The headlines were impossible for parents to ignore. Dangerous amounts of lead found in children’s toys. Massive recalls by every major toy company in the world. Questions about quality control, health effects and manufacturing standards. From April to November 2007, at least 38 toy lines were pulled from store shelves in Canada, and thousands of toys were tossed into trash bins around the world. You could almost hear the landfills groaning in agony. But in February 2007, just prior to the maelstrom, eco-friendly hope began to glimmer. At the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, professors Yoav Ziv and Assaf Eshet of Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Israel met with Peter Handstein, founder and CEO of HaPe International Ltd., a Chinese toy company with offices across Europe. The topic of discussion: designing innovative and engaging children’s toys made from environmentally sound and kid-proof bamboo.
Located outside Tel Aviv, Shenkar College offers degree courses in engineering and design, and holds an international reputation for a socially relevant, forward-thinking curriculum.
“Recreating old ideas with new materials is something whose time has come due,” says Eshet. “This project was a step in that direction. Bamboo has been used for centuries in hundreds of ways but doesn’t translate well on the international toy market, even though it’s a perfect material in terms of weight, structure, sound and feel.”
Environmentally speaking, bamboo is an ideal material for all mass-produced consumer products. It grows prolifically, thriving in dozens of different climatic zones on every continent except Antarctica. There are more than 1,500 species worldwide, several of which have been measured to grow over four feet in a 24-hour period. It’s virtually impossible to kill the stuff, too. Harvesting is actually beneficial to the plant, facilitating healthy regeneration for the purpose of ongoing farming. As opposed to hardwood trees that take 30 to 50 years to regenerate after cutting, bamboo is able to fully regenerate itself in just six months and can safely be re-harvested in as little as three years. The positive attributes don’t stop there. Bamboo releases more oxygen than equivalent groves of trees, and more successfully prevents erosion. It’s also incredibly strong, with tensile strength superior to many steel alloys and a higher strength-to-weight ratio than graphite – a key factor when you’re making items that are certain to get stepped on, crashed into, tossed around, and generally treated with playful abandon. Stacking up the all the facts raises the question: what’s taking toy designers and manufacturers so long to jump on the bamboo bandwagon?
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bamboo trivia
- Bamboo grows more rapidly than any other (woody) plant on earth
- Larger species can grow over 1 meter per day
- Bamboo stands release 35% more oxygen than equivalent stands of trees
- Unlike most trees proper harvesting does not kill the bamboo plant
- Thomas Edison successfully used a carbonized bamboo filament in his experiment with the first light bulb
- Bamboo related industries provide income, food and housing to over 2.2 billion people worldwide
- Anji is China’s largest bamboo forest, covering an area of more than ‘600 mu’ or ‘40 hectares’
- There are around 1,500 species of bamboo thriving in diverse terrain from sea level to 12,000 feet on every continent except Antarctica
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