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Circular toys (not talking about their shape!)

We'd love your help thinking about how to make toys 'circular' in Ireland.

We exist to inspire a playfully sustainable world: offering 750 sustainably-made new toys is one part of that; keeping toys in use longer is the other. 'Circular' means sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and as a last resort recycling.

  • Rejoue is a French social enterprise that refurbishes used toys - checks, cleans, repackages, sells in a bright mainstream mall toystore. It's doing well and growing.
  • Whirli was a national, by-courier UK toy library. It was venture-capital backed and just went into administration (bankruptcy).

We considered starting an Irish Whirli last year...but higher courier costs here made us nervous (and maybe we were right!) So instead we started a learning community, to help people start toy libraries in their area: so far 2 have succeeded with their local public library!

But we're still excited about the Rejoue model. We just started an Irish Government funded programme (CIRULEIRE) to explore it. Here are our open questions, love your ideas!

  1. Which toys to collect? Anything, or a specific list to reduce complexity?
  2. How to collect them, in a cost-effective way that gets only good-condition toys?
  3. Who could we pay to do a great job of checking and cleaning them?

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