What Makes Toys Green?

We are big fans of Automoblox (we reviewed them in depth last year), and finally got Z one of the new Automoblox Minis. The design scales well, although the loss of the passenger compartment does limit pretend play a bit - she's used to stuffing her Automoblox full of those little plastic bunnies and teddy bears you get at the craft store. One of the most attractive features of the Minis is the price - they cost around $10, which is a great deal for the toy's quality and interest, compared to the standard Automoblox sticker price of around $30, which borders on prohibitive.

We love how Automoblox combine wood and plastics in an innovative way to make a toy that capitalizes on the best properties of each. I'm guessing that the cab/windshield is either SAN (a #6 styrene) or polycarbonate, but we don't currently consider polycarbonate (and thus BPA-containing) plastic a concern for items that don't come into contact with food or with little mouths, so we haven't checked.

The use of plastics more generally does make them a bit less "sustainable" than an all-wood toy. But no all-wooden toy could roll as phenomenally as Automoblox do. Better-functioning toys get more use, and will be worth passing on to another child after Z is done with them. These are "green" considerations too, aren't they? Perhaps the greatest environmental crime of junk plastic toys is not just that they're made out of plastic, but that they (a) aren't tough enough to survive to be handed down, and (b) aren't open-ended enough to allow children to use them for a long time. Great toys are "open" in the same way that great works of literature are; they expand to occupy users' imaginative capacity - that is, they can be participated with on a variety of levels, depending on your ability to engage them.

The untold story of natural toys is that the intense interest in alternatives to molded plastic products has spurred a Renaissance in wooden toy development, offering consumers the first advances since Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs and the days when plastics weren't so ubiquitous. Automoblox represent one response to this challenge. Anamalz, a new favorite line of toys in our home, are another excellent example of the new thinking going on in wooden toys.

The bodies, heads, and feet of Anamalz are made out of organic maple, with printed-on faces and string tails and bits of felt for manes and ears as needed. The ears are attached by drilling tiny holes into the creature's head, curling up the edge of the ear, and hammering in (and presumably gluing) a little wooden plug to hold it in tight.

What's brilliant about these toys is that their legs (and in some cases, necks) are flexible, and hold poses, and the rest of the toy's design enhances this function. Unlike the rubbery "bendy" toys we may remember from our own childhoods, twisting the limbs of Animalz is actually quite engaging, because thanks to their wide, flat, clunky feet, you can balance Animalz on three, two, or even a single leg, as demonstrated in the photo above and below. This is fun for adults who like to fiddle idly with toys as well as for kids. They are durable and cute, too.

The firm "bendiness" of the legs got us wondering what's in there, so we performed a bit of impromptu surgery. Don't worry, we'll patch him up later.

Underneath a soft, ropelike sheath, the leg and body are linked by a piece of ordinary, plastic-sheathed copper wire. Yep - electrical wire. It works brilliantly. The ones with the shortest legs - the pig, bear, and crocodile, to name a few - are less dramatically poseable. Our favorites are the giraffe, elephant, hippo, and horse.

The best animal toys we could find for Z prior to discovering this brand were the hard plastic, solid-centered, "realistic" animals sold in every toy store in little bins. Animalz beat these on every count except the mommy/baby form factor - Anamalz currently come in only one size. As it turns out, Z has no problem pretending two identical hippos are mother and child, or sisters, or friends, or mommy and daddy to a giraffe.

Little touches give these toys great personality in small strokes.

Anamalz run $6-7 each on Amazon.com. The name of the toy is frequently misspelled there as "Animalz." They are the same toy.

There is another aspect to "green" toys, however, and that is enacting a life that is sustainable. When we begin thinking in this way we start seeing that in all of the choices we make for our children for environmental reasons - whether we buy sustainable shoes, hand down used clothing to those in need, buy and use reusable drinking bottles, or use cloth grocery bags - the world of toys merges with the rest of the world around us, just as the world of "environmental" considerations, if disconnected from the way we live and breathe, is just another catchphrase. Our home is an environment; the world of pretend play, too, can be polluted, or it can be cleaned up.

Case in point: Cabbage Patch makes a line of self-wetting dolls with disposable diapers (reusable, but made of paper and plastic). We used cloth diapers with Z, and featured a ZRecs Showdown review of major cloth diaper brands last month, so this seemed worth mentioning. Below, Z diapers her pet monkey.

I'm not saying that cloth diapers are a solution for every family; what I am saying is that your environmental choices - or those you hope will be real possibilities for your own children - should be mirrored in play opportunities.

Many work-at-home-moms offer handmade cloth diapers, and of course you can make your own. We got ours from Daisy Designs [Etsy shop|blog], where doll diapers are $6 apiece.