Ecotronic’s Wind-Up Mr. Robot Head & Battery Free Green Toy Collection
by Desmond Williams, 02/14/10
Fact #1: “Only 2% of batteries are currently recycled — the rest end up in landfills and are poisoning our planet.” Fact #2: “Kids love electronic toys.” Add these two facts together and you get the starting point from which Ecotronic has launched a line of wind-up, shake-up, pump-up powered toys. The quirkiest is an odd activity game called Mr. Robot Head. I remember encountering a very similar incarnation at a street fair in my youth. The goal is to toggle a metal ring from one end of a winding length of wire to the other. If you don’t have a steady hand, and the metals meet, Mr. Robot Head is sure to let you know it by buzzing loudly and flashing his LED eyes. Colorful cell phones and touch-button duckies, an FM radio and a beeping boombox, microphones, flashlights, and rockets round out the Ecotronic battery free toy collection. Each item comes boxed in the Gekopak, “bio-degradable packaging that’s easy to open, has no dangerous ties and wires and uses nothing but recycled paper.”
