With all the new plastic containers for chips and snack foods, these interestingly shaped containers could be designed to become toys (such as building blocks or Hot Wheels jumps, etc.) once the food inside is consumed. What a way for a marketer to keep their product's name in front of the consumer.
A specific example is the Pringles Snack Stack individual serving container. With a slight redesign of the container they could stack on top of each other and allow Mattel's Hot Wheels tracks to be attached to them allowing the creation of jumps and hills, etc.
My youngest is using them now as little jumps, but I know he'd be begging me to purchase more if they actually were designed to fit with his tracks. And like a sucker, I'd be buying them. Isn't that what marketing is all about?
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This idea has potential in extension. Large boxes to contain washing machines and refrigerators could be printed to resemble miniature housed so that if the product were carefully removed, the cardboard box could become little houses that kids could use for play. Windows and doors could be cut out where indicated in the printing to enhance the effect.
Excellent concept - often kids have more fun playing with the boxes anyway!
I think the key to this idea is that marketers could keep their product name in front of their potential market for a longer period of time than it takes to consume the product.
I don't see appliance companies printing graphics on their boxes since most normal kids won't be in the market for a large appliance for some time. And neither will their parents. How often does anyone buy a refrigerator? A week after they buy it the box will be destroyed and in the trash. They'll make their next refrigerator purchase decision on how well the refrigerator works. And no one would base their decision to make such a large purchase on whether the box could be used for a week as a plaything. There's just no value for the manufacturer or for the consumer.
The toys out of product containers works though because the food products they contain are inexpensive, purchased regularly and children influence their parents purchases.
I like your idea, however, looking at the piles of plastic toys sitting around my house and eventually being thrown away, maybe we should recycle the plastic toys like we do aluminum cans. Milk containers and soda containers made of plastic are recycled but no mention of melting down the piles of plastic toys that we all get is in the works yet.
I voted 'for' based on grantgoldrush's great idea to have all that kid's plastic recycled.How do we get this back up into the mainstream of ideas based on her ecology minded input???
Recycling plastic bottles is just a simple matter of melting down thermoplastic material. The bulk of kids plastic toys have both plastic and metal parts that requires separation which might prove expensive. Theoretically a solvent might be able to dissolve away the plastic and then be evaporated and recycled to leave pure plastic for re-use. But some plastic is insoluble.
1. Maybe if you just chew it all up into little pieces, by either magnetism or weight the metal could be chaffed from the plastic.2. Does there really need to be metal in toys? - for a number of reasons.3. Are we talking about Lego-like stuff, Barbie/GI-Joe stuff, or etch-a-sketch stuff?
I think there is still validity to recycling a number of toys, even if it entails donation to a 'toy pool' where lost fragments are re-combined to create complete sets for distribution.
If the metal were magnetic it would be no problem but aluminum or zinc cannot be removed that way. Perhaps centrifuging might work.
The sole reason I bought Chubb's diaper wipes (besides the fact that I had a young child who wasn't potty trained) was that they came in stackable plastic boxes, that looked like giant legos, with prongs on top and recessed holes on bottom. They were great, and I still use several of them, years later,The pringles cans idea is exactly correct--with 100 brands on the market, it is a great marketing tie-in.