How to Recycle Any Fisher-Price Toy for Free
If you have kids, you probably have too many toys. Even if you don’t buy much, there seems to be a constant influx of gifts from grandparents, birthday and Christmas gifts, souvenirs, and used toys from neighbors and friends. This can make the game room very crowded and cluttered. (And the kitchen, and the living room, and the basement … after all, all toys inevitably migrate).
When your little ones finally outgrow them (or beat them to the point where they don’t work anymore), the question is, what do you do with all of them ? While it’s easy enough to sell or donate carefully used toys to friends, family or a local charity, pirate ships and cash registers that are battered, broken and can’t be safely donated, you can either throw them in the bin. — which may come with a lot of environmental guilt — or participate in Mattel’s “PlayBack” program , which is designed to recover and reuse materials found in toys for use in future Mattel products.
When we last wrote about the program , it was only available in the US and Canada and only accepted Barbie, Matchbox, and MEGA brands. It recently expanded to include Fisher-Price products (including the Laugh & Learn, Little People and Imaginext brands) and is now available in France, Germany and the UK.
Designed to help Mattel reach its corporate goal of using 100% recycled, recyclable or biophasic plastic materials in all of its products and packaging by 2030, the PlayBack program makes it easy for families to enroll in the program to receive a prepaid shipping label by email. mail. . Simply print out the label, remove all batteries from the toys, repackage them (in any condition, no need to clean or repair, per their FAQ ) and ship to your local post office. All of these headless Ken dolls and MEGA Bloks will then go to the company’s recycling plant in East Aurora, NY to begin their recycling journey.
When possible, they reclaim the still usable materials of the old toy so they can be reused in new products. According to Mattel, “Materials that cannot be recycled as recycled content into new toys, we will either recycle into other plastic products or convert them from waste to energy.”
While it’s not clear exactly what this means, the PlayBack program certainly solves the problem of many parents who would like to do everything they can, no matter how small, to keep excess plastic from ending up in landfills.