Toys

Recycling Habits

Some families teach their children to recycle their toys. Single-stream recycling makes the practice easier for people because it ends the hassle of sorting. For example, instead of separating cardboard from plastics, all recyclables go into one bin. The numbers of people recycling increase, and less trash is being hauled away from neighborhood curbsides. Toys are sorted with other plastics and sold to facilities handling that particular material.

Disposal Habits

Overconsumption of toys and their resultant disposal is an international burden that each country bears. In the United Kingdom, statistics reveal that the mean age of toys discarded between 1993 and 1998 was 4. While most consumers wish that their items be reused or repurposed, only about 35 percent of toys are donated or sold for reuse, which leaves 65 percent of the total amount of cast-off toys lying in landfills where they may never degrade entirely and may leach chemicals such as lead, cadmium, and PVC into the soil and groundwater tables. When toys are recalled by companies in the United States, they follow U.S. government guidelines in the disposal of the recalled toys and are usually destroyed.

For example, Fisher-Price never refurbishes recalled toys. Customer service supervisors at Manhattan Group of Minneapolis, Minnesota, have no idea what happens to recalled toys that their company manufactures or distributes. This lack of knowledge at the corporate level may indicate that recalled toys are illegally dumped or destroyed, or it may be an instance of corporate ignorance.

Hazards

In 2008, Walmart, Target, and Toys “R” Us recalled about 25 million toys made in China and sold in the United States because they contained lead or other heavy metals and chemicals that cause medical and developmental problems in children. While China bears the brunt of Americans’ ire over lead-contaminated toys, other countries manufacture cheap toys that end up in landfills. Six toy production centers in India produce approximately 2,000 stuffed toys each day—4.4 million toys a year.

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