Sustainable Solutions for Misfit Toys
Saturday, March 14, 1 to 4 pm
Do you face the same "trash or stash" dilemma we do when it comes to broken toys? Trashing is easy but it's not a sustainable alternative. Stashing items until they can be recycled means they usually end up as clutter. After ten months of research by dedicated high school senior Karis Tzeng, we've discovered some practical and easy solutions and we're excited to share them with you.
LEARN:
practical, green alternatives to trashing or stashing puzzles with missing pieces, books with broken bindings, and dress-up clothes with too many holes.
BRING:
your broken PLASTIC animals and action figures and we'll donate them to Happen Inc.'s Toy Lab in Cincinnati. It's the one place we've found that can re-use broken plastic toys and we're thrilled to be partnering with them. Happen Inc. is an arts-oriented non-profit. Their Toy Lab lets kids make ingenious new toys out of broken ones.
MEET:
the wild, wacky professors from Happen Inc.’s Toy Lab. In this fun session that makes everyone a toy inventor you’ll learn the key terms of toy invention and make your own paper toy with paper parts straight from the Toy Lab collection. Begins at 2 pm.
DONATE:
your broken PLASTIC toys. Plastic or Rubber only. The wild, wacky Toy Lab professors will accept your broken and worn toys and take them back to Cincinnati where kids will make them into new toys. Toy Lab accepts action figures, Barbies, plastic cars, airplanes, rubber animals or any other fantastic plastic or rubber toy you’d like to recycle.
Visit http://toy-lab.com/toylab_index.html to see the results of this toy recycling.
A message from the Smead Discovery Center:
Hey Families,
In the Smead Discovery Center, we have been working hard to figure out what we should do with our broken toys and other broken and worn playthings.
Trash or Stash Dilemma
The easy thing to do with our broken stuff is to throw it in the trash. We wouldn't have the stuff hanging around the office anymore. However, we have decided the easy way is not necessarily the best way. Technically, it's not our problem anymore once we throw it in the trash, but in a way it is our problem.
Garbage trucks take your trash to a hole in the ground called a landfill. There are lots of landfills and they are filling up. We worry that one day landfills will be everywhere; or worse yet the landfills will be full and trash will be everywhere. So we don’t want to contribute our trash to a landfill.
We also don't want it hanging around the office forever. We call that "stashing." We do it when we can't recycle something like a broken dinosaur, but we hope one day we will be able to.
Not Taking the Easy Way Out
We decided not to take the easy way out and chose to begin solving our trash or stash dilemmas. The hard part was that it would take a lot of time and creativity to research alternatives to throwing stuff in the trash. Because we care about our world, we think it is our responsibility to ask tough questions like: "What can you do with a puzzle missing one piece instead of trashing it?"
Getting Help: Karis to the Rescue
Karis Tzeng started volunteering in the Smead Discovery Center when she was a freshman at Hathaway Brown. She is now a senior. She offered to help us ask and answer our challenging sustainability questions. Karis has spent the better part of one year working with the SDC staff.
What We Kept Out of a Landfill up to 2009
1,257 lbs. of paper, fabric, gently used toys, crayons, corncob from our dino dig, animal food, lunch scraps, and coffee grounds.
The Tough Questions and Answers
What do we do with:
• Broken dinos and other plastic animals?
• Worn puzzles?
• Puzzles missing one piece?
• Broken wooden puzzle piece?
• Books with broken bindings?
• Dress-up clothes beyond mending?
Solutions:
• Donate the dinos to a place that makes broken toys into new ones
• Make flashcards out of worn and broken cardboard puzzle pieces
• Repair and repaint broken wooden puzzle pieces; fabricate new puzzle pegs
• Get books rebound or figure out a way to do it ourselves
• Donate the dress-up clothes to women who make rag rugs
On Saturday, March 14 in the Discovery Center Karis will show you how she made new puzzle pegs and turned old puzzles into flashcards. She will also share a resource guide that points you in the right direction the next time you want to get rid of something sustainably.
At 2 pm the wild, wacky professors from Happen Inc.'s Toy Lab will give a special demonstration to show you what kids do at Toy Lab when they make old toys into new ones. Afterwards try a creative paper toy-making project and a take home Karis’ booklet summarizes what you can do with your broken playthings.
The Toy Challenge
Bring your broken PLASTIC toys to the Discovery Center on or before the day of the program. We can collect Plastic or Rubber only. The wild, wacky Toy Lab professors will accept your broken and worn toys and take them back to Cincinnati where kids will make them into new toys. Toy Lab accepts action figures, Barbies, plastic cars, airplanes, rubber animals or any other fantastic plastic or rubber toy you would like to recycle.
We hope to see you there.
Beth Gatchell
Smead Discovery Center Coordinator