Eco Kids USA's "Eco Dough" play dough is handmade by a very passionate and intense guy I met at the ABC Kids Expo and would have talked to all day if either of us had had the time. His company, which he runs with his wife, has the financial and moral support of Burt's-Bees-founder-turned-organic-clothing-company-Happy-Green-Bee-founder Roxanne Quimby. In addition to play dough Eco-Kids USA also makes a powdered tempera paint, also by hand, and sell colored pencils and art pads that are sourced out. We're guessing Roxanne's hand is still at work in the company, as they announced recently that they're relocating from California to Maine, which happens to be where she lives. If one wanted to speculate.

Their play dough is a rare concoction of all-natural ingredients and plant and vegetable extracts, dyed by beets, spinach, paprika, carrots, purple sweet potato, red cabbage, blueberries and tomatoes. They also make a gluten-free play dough, which is made with rice, banana or potato flour. That version will really cost you, but if you are needing gluten-free it is probably worth it.

We are do-it-yourselfers and would never think of buying play dough but handling this stuff makes it clear how you could justify it. Roughly one-cup-size portions of five vibrant but earth-toned colors of play dough come in a cardboard tube and are easy to get out and put away; our homemade play dough tends to take up the whole house and even with the artificial food colorings we never get colors half as rich. The moisture level is also uniformly just right - ours sometimes comes out a little, eh, sticky. Besides, many of us do buy play dough in a pinch, even if we like the idea of making it, but I always hated for our daughter to get all those weird Play-Doh ingredients on her hands, even if it is supposed to be non-toxic. (No, we don't have any evidence that Play-Doh is toxic. But still.)

A set of five colors of Eco Dough sells for $20 plus shipping from Eco Kids USA's well-stocked shop.

The only warning I'd issue is that these vegetable dyes can bleed. No Hair's bald head was tanning-cream orange when we peeled that Legoman helmet off her scalp and the color only washed about 75% off with a little dish soap. Z also had some stuffed dogs "eating" play dough cookies and they have a bit of yellow on them. Personally I think this is fine - it will probably come out of the dogs' polyester fur once we throw them in the washing machine and there's nothing wrong with a little fakin' bakin' when it comes to Z's dolls - better that than the blue. But you'd better have your child play with this stuff in the proper type of space, not on your kitchen butcher block countertop.

We haven't yet used the paint but are eager to. It seems even more unique (whoops, "more unique," can I get a shout-out from a peeved English major?) than the play dough. We'll let you know what we find.

Like making homemade play dough? Make a "to go" play dough kit for a day at a caregiver's.

We're most excited about the boats, which look fantastic. We've been searching for good boats that actually float on water for a while now, and can't wait to try these new toys from their Adventure Series after being somewhat disappointed with the first round. Between their great Sprig Hollow line (we reviewed Sprig Hollow toys here), their durable Eco-Trucks, and the look of this new lineup for their Adventure Series, we're pretty impressed with this company, which makes toys from a recycled plastic-wood composite they call SprigWood.




You can see more photos from Sprig's fall lineup in their Flickr photostream. Photos reproduced by permission.

Sprig Hollow toys are currently discounted 25-40% on Amazon.com from a list of $20-$35 for the various sets (they're now $15-$25). Whether the list prices changed or we mistook sale prices for MSRP in writing our previous review, we'd recommend buying at these prices - $35 is a bit steep for Bee & Butterfly's Farm, for example, but at $25 we think it's a good deal. Keep tightening up those prices, Sprig, and you'll be headed for world domination.

It's hard for eco-friendly toys to get a bad review these days, both because we all want to see mainstream toy companies clean up their act, and because we want to see these upstarts take over if (when?) they don't. This would only be a true Cinderella story if everyone in Fairyland had been calling her a beauty even when she slept in the fireplace. But for the sake of our story, let's pretend that even when Cinderella can't get a date to save her life, everyone in the kingdom is abuzz with how brightly she makes her wicked stepmother's marble floors shine.

We've been rooting for Sprig Toys ever since we heard about their first line of toy vehicles about a year ago. They're one of the standout companies that are recasting classic kids' toys for a greener age. With their new Sprig Hollow line, the company has truly lived up to its promise. But before I tell you how great Sprig Hollow is - in fact, because the line is so great - I first have to speak to anyone who might be disinclined to give the company a second chance, or who are debating between one of the toys from their early Adventure series and those in their new line.

Blends of recycled plastic and reclaimed wood have been used for years by the plastic lumber industry, and is a meaningful sign of construction technology running a tighter ship and reducing waste while capitalizing on new technology. Bringing this same material to the toy industry was an epiphany just waiting for the right company to capitalize on it.

