Green Options

Starting with the release of Paul Blart: Mall Cop on May 19, Sony’s standard-def, single-disk DVD releases will be greener than ever before.

According to reports, the DVD cases will be made with 20% less plastic, and the paper will be 30% post-consumer recycled content. They’re also doing away with any cardboard outer sleeves. From Green Biz:

By switching to the lower-impact packaging, Sony Pictures expects to reduce its annual carbon emissions

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(See also Jennifer Lance’s article posted last month on “edutainment.”)

Campaign For a Commercial Free Childhood, a coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and parents, announced today:

As a result of CCFC’s Federal Trade Commission complaint, Baby Einstein has completely redesigned its website and is no longer making educational claims about its DVDs and videos. In other words…no longer will Baby Einstein DVD’s be pitched to parents as not only appropriate but good for growing infants! Which makes sense since The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time for those under two.

While reading one of my favorite parenting blogs Z Recommends, I noticed an advertisement for Swaptree. Swaptree provides an online service where you can trade books, music, dvds, and video games for free with other users. This is a great idea for children’s books, especially as children outgrow pictures books and are ready for chapter books.

Swaptree was started because the founders noticed:

• their mothers were frequently trading books with their network of friends
• their nephews played a new $55 dollar video game for a week or so, and then never again
• their shelves (and everyone else’s shelves that they knew) were filled with hundreds of CDs and DVDs that weren’t going to see the inside of a CD or DVD player anytime soon
• the price of college textbooks had gotten out of hand