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Project Mission, Vision, and Approach
The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production formed the Sustainable Children’s Products Initiative in partnership with GreenBlue in 2007 to promote the sustainable design and development of children’s products. The goal of the first phase of this project was to engage the toy industry supply chain and its stakeholders in a dialogue about how to improve the design and development of children’s products to make them more sustainable.
One of the first products of this stakeholder group was the development of an ambitious vision of a sustainable children’s product that draws from the vision for sustainable packaging developed by the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a project of GreenBlue, a non-profit institute based in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Sustainable children’s products are:
- Made from materials that are safe and healthy throughout their lifecycle
- Manufactured using clean production methods, under humane working conditions
- Meet market criteria for cost and performance
- Maximize the use of renewable and recyclable materials and are designed for disassembly, recycling and remanufacture
- Optimize the efficiency of materials, energy and water use in production and consumption
- “Appropriately durable” - products designed for long term use can be repaired and reused and products designed for one time use are biodegradable
- Sourced, manufactured, used, and recycled using renewable energy
This definition serves as a compass to guide our work. Few products meet this definition today. It is our long-term goal that the design of children’s products will continually improve and eventually meet most if not all of these criteria.
Approach:
In phase one of this project, the Lowell Center convened a dialogue with a group of stakeholders throughout the toy industry supply chain (see Background). In phase two of this project, we are supporting efforts to develop criteria and an eco-label that will identify sustainable children’s products. In addition, we are conducting research on companies that are developing sustainable children’s products and also examining alternatives to some of the toxic chemicals in these products.
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