 |
| Before: Love, exciting and new. |
I recently tested a truly heinous “oral
sex simulator” sex toy for a magazine. The contraption involved 10
chihuahua-sized plastic tongues that swirled furiously,
pinwheel-fashion, slapping at your most delicate bits while whirring
furiously, like a peeved lover who wished you would just have a
damn orgasm already. I can only imagine what it would do to an
errant pubic hair.
I used the thing, because I am a
serious journalist, but what was I supposed to do with it, after? It seemed wasteful to just throw it
away, not to mention the embarrassing tarting up of my weekly
garbage. And right now there are no blue recycling bins where you
can toss your toys after they've put in their time.
How is it that old sex toys have no
dignified resting place? It's for a variety of reasons, the top
being that they're sex toys, ewwww.
Some recycling facilities
won't take them because they consider them bio-hazards. Recycling is
also tricky because toys can contain problematic and/or toxic
materials like batteries, motors, and weird-ass “jelly”
materials. Money is also an issue. It's just not profitable (yet) to
deal in used Fleshlights. “The biggest issue is the mixed polymers.
This is an export only item, mostly to China. The market for mixed
plastics has been quickly eroding since 2008,” said a recycling
industry expert, who wished to speak anonymously because...sex toys.
“But if there were large quantities available on a consistent
basis, I'm confident that there would be a home available for
recycling.”
Even though I have, perhaps, “a lot”
of sex toys hidden under my bed (the world's #1 hiding place for sex
toys, followed by the nightstand drawer), it's not the kind of large
quantities I would need to set up an in-home export business. What
are the options, then?
Throw them away.
Sure, you can take out the batteries
and recycle them, but the rest will end up in a landfill, stubbornly
not biodegrading, so our descendants will be well aware of what big
pervs we were. This is not ideal.
Buy from a place that recycles toys.
Right now that's exactly two places:
UK-based sex toy company
Lovehoney
and
Come As You Are
(CAYA), an “anti-capitalist, co-operative sex shop” in Toronto,
Canada. Lovehoney's Rabbit Amnesty Programme is the most successful,
running for 10 years in the UK, and now offers recycling to U.S.
customers (
click here for info).
“Everything we receive gets checked
to make sure it qualifies for the recycling scheme. The toys are then
sorted into containers and sent to our nearest WEEE Recycling Plant.
They’re pretty used to receiving mountains of colourful phalluses
from us now, “ explains Richard Longhurst, co-owner of Lovehoney.
“The unwanted toys get crushed and separated into their different
materials. You can see a
video
of the whole process on Youtube. It’s quite entertaining to see
a bulldozer with a shovel-load of sex toys and see rabbit vibrators
whizzing round conveyor belts and crushed into little pieces.”
Metals might be made into new gadgets and plastics be made into a new container or coffee mug, perhaps one just like the one you're drinking out of right now! Pause for spit take.
At CAYA, things aren't quite as
advanced, but they are doing their sincere Canadian best. “We
encourage folks to drop off their busted sex toys and give them a 15%
discount for their efforts,” says Jack Lamon, Worker-Owner at CAYA
Co-operative. “While we can't recycle all sex toy materials, we can
deal with abs plastics, silicone, and the electronics contained
within. The silicone we're hanging onto for a top-secret in-house
re-purposing project. The biggest issue for us is the vinyl, rubber,
and mystery plastics. None of these materials should have ever been
in sex toys in the first place, and they certainly shouldn't be in
landfills! Anything we get that is an antique, we sterilize and keep
for our collection. We've found some original Fun Factory pieces in
the recycling, not to mention Wahl Vibrators from the 1960s.”
Although you are welcome to send your box of worn out butt plugs to
CAYA, Lamon doesn't actually recommend it. “The shipping cost is
probably too prohibitive for most folks, and honestly, we feel weird
about people shipping stuff to us from too far away - I suspect that
the gas/oil and emissions undo the good work of recycling - from an
environmental perspective,” he said. Instead he encourages...
Sex Toy Swaps
“Sex toy swaps are amazing and I
would love to see more happen in local communities,” says Lamon.
“Folks have tons of amazing stainless steel, glass, and leather
toys that would be better re-used than recycled--and that stuff is so
expensive to buy new.”
The thing is, most people have a huge
issue with used sex toys, despite the fact that we happily re-use
penises and other real body parts all the time. We're so squeamish
about it that it's difficult to have a serious discussion about used
toys without everyone giggling like a bunch of 5
th
graders. When I asked readers of my
sex
blog—a pretty progressive group--if they'd consider a swap,
only one person would admit to it.
Still, a few determinedly green and/or
thrifty souls are willing to give it a go. “I have a small group of
friends I trust and am very comfortable sharing intimate things with,
and every once in awhile we do a toy-swap. I know it sounds like a
terrible and kinda creepy idea in general, but really, if it's
sterilizable and comes from someone I trust, why not exchange that
glass g-spotter that I never actually use for an awesome purple
silicone dildo that doesn't quite work for my best friend?” posted
rhiannonstone
on Metafilter.
Re-using sex toys most likely has some
historical precedence. As one of my readers pointed out after
a
post on the early 1900s vibrