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How many LEGO bricks have been produced in total? I'm asking only about real LEGO, not other brand's "blocks."
This article from Gizmodo puts the number at 400 Billion, but that was written in 2008.
The BBC from 2018 says "75 billion bricks are sold annually."
An answer on Quora puts the number at 600 billion sold.
I understand that the number sold, and number produced is likely very different, thus my sources are not particularity useful. So how many LEGO bricks exist?
It does not seem as if it would ever be possible to come to a definitive assertion—or even a sufficiently precise approximation—of "how many LEGO bricks exists." For the English Wikipedia article "Lego" in the "Manufacturing" section informs,
Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 36 billion, or about 1140 elements per second.
Although this quotation conflates "bricks" and "elements" thereby ambiguating whether it refers specifically to bricks or generally to any LEGO component, it nevertheless indicates that the number of LEGO bricks is indefatigably increasing. Thus, even if a total number of LEGO bricks in existence could be concluded, that number would immediately be inaccurate as a result of additional bricks continuously manufactured. Furthermore, as Eran perceived in the comments, LEGO bricks eventually disintegrate or become unidentifiable as LEGO; therefore, even if there were documentation of exactly how many bricks were produced up to any given time, it would still be infeasible to establish how many LEGO bricks exist because it would be extraordinary difficult to ascertain which individual LEGO bricks are currently in existence.
This is all just speculation based on the Wikipedia entry for LEGO and some of the sources linked within it.
In 2008, TIME reported that the LEGO Group estimated that they had produced about 400 billion LEGO elements.
In 2006, Bloomberg reported that LEGO was producing about 15 billion elements per year. ()
In the Wikipedia entry, it is stated that "Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 36 billion," but that statement does not have a citation, so I don't know where it came from or when it was referring to. However, I would guess that it is a more recent estimate than 2008.
If we use the 2006 estimate of 15 billion and assume 2019 for the 36 billion estimate, we can work out an annual production increase of about 1.6 billion. Working from that, we can get a number around 706 billion total elements produced. And it looks like they'll hit 1 trillion elements sometime around 2026.
Again, this involves a lot of speculation and assumption, so don't quote me. ;)