But when Sprig sent us their Discover Rig and Baja Scout Side Kick vehicles to test drive last year, we were disappointed. The toy's "Sprigwood" material is attractive, with look both clean and "eco" communicated by rich colors and flecks of wood visible in the composite material. And we loved the concept - a USB-linked figure plugs into the vehicle, and the child's pushing (Discover Rig) or pumping (Side Kick) energy powers headlights and triggers sounds and stories. But the USB connection worked erratically from the get-go, neither had a battery to sock away even the few seconds of kinetic energy needed to offer smooth functioning with a child's erratic movements. If that wasn't bad enough, the sound quality was poor, making the USB-powered effects both a novelty and a nuisance. Ultimately, the toy's chunky, durable design virtually guaranteed that we'd treat it as an outdoor toy, which soon disabled its electronics.

All this for list prices of $60 and $25? We considered these toys a failure, and never reviewed them.

Despite our displeasure, the Discover Rig was nominated for three Toy of the Year Awards by the Toy Industry Association in advance of the NY Toy Fair: Most Innovative, Best Boy's Toy, and Best Specialty Toy. (They didn't win any of them.) We thought they needed to go back to the drawing board. With a high price tag and so-so features, Sprig's first line of toys had too many quirks borne of experimentation that just didn't pan out.

Later last year Sprig came out with a line of "Eco-Trucks" that went through a couple of drafts, and came out looking like pretty handsome, durable toy vehicles. They feature big chunky handles for kids to grab onto and use their toys like the tools they really are - the kind of "a-ha!" moment toy designers (and reviewers) live for. They also brought the price down to $15 a vehicle, which means they can actually compete with similar toys and beat them in the kind of obvious and compelling ways that make people ditch well-established brand names.

But even that couldn't have prepared us for Sprig Hollow. These toys are just plain brilliant.

Sprig Hollow is a world of agriculturally-employed "bugs" whose current operating capital include a couple of farm trucks, a helicopter, and a gadget-rich farm that are a little hard to describe. They snap together quickly and easily, but they are not building toys; they are full-featured, three-dimensional toys for an age of resource consciousness and, yes, scarcity. But they are designed in ways that turn their leanness into assets. The barn is lightweight and thus easy for our four-year-old Z to carry, and its permeable walls and lack of a roof don't bother her in the least - in fact, the skeletal design just offers her more access points. The only misstep is the farm's funnel and chute, which is supposed to clip together through a slot in the barn's planks but quickly slips apart every time. It's a casting or a materials issue - one that can be expected from a new company working with new materials, but that makes a component of the set frustratingly non-functional nonetheless.

The figures are small, unassuming achievements in their own right, consisting of brightly-colored SprigWood bodies and rubbery pieces that combine a unique facial expression (presented on a button-shaped knob that pushes through the head) and a pair of one-of-a-kind wings. The faces and wings are interchangeable, and the faces have been designed with eyes only, meaning they can also be rotated 180 degrees for a dramatically different expression (angry/frustrated becomes sad, etc.). It's a ton of good design packed into an astonishingly small bit of plastic, and the characters speak volumes about Sprig's commitment to thoughtful product design. The figures have a gap between their legs that matches slots on the various vehicles.

We've saved the best for last here: The trucks/ Bee and Butterfly's Farm, the largest set in the line (which retails for about $26), includes a flatbed truck, and Dune Bug's Sand Truck adds a pickup bed; both feature cabs that can be removed and used as shovels, while the Sand Truck's pickup bed and cap each double as independent play tools as well. The line also includes the fun Dragonfly's Heli-Scooper, with each separate vehicle selling for around $14 with a figure.

Here's a video of me putting a truck together - it's the flatbed truck, but I add the pickup bed and cap so you can see that these are interchangeable parts. Older kids may enjoy deconstructing and rebuilding these toys, but the most interesting thing about them is not in the building, it's in how they create the shape and strength of a one-piece, injection-molded plastic toy using smaller, lighter construction. Add to that the fact that this is recycled, wood/plastic composite material, and you're looking at a very environmentally-conscious take on "plastic" toys.


You can hit the ZRecs Archives for more of our thoughts on the nuances of what makes toys "green."

The company is planning new toys for the Sprig Hollow line, and we can't wait to see them.

We're naming the Sprig Hollow line a ZRecs Top Pick, and there's no hype about it. Sprig Hollow is one of the best new toy lines we've seen this year, and we believe that with it, the company has truly come into their own.

Healthy Child Healthy World has set up a contest that has become one of the best-kept secrets in online giveaways at the moment. Beyond our personal ties to this great organization and our love for what they do, I have to say to you, as a reader who probably likes free stuff and is proud of something your family does to help the environment, this is a quick and easy contest you really shouldn't miss.

