One day last week, the Badger arrived early to collect his grandson from nursery school. As he waited, he couldn’t help a wry smile as the young tots resisted the nursery leader’s attempts to get them to tidy the plethora of toys away. One little girl came up to the Badger with a battered Fisher-Price musical guitar and insisted on showing him how to extract noise from it. The noises from the guitar demonstrated that it was on its last legs! One of the nursery helpers then ushered the little girl away, and as she did so she told the child that the toy was broken and needed to be ’thrown away’. Did they really mean ‘thrown away’, or did they mean ‘recycled’? It was pretty clear that they meant the former.
In due course, the Badger’s grandson, who had been playing with a musical toy in the form of a mobile phone, was returned home to his parents. Afterwards, the Badger found himself cogitating on how different today’s pre-school toys are from those of his generation. No toys for pre-school kids in his day required a battery to function! Today, however, toys requiring a battery and containing microchips are commonplace. The Badger found himself muttering a phrase that everyone uses at some stage when they get older, namely ‘those were the days’. His thoughts moved on to the nursery helper’s ’thrown away’ remark. Did they really mean ‘thrown away’ rather than ‘recycled’? Well, since toys top the list of ‘invisible’ e-waste finding its way into landfill, then, yes, they probably did.
Many things young children play with today contain recyclable electrical or electronic material that goes unnoticed. The amount of such material in an individual toy may be tiny, but every little bit matters if we truly want a sustainable future. Unfortunately, however, awareness that a child’s toy should be sent to recycling at the end of its useful life isn’t as high as it should be. That’s why children’s toys contribute to the growing so-called ‘invisible’ e-waste in the world’s land fill sites. The Badger thus feels it’s incumbent on us adults to be more knowledgeable and make better decisions when it comes to disposing of broken children’s toys.
The Badger also suspects, perhaps wrongly, that the WEEE’s recent International E-waste Day on the 14th October 2023 passed most of us by. It’s purpose was to shed light on the overall scale of ‘invisible’ e-waste, see here. Our awareness of ‘invisible’ e-waste must be improved, and, as the WEEE Forum puts it, we must all be more conscious that we can recycle anything that has a plug, uses a battery or microchip, or has a cable. So, if you hear someone telling a child that a toy should be ‘thrown away’ then tell them to recycle it, and wish them good luck in getting it out of the child’s hands without a tantrum to do so…
