Citations › Citation ID: 12

C12. BOOK: Daniel Konstanski, The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks: The Inside Story of a Design Icon (Unbound, 2022), p. 49.

The LEGO Group has thousands of moulds in active use every year with even more on standby. Every one of them must be regularly calibrated, maintained, polished and stored in a massive climate-controlled environment. Prior to the mid-1990s, when computers began making it possible to store information in databases, designers relied on an analogue element archive, personal lists and their own memories to know which parts were available and which were not. Retiring elements and destroying moulds occurred rarely; normally only when a new or better element came along and replaced it.

Thousands of moulds are used every year.