What is a circular economy and why is it so important for toys?

In nature all elements flow in cycles, from smallest nutrients to the most complex living things, our planet has evolved through billions of years to come to this optimised environment that allows us to flourish. Only in the last couple of generations of our existence on this planet we have developed a behaviour and a global economy that operates in a linear manner. We take resources, we make very complex products, to be used for a very short period of time, and then we throw them away. We are doing this at an extremely fast rate, so it is not surprising that we are depleting the planets resources, and stocking up on a lot of waste that contaminates our environment, and heats up the planet.

One way industries and organisations are investing and working on to fix this problem is by encouraging a circular economy in which we can maximize the period these products are being used, and give the planet a chance to replenish its resources. This, combined with choosing to produce these items from sustainable resources that we can better manage and that contaminate less should create the positive effect we need. We can live in harmony with our home planet and taking care of it, but if we maintain the same behaviour we have adopted recently which is the linear approach, we will be consuming our planet, and leaving very little to the coming generations.

The Ellen Mc Arthur foundation has described this so well that it makes absolute sense to watch this video:

To do this we need to change the very mindset and behaviour that our generation is conditioned to, which is to consume, and raise the coming generation to be part of a sustainable circular economy that uses, shares, and maintains.

In this new economy it becomes more profitable for businesses to build better quality products that have an intrinsic value instead of selling more to consumers, and competing to mass produce lower quality cheaper products.

The scariest part is that these low quality mass produced, short-lived, wasteful products are being advertised in a way that consumers should identify with them, need them to feel complete. No wonder that each new generation is growing more restless, feels more purposeless, inefficient, lonelier and more wasteful than the last.

Industries are being encouraged to find ways to produce higher quality long life products that are provided to users to enjoy and then return, they get repurposed or maintained, cleaned, appreciated and then sent to the next awaiting user. After all, why have we been conditioned to believe that we must own something, that we only need to use for a specific function for a short while and then throw away?

Toys should be a perfect candidate for this approach.

We should be teaching our kids how to treat and think about the very first products they come into contact with- toys. We owe it to them to help them reduce the large debt to the environment we have left, and most importantly we want them to grow up with the right mindset and values and be innovative in shaping the economy of the future. 

Most of our efforts to battle this wasteful way to consume toys involve being restrictive in either the amount of toys (think only Christmas and birthday purchases) or being restrictive in the quality of play (think second hand shops or hand me downs of toys that don’t always give us the widest choices). This is because we have often thought of toys as objects that need to be purchased.

Thinking in Cycles might be a good solution.

By adopting a method or program that has the circular economy at its core we can provide our kids with a huge variety of high quality well-designed toys and tools for their development and fun without buying a single one. With a more cyclical program we can receive toys, experience them, pass them on and move on to the next set of experiences.

Let’s all join this worldwide effort together and let’s start from the very basics! Let us know what you think in the comments.

To inspire you here is what the EU think about circular economies!

https://ec.europa.eu/spain/news/20190218_%20The-EU-is-strongly-committed-to-circular-economy_es