20th September 2021
Submitted by Team: Toys Upcycling, Eunseok Kim Eileen Kim, Jiho Park, Dow Lee, and Evan Kim
YRE competition 2nd place winner, category for Video campaign Age 15-18
Giving new life to toys and upcycling them into new functions and purposes is a straightforward way to address several environmental issues plaguing our world. The main problem that is tackled is the issue of waste. With the ever-growing capability to easily produce millions of toys, it is tempting, and in manyways easier, to simply buy new toys for a child who wants them.
However, that convenience comes with a different cost - a cost that exists at the expense of the environment’s health. As toys become more complex, they become more difficult to disassemble for the sake of proper recycling. Not being able to be recycled properly, these toys pile up in landfills, contribute to pollution on land, and affect life on land. Moreover, the cheap plastics that are used to manufacture these toys often find their way into our oceans. The microplastics that are then dispersed into the water are consumed by fish, damaging ecosystems and life below water; to make matters worse, these microplastics may then consequently be consumed by people.
These issues surrounding clean water and sanitation directly affect the health of the environment, and they also have serious implications regarding accessible resources and healthy societies. The move to upcycling toys will help reduce the waste that goes to landfills and into the water, helping keep water clean, making cities healthier, and preventing irreversible environmental damage for more sustainable cities and communities.
The plan to upcycle toys to help them find new owners, new functions, or new purposes will help reduce the need for new toys while also taking advantage of the already existing supply of neglected used toys which leads to more responsible consumption and production. One of the reasons that many parents simply buy new toys is because of the ease of that process; there is no formal infrastructure for upcycling or sharing unused toys.
The introduction of upcycling toys could be a start of a growing industry or infrastructure that will eventually spread to other businesses, making upcycling much more accessible to the public. Furthermore, the establishment of such infrastructure may allow for those who lack resources to get the help they need. This is one step in the process towards creating sustainable societies that consume responsibly and protect the environment’s health.
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