Upon inspection, only a plastic watering can (with more holes in its bottom than its spout) featured a recycling symbol. “But I’m going to argue they’re still incremental changes and they’re not going to…move us from an extractive to a regenerative economy, which is what we need.” A non-cyclical life cycleĭuring a recent cleanout of my kids’ outdoor toys, I fished out a half dozen that had broken beyond use or repair. “If we can build a circular economy of our packaging, that seems really transformative,” says Dana Gulley, a business consultant who focuses on sustainability and climate justice. It’s like walking the cereal aisle where all the chocolate and marshmallow options are at kids’ eye level and the onus is on the adult to explain why we’re opting for plain oatmeal instead. It’s infuriating that companies market plastic objects to kids who don’t fully comprehend the long-term implications of those objects. As children become little consumers of their own, they become more aware-and more tantalized-by the hot toys displayed in stores, advertised, and chatted up at school. Year by year, though, the share of those toys in our house is being eclipsed by AA-battery suckers. When my children were younger, it was easier to curate their toy chest with timeless-and more environmentally friendly-wooden blocks and trains. It’s hard to know whether to feel reassured or terrified that people with deep knowledge of both polymers and Polly Pockets are dealing with the same challenges as the rest of us. “And our kids still want them.” Senft is one of several plastics experts I spoke with who is also a parent. “There’s a lot of toys that aren’t going to make it a decade from now,” she says. Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center. “I don’t think there is a magic, silver bullet for the toy plastics issue,” says Katie Senft, a researcher with the U.C.
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