Parenting Site of the Week: BabyPlays.com
I don't know about you, but my kids are drowning in toys. We have a lot of family and they have been known to go a little bit overboard in their shopping. Anyway, I try to rotate out some of the toys so my son doesn't get bored (my daughter is too young to notice).
If you have kids 5 and under, there's a solution for the bored-toy syndrome: BabyPlays.com. Capitalizing on the popularity of online services such as Netflix, BabyPlays allows parents to borrow toys for a month or more at a time. Subscription plans allow you to choose 4-6 toys at a time and shipping costs are included. Toys are inspected and sanitized when they are returned, so you know you're getting a high quality item.
I think this is a nice solution for cutting back on the clutter around the house and the number of toys in landfills. What do you think? Would you consider borrowing toys for your kids?
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Comments
With a gazillion toys that already exist on this planet as well as in the land fills, I believe that recycling what is currently available is the greenest way to go.
However, recycling baby toys has been around for some time now….in the form of “Garage Sales” or “Donation Drops”. These pre-owned toys can easily be cleaned with a little soap and water to sanitize. Any other sanitizers may ultimately not be as safe for your children or for the environment.
In my own experience, I am the sixth out of eight healthy children and we were all brought up possessing pre-owned toys that we thoroughly enjoyed. My Mother has since passed that cost-effective practice on to her children which has saved my own family quite a few green-backs. It just makes sense to keep your cents while taking care of our home we call earth.
Here in Singapore the toy rental club started with the same sort of objectives as Lori Pope at BabyPlays - i.e. reduce the volume of toys going to landfill, provide quality play items and cope with kids’ changing interests - but we have adopted a different approach. Rather than Lori’s mail order approach we actually do deliveries (Singapore is a small, fairly densely populated island) and many clients collect from us. We also rent quite large items (slides, playhouses, ride-ons, inflatables, carseats, strollers etc), open up our premises for indoor play (popular in a hot, humid climate) and host birthday parties.
Different because our circumstances are different, but it’s good to see toy rental businesses meeting a need in diverse places.