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There is actually a very good selection of toys for children in our shop, including recycled, sustainable and organic stuff. There are also some toys for the not-so-young.
If you can not find anything you like in the shop, Toys To You have a good selection of fairly traded and ecofriendly toys for children, although there are lots of categories on their website that cover this (such as ‘Green Toys’ and ‘Environmentally Friendly Wooden Toys’) with different products in each, so you may have to hunt a bit for what you want.
There are several interactive web-games for children to play that have an eco-theme. Action For Nature have two litter catching games that are quite good. The Environment Agency have several games centred around waste and pollution, but I think it is fair to say that they are better at regulating business than designing games. The Atmosphere, Climate & Environment website has a lot of good games to play and information sheets that are great for teaching kids all about waste and climate change.
Kew Gardens have an excellent range of active games for groups of children. These centre around ecosystems and have names like ‘The Pollination Game’ or ‘Wildlife Theatre’. Some need to be done outside and some require quite a bit of space, but all of them need only simple props like paper and string. Excellent ‘learn while you play’ fun – good old Kew!
What to do
When buying toys, go for fairly traded or locally made varieties where possible and always look for those with least packaging. You pay for the packaging, which is there mainly to entice you to buy, so the less of it there is the better value for money you will get on the actual toy.
With cheap bleeping toys (you know, the bright plastic stuff that takes batteries) remember about the distance it has travelled and the conditions of the country it was made in. China, for instance, does not have the same environmental and social requirements as the EU. Rechargeable batteries are a good idea, as normal batteries are basically little tubes of chemical nasties that take a lot to make and are a real waste to throw away. Better still, buy toys that don’t need batteries.
Buy second hand wherever possible and when your kids have finished with their toys, assuming that there is anything left of them, pass them on to charity shops, hospitals, support groups etc. Or advertise them for sale/free in the Market Place.
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