Special Feature
Sustainability
A brighter future April 22nd marked the 50th anniversary of World Earth Day, an annual event dedicated to raising awareness of the various environmental challenges that face our planet. Toy World spoke to the toy companies addressing the challenges head-on, to find out how materials, packaging and play itself can pave the way to a greener future.
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lways something of a pathfinder, MGA Entertainment recently outlined the next steps it was taking on its sustainability journey, which has been spearheaded by the phenomenally successful L.O.L. Surprise! collectibles brand. The company’s partnership with the waste recycling specialist Terracycle, which kicked off in 2019, has been further extended to include Ireland as well as Britain and the USA, while a new bio-degradable L.O.L. Surprise! ball, plus a new patent-pending compound that facilitates the degradation of plastic in landfill conditions, will reduce single-use plastic waste even more. However, the company plans to go much further; in an announcement made in April, MGA outlined plans to make the entire L.O.L Surprise! packaging line completely degradable by 2021, while, by 2025, MGAE says it will only manufacture products that will break down safely when disposed of properly. “Our ongoing commitment to creating products that push our brands towards a more sustainable future is a firm priority both personally for our CEO Isaac Larian, and for the entire MGAE portfolio,” explains MGA’s senior vice president UK, Andrew
Laughton. “Sustainability is becoming more and more important and is on everyone’s agenda – our consumers are increasingly demanding it, and rightly so. As a global company, we feel it’s our commercial responsibility to help preserve our planet for the generations to come. We have a responsibility, as the biggest privately-owned toy company in the world, to lead the way towards more environmentally-friendly toy production, without compromising the play value of our products.” To coincide with World Earth Day 2020, Zuru also outlined a new programme which it hopes will prevent some 800 tonnes of single-use plastic entering the supply chain each year, by making the plastic stems and caps for its best-selling Bunch O Balloons from 100% fully certified and traceable postconsumer-recycled plastic. “It is important as a toy company to take necessary steps to make a change for the better and protect the future for our kids,” comments Renee Lee, VP of Global Marketing, Zuru. “Making these changes ensures we stay at the forefront of consumer trends; customers are increasingly interested in buying more sustainable goods. We are also future proofing our brands from regulations that may come into place,
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that restrict or tax certain materials.” Renee went on to outline Zuru’s 10-year sustainability plan; the company plans to rethink how it designs and manufactures high quality, sustainable goods, to reduce its use of unsustainable business practices and materials, and to drive the use of recycled materials as well as educating and aiding consumers on how to recycle responsibly. Mattel, meanwhile, is set to debut its first product aligned with its goal to achieve 100% recycled, recyclable or bio-based plastics materials in both its products and packaging by 2030. The iconic FisherPrice Rock-a-Stack will be made from sugarcanebased plastics and packaged in 100% recycled or sustainably sourced material. Fisher-Price will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2020, and by the end of the year, all Rock-a-Stack toys sold worldwide are on track to be made with plant-based plastics and packaged in 100% recycled or sustainably sourced material. The Rock-a-Stack toy, which was first launched by Fisher-Price in 1960 to introduce babies to relative size and stacking, will be made from a sugarcane-based polyethylene, a renewable raw material. Streamlining the toy’s materials means it can also be fully recycled, which will eliminate waste