned in vast inland floods still flowing across outback Queensland.

And a celebrated coral reef off Western Australia has turned a sickly shade of white as hotter seas fuel an unfolding mass bleaching event.

The average sea surface temperature around Australia was the "highest on record" in 2024, according to a recent study by Australian National University.

This record run looked to have continued throughout January and February, said Grainger.

"We haven't seen much cooling in sea surface temperatures."

Moisture collects in the atmosphere as oceans evaporate in hotter temperatures -- eventually leading to more intense downpours and storms.

Australia follows a slew of heat records that have been toppling across the planet.

Six major international datasets confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record.

Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming.

Australia sits on bulging deposits of coal, gas, metals and minerals, with mining and fossil fuels stoking decades of near-unbroken economic growth.

But it is increasingly suffering from more intense heatwaves, bushfires and drought, which scientists have linked to climate change.