This Jenga set is made of recycled fishing nets

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/04/this-jenga-set-is-made-of-recy.html

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Because Tim Curry has moved on to better roles?

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When W Gibson said the future is here but not widely distributed, this seems like one of the kinds of things he might have had in mind. What excuse is there to make an inert, low-content, long-useful-life item like a toy block out of new materials?

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So why only nets?

Does it have to do with the composition of the material? I would figure all the plastic floating around the oceans is harmful to marine life, not only nets.

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Off topic…

Ghost Nets

Haven’t Scooby and the gang proven already that nets only catch humans in disguise, not actual ghosts? I mean, like they’d pass right through. /s

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The tendency of nets to come in large, durable, chunks that excel in snagging on things, while it makes them particularly dangerous, probably also makes them relatively attractive from the perspective of recovery efficiency.

Snag a bottle and that’s pretty much what you get. Snag part of a net and you could end up bringing in a nice big piece, whose design demanded that it not tear easily in doing so.

Also wouldn’t be a huge surprise if, while informally or just especially cheaply, manufactured exceptions exist; decent nets started life made from fairly good materials to cope with their requirements; plastic bags not so much.

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Excuses:

  1. New wood products actually sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.

  2. Because you should carefully think what you make toys from. If you give kids toys made from recycled fishing nets (impure, mostly PET?) you possibly expose them to endocrine disruptors.

  3. Oil-sourced plastics (non-renewable resource) should be saved for things that actually need them.

All those are debatable, but at least in the case of fishing nets I think they should mostly be recycled to… fishing nets.

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I’m not sure what the life expectancy of the average jenga set is; between user disinterest and loss of individual parts; but isn’t ‘inert, low-content, long-useful-life’ exactly the case where you’ll get the best value per unit material used; with concerns about reducing the production impact of new units and recycling the dead being most acute in consumable, high-content, short-useful-life objects?

I don’t get the impression that jenga sets are often offered heirloom status; but that’s mostly because people get bored with them or lose pieces. If you were so motivated the service life would be ridiculously long.

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What about dolphin residue?

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I can’t wait to throw it back in the ocean! We really should not be removing these majestic creatures from their natural habitats.

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