Inside a 154-year-old cotton mill in Lancashire, a machine that looks like something out of Willy Wonka is sorting roughly two LEGO pieces every second — and it just helped cross a 25-million-brick milestone.

  • 25 million LEGO bricks saved from landfill so far
  • 100,000 pieces the Brick-O-Matic can sort in a single day
  • 60,000+ distinct LEGO piece types the AI can recognize
  • 40-60% cheaper than retail price for the resold sets

How the Brick-O-Matic works

WeBuyBricks, based at Hall Carr Mill in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, buys unwanted LEGO — complete sets and jumbled boxes of loose pieces alike — cleans it, and resells it. Sorting that flood of mixed bricks by hand used to take a small army of people working slowly through buckets of plastic. So the company built a machine to do it instead.

Boxes of loose LEGO are fed onto conveyor belts, where camera systems paired with AI and machine-learning software identify each piece as it passes beneath them. Once identified, precisely timed jets of air blow each brick into the correct sorting chute. According to BBC News, the system can process roughly two pieces every second — more than 100 times faster than sorting the same volume by hand.

What 25 million bricks looks like

"It's really difficult" to sort large quantities of mixed LEGO manually, said Brad Hacking, WeBuyBricks' head of projects — which is exactly why the company invested in automation. The Brick-O-Matic can also assess how complete a given set is, flagging precisely which pieces are missing so staff can track those down separately rather than scrapping an otherwise-complete set.

"It does feel very Willy Wonka or Wallace and Gromit," Hacking said of the machine's tangle of conveyor belts and air jets.

There are currently more than 10 tonnes of LEGO waiting to be processed at the Rawtenstall site — Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, and DC sets among the most common, alongside rare vintage and retired pieces the company also accepts. WeBuyBricks says it believes the Brick-O-Matic is the first machine of its kind built in the UK, according to the Lancashire Telegraph.

The secondhand LEGO market has grown quickly in recent years, driven by resale platforms and by parents looking for a cheaper way to keep up with a hobby where a single new set can run well over a hundred pounds. WeBuyBricks says it already handles a meaningful share of that UK demand, and Hacking said the company plans to keep expanding the Brick-O-Matic's piece-recognition library as new themes are released, so the system stays current with a catalogue that grows every year.

Reviving an old mill for a new industry

Hall Carr Mill dates to 1872 and sat largely unused from the mid-1990s until WeBuyBricks moved in. Rather than relocating to newer industrial premises elsewhere in Lancashire, the company — which grew out of the used-book business WeBuyBooks — chose to stay local specifically to retain staff who had worked there for years.

Every piece that passes through the Brick-O-Matic is cleaned, checked for authenticity, and inspected for foreign objects before resale, with finished sets offered at 40 to 60 percent below their original retail prices. The company's broader goal, Hacking said, is to make buying pre-owned LEGO feel as ordinary as buying secondhand clothes — one AI-sorted, air-jetted brick at a time.