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Art & Ecology:

Photoessays: Art and the Earth



Earthly Matters

Recycling for Fun and Profit


by Suzanne Seriff, Ph.D.


"Poverty was my Teacher."
- Encarnación Lopez, Tin toymaker, Guanajuato, Mexico


Have you ever felt like a king wielding a whittled stick sword and a painted paper hat? Did you ever fly a kite made from the grocer's plastic shopping bags? Could you win a race with a scrap-made scooter down a country road?

If your answer is "yes!" than you too can claim membership in a global community of children and adults alike--from Africa to the Americas to Australia--who pass the time and celebrate the moment with playthings made out of whatever materials they have at hand. Sometimes the scrap toys are recycled versions of traditional playthings in the creator's culture, including kites, puppets, masks, dolls, and games. Señor Velez Iñiguez owns a small toy store in Cuenca, Ecuador, where he sells a range of games and toys to the local children. When the winds start picking up in May and June, he makes kites out of the plastic shopping bags from his store. He sells these at low cost so every child is able to enjoy the sport of kite flying.

Other times the handmade toys replicate the most contemporary products of a modern global technology--film projectors, boom boxes, racing bikes, cars, even the latest military vehicles. Saarenald T. S. Yaawaisan is an itinerant toymaker in Monrovia, Liberia, who has long fashioned toys from found materials. When he first began making toys from flip-flop sandals, he found the raw materials on the beach near his home, along with scraps of plant fiber and plastic bottles. By the mid 1980s, Mr. Yaawaisan had begun to acquire his colorful raw materials directly from a sandal factory outside Monrovia.

Some of Mr. Yaawaisan's favorite subjects for his flip-flop toys are the many modern vehicles he has seen both in the popular media and on the streets where he lives.

Another example of kids making scrap toys inspired by the current events which surround them can be found in Port-auPrince, Haiti, in the early 1990s, when American armed forces were stationed at the military bases there. Soon after their arrival, local boys entertained themselves for hours designing miniature replicas of their heroes' impressive military vehicles. From popular plastic soft drink containers they cut and painted pint-sized copies of standard camouflaged tanks, helicopters, and military cars, as well as more specialized versions of the well-known American Chinook helicopter and humvee vehicle.

Whether made for fun or profit--to resemble the old or mimic the new--these ingeniously fashioned toys appeal to the creative impulse in each of us and have much to teach us about the lives and dreams of young and old alike throughout the world.

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