Kickstart: Adding green to the Rubik's Cube

Here's a 21st Century puzzle: How can toymakers be more sustainable?

Spin Master Ltd., which bought the Rubik's Cube brand in 2021, says it has one answer to that question with a new version of the classic 3D puzzle now made with 100 percent recycled plastic.

The Rubik's Re-Cube went on sale in January as the first major focus of Spin Master's "Playsponsible" initiative to improve its environmental footprint.

"The Rubik's Cube was chosen as one of the first toys for a green makeover because as an evergreen, high-sales-volume product made almost entirely out of plastic it was 'just screaming out to us as an opportunity,'" Tammy Smitham, vice president for communications and corporate citizenship at Spin Master, told Joan Verdon of Forbes for a Jan. 26 story.

Spin Master has also recently released versions of checkers and dominoes games using recycled plastics and told Forbes that the success of the Re-Cube will open the door for more recycled material at the company.

Trade group The Toy Association notes that research by The Insights Family shows that 64 percent of U.S. parents of kids age 3-9 said they were willing to pay more for toys with a better environmental footprint.

This may not be new, but I recently came across this blog post from 2021 about Charles Harrison, the industrial designer who was responsible for the look of another iconic toy, the View-Master.

Harrison was a freelance industrial designer when he was handed the assignment of making a more user-friendly version of the View-Master, which had been introduced in 1939 but until 1959 was more of a tool aimed at professional photographers rather than kids and families.

"My job was to adapt it to another manufacturing process so that it could be made less expensive, made a lot faster, reduce the costs, put it into an updated form so that it would be more appealing, and essentially, that's what I contributed to it," Harrison told Smithsonian Magazine in a 2008 interview. "As a consequence, it just happened to hit America at a time when it did a magical thing. It was low cost enough when I got done with it that they could buy it for children and let them play with it."

View-Master entered the Toy Hall of Fame in 1999. Harrison died in 2018.

Harrison was also the first Black executive hired at Sears, where he had a hand designing everything from plastic garbage cans to ride-on lawn mowers.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has extended the comment period for an update to its Green Guides, a voluntary program that aims to help companies make substantiated claims in their environmental marketing.

The FTC voted in December to update the program — first adopted in 1992 and updated in 2012 — and originally said it would be open to comments until Feb. 21, 2023.

But it has since changed that deadline to comment until April 24.

"Claims like 'recyclable,' 'recycled content,' 'compostable,' 'degradable' and 'ozone-safe/ozone-friendly' are covered in the current Green Guides, but should we take another look at what consumers understand those words to mean?" FTC asks in a news release.