HCHW is collecting videos of what families do to help the environment or family health. You can get the deets on their YouTube page. But here's the thing: The contest ends April 18, has ten prizes including an iPod Touch and a year's supply of Seventh Generation cleaning products, a Flip camcorder, Seventh Generation cleaning products, and the new paperback edition of HCHW's great eponymous resource, Healthy Child Healthy World. They currently have fewer entries than prizes - proof positive that the best giveaways don't always rise to the top as far as online attention is concerned.

We'd have entered ourselves if it weren't for our own ideosyncratic constraints. We are pretty restrictive with what we put online featuring Z - a home policy that has nothing to do with what other people do for and with their kids online, and everything to do with how much exposure Z'd get as a cutie-pie "endorser" of products if we didn't draw that line. (Shudder.) We want her to be able to choose her own path, and we don't want to trade on her charms to advise readers on products we like, or have her associated with a cause or position she has no control over. In other words, unless you are in our exact situation we think you should enter and have fun with this!

Here's one example of the (few) videos they've received so far:



You can do more, or much less, and be proud of your contribution to the conversation. As for those prizes, folks, you really can't get better odds. Videotape your kids sorting plastics or blending up an organic smoothie and you've made what is likely to be a very valuable investment of your time. As the organizers point out, you don't even have to have a video camera - you can use some online software like SlideRoll to create a video from still photos.

Get started here.

This evening Z, Jeremiah and I experimented with natural Easter egg dyeing.


We boiled enough different vegetables and other plant materials we were reusing our few cooking pots two or three times each. Beets, prickley pear cactus tuna, and blackberries for shades of red; spinach in hopes of a yellow or even a green; and yellow and red onion skins.




The onion skins we soaked, then wrapped around eggs, wrapping them afterwards in scrap fabric from an old sheet, from a great tutorial we found on Instructables. The wrapped eggs were then boiled


The rest of the plants were each chopped and boiled for about ten to fifteen minutes. For some things, this may not have been long enough.


The strained juices looked promising - that's the beet stock in the center, flanked by prickley pear and blackberry.


As you can probably see, the spinach stock didn't have much verve. At least, not after we accidentally dumped a bit too much vinegar in it (a dash of vinegar is supposed to help the color stick to your eggs). That mug isn't filled with anything you'd want to drink - it's a turmeric stock, which we'd hoped would make a nice yellow dye. It probably would have worked better if we'd boiled the eggs in it, but as a dye it was pretty pale.


Some early tears made it clear a fresh dinner needed to accompany the dyeing event...


Including, naturally, freshly boiled eggs. (The "not pretty ones," Z insisted.) She has eaten hard boiled eggs at salad bars, but this apparently was the first she'd seen unshelled before her very eyes. She was tickled.


The eggs wrapped in red onion skins were the most beautiful, followed by those left to steep for a while in the beet juice. We'd recommend beets over either of our other two red options, hands down.


With a light rubbing of vegetable oil after they had dried, the eggs were truly lovely.

If you've used natural pigments to dye eggs, let us know your tips! We'll definitely be doing this again next year, and will rotate in some other plant materials to try for some more strong colors. We'll also be wrapping a lot more in red onion skins...

Have you or your kids ever noticed that if those environmentally friendlier cellulose packing peanuts ever get wet, they stick together? The folks at Cadaco did, and to their credit, they saw a marketable toy. The result is EnviroBLOX, colored tubes made of that same fibrous, biodegradable puffy stuff. They were a big hit with our family, with Z and her in-laws happily building a variety of random-looking structures and people out of them for an afternoon.

Another big plus: These things are cheap. An "X-Treme Builder" set with 400 small pieces, the best value, runs $15; a "deluxe" set with around 100 pieces costs $10.

Images in this post are courtesy of BoingBoing Gadgets, whose reporter saw these at the 2009 Toy Fair in New York.


I do feel obligated to say that claims for this toy's eco-friendliness, like that of anything made from corn, could be taken too far. Like bioplastics, ethanol, and other corn-based products, things do come down to petroleum eventually, as corn is among the most energy-intensive crops on the planet, demanding (at its current rate of production) massive amounts of chemical fertilizers (produced using fossil fuels), petroleum-driven machinery, chemical pesticides, and other goodies that take a major toll on the world's topsoils, waterways, and environment in general.

I say this not to knock this product - clearly, buying a few packs of EnviroBLOX is a big improvement over a pile of magnetized plastic building rods (for example) that are used for a few years and then discarded. The problems of corn-based products may be years into our shared future, and I look forward to the day when that's the biggest of our environmental problems. But if it's sustainability you want, the answer to A vs. B is often C. (In the paper versus plastic shopping bag debate, for example, it's "cloth."

Have you used these, or used eco packaging peanuts to the same effect?