Sustainability

We only make toys that already have homes

Factory toys get made by the million and shipped across oceans hoping someone buys them. The ones nobody buys get landfilled. My Lab works backwards: most toys are printed after you want them, and the stall stock is printed in small batches I can actually sell. There is no warehouse, no container ship, and no mountain of unsold toys. A toy that is never made is the greenest toy of all.

Even the printer's poop gets a job

When my printer changes colors it squeezes out a little rainbow blob to clean the nozzle. Most print shops bin them. I am going to seal the best ones in little acrylic boxes and sell them at the stall as Genuine Printer Poop. Toys that print with cosmetic blemishes will not get binned either; they will become Oops Shelf mystery toys at a discount. Our two weirdest products will exist because throwing things away annoys me.

The plastic, honestly

• Most toys are PLA, a plastic made largely from corn starch instead of oil. It prints at lower temperatures than oil plastics, which also means less energy per toy.
• Honesty part: PLA is industrially compostable, not backyard compostable, and a toy is not a single-use fork. The greenest thing about a toy is being played with for years, and flexi toys are built to survive exactly that. Broken-in-normal-play toys get replaced, and I want the old one back when possible.
• The see-through toys are PETG, the water-bottle plastic family, chosen because it is tough enough to last. Every filament's manufacturer documents are public on our safety page.

Made here, sold here

A typical toy travels thousands of miles before it reaches an Austin kid. Mine travel from our house in Austin to a market table across town. Short trips, small footprint, and you can literally watch your toy's birthplace on the live cam.

The people part

ESG is not just plants and plastic. This Lab is a kid learning to run a real business with a parent supervising every order, safety documents published where anyone can read them, and profits that go into more filament and the occasional taco. Our safety page says exactly where each toy's certificate stands, our terms are written so kids can read them, and when we say made in Texas, we mean this actual house.

What we are still working on

• Recycling failed prints and support scraps into new filament needs special equipment; for now scraps are saved in a bin I refuse to throw out. Watching that space.
• Moving core solid-color toys to a filament that is toy-safety-certified at the material level.
• Lighter, plastic-free packaging as we grow. Bags at the stall are paper already.