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?