to think that I'm probably single handed response the plastic crisis!

[rbmilliner]

Slightly light hearted but probably shouldn't be - Does anyone else with kids feel they are drowning under a mountain of tiny bits of plastic crap and rubbish that small children seem to accumulate?
I have spent the morning tidying up useless pieces of plastic tat that have either come off of the enormous pieces of plastic dd was given at Xmas or from the rubbish that comes off of the front of a magazine or out of a kinder egg!
I really didn't think she had that many toys but I've just filled 3 boxes full of stuff which when asked if she still wanted seem to be her favourite thing (despite not having looked at it for six months).
For the sack of the planet what do I do with this crap ???

Chucking it would be the worst... now that it’s all in your house the damage is done from the manufacture and transport point of view and it’s not yet in landfill, so I would tackle it at the other end.

Talk to everyone giving gifts to the children to cut it down for the children’s sake. Get family and friends to band together for a few ethical gifts when gifts must be given, rather than mountains of tat. (For ideas, see www.onehundredtoys.com/ or Babipur)

Organise group purchases for birthdays of school classmates, same idea as above.

Talk to your children about caring for the Earth and how overconsumption is bad for the planet, so they feel happier with a small number of quality toys. My 6 year old is absolutely on board, they do understand quite young.

Ah yeah - we have worked with DS to stop the buying of Kinder eggs, and only buy magazines that don’t foist plastic shite onto us. There should be campaign to stop publishers distributing all this tat, which mostly goes into landfill within weeks... here, child, here’s another piece of your planetary heritage destroyed, hope you had your 5 min of thrill!