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A tale of two plastic toys
If someone handed you two plastic toys of about the same size and weight—one
mass manufactured and one 3D printed—would you be able to guess which
toy's manufacturing process caused less environmental harm? Many people
would jump to the conclusion that the 3D printed plastic toy was greener than
the mass produced action igure. Would you agree?
The answer lies in each toy's product lifecycle, or the winding chain of
production, distribution channels and stores that carry a product to its ulti-
mate destination—the point of sale. The tail end of a product's lifecycle is its
disposal, when its human user throws it away.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario where both toys could talk. In this sce-
nario, you ask both plastic toys to tell you where they were made, how they
were assembled, and inally, how they reached the person who bought them.
Let's imagine that the mass-produced toy was irst to answer your question.
This toy would inform you that it began life as a loose bunch of plastic pel-
lets the size of ish eggs called nurdles. Sometimes rogue nurdles escape their
packaging and wash into oceans and rivers where they worm their way into the
nutritious zoo plankton base, choking and slowly poisoning marine animals
and sea birds. This toy's nurdles were successfully fed into an injection mold-
ing machine and forced into the shape of the toy, which was dumped onto an
assembly line.
The assembly line was probably located in an offshored factory in Southern
China where an estimated 80 percent of the world's toys are produced.
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The
mass-produced plastic toy came into being in the company of thousands—
maybe millions—of identical plastic toys. Its irst glimpse of a human face was
likely the factory worker who snapped its plastic parts together.
Mundane as mass-produced plastic toys may appear, most are cosmopolitan
world travelers. This toy and its legions of identical colleagues left their factory
of origin in a shipping box and embarked on a journey of several thousand
carbon-emitting miles over oceans, rails, and roads. The end of their journey
was a loading dock behind a store at the mall where a local employee unpacked
the boxes. After a few weeks sitting in the store's inventory, the toy was even-
tually placed onto a shelf to await its sale and inal destination: a child's eager
hands and home.
Let's imagine that the hypothetical scenario continues and the 3D printed
toy takes its turn. The 3D printed toy would explain that it is the only one of
