We drove out today to my new favourite toy store in the whole world, Hot Toads.  The store itself isn’t all that “impressive” — it’s a small, concrete-floored basement room in a medical building.  There’s a wide variety of items available, but only maybe 2 or 3 of each, so the simple wooden shelves seem somewhat barren.  Puppets and stuffed toys hang by clothespins from simple lines strung across the room.

It’s what they carry that makes it special.  Plan Toys.  HaPe.  Schyller.  Plastic toys made from recycled milk jugs.  Non-toxic wooden toys.  Toys intended to enrich the mind and body of your children, not just feed into consumerism and branding.

There is a marbleworks set up for kids to play with.  And the pièce de résistance, a working 10-foot long train table made entirely out of Lego.

One of the cool items they have is a line of large toy cars called E-Racers.  These eco-responsible racers are actually made of bamboo.  I had a nice chat with the fellow working there… apparently these were the first toys to be made from bamboo, and I was surprised that bamboo had been used for clothes and cutlery and dinnerware and flooring but bamboo toys were still “pretty new”.

He filled me in on a fact I had previously been aware of.  Of course, bamboo is the new golden child of the eco movement: it grows easily and grows fast and is therefore a readily renewable resource with low environmental impact.  More and more products are using bamboo, either the pure wood or turned into fibers.  Bamboo wood is attractive and sturdy, and the fibers are soft and have natural antibacterial properties.  As worldwide consumer demand for bamboo has increased dramatically in recent years, some companies have taken to clear-cutting hardwood forests in order to make room for bamboo plantations.

Ugh.

Why can it never be simple?  Every responsible choice we come up with seems to lead to more problems.  CFL lightbulbs reduce energy usage by something like 90%, but then you have trace amounts of mercury to deal with.  Nuclear power creates no air pollution… but then what about the radioactive waste?  Replacing the plastic in your home means using more wood — which means cutting down more forests — or more metal, which must be refined and processed using lots of energy.  Safe, organic produce is trucked in from thousands of miles away, polluting along the entire journey and displacing local farmers who cannot match the prices.  Using home cloth (diapers, menstrual products, napkins, toilet paper, handkerchiefs) keeps disposable junk out of the landfills, but adds to your energy and water use cleaning them.  And now, the demand for eco-friendly bamboo leads to clearcutting of natural hardwood forests.

In most of these cases, the eco-friendly solution, while imperfect, is still a step in the right direction.  Sometimes a huge, ginormous step.  It’s ridiculous to say that because a proposed solution is not absolutely perfect, we should therefore stick with the far worse status quo.  I think of the CFL lightbulb controversy… yes, the mercury is an issue, but in my opinion it is by far the lesser of the two evils.  We shouldn’t stop working towards a solution that’s even better still, but that does not mean we should stay with the old-fashioned and wasteful technologies until then.

But clear-cutting hardwood forests for the bamboo?  That’s hardly a lesser evil.  That’s just greed.  It’s an unfortunate example of how the positive trend towards eco-consumerism is spawning a negative drive to commercialization and profit-mongering.  Every company now wants to brand itself as “green”, but you must look beneath the surface to discover how responsible they are truly being.

In any case, the fellow at Hot Toads assured me that HaPe is very strictly careful with where their bamboo comes from.  So the E-Racers are fine.  But I will myself be more careful in the future as well, and investigate where my bamboo fabric, cutlery, and wood products actually come from.

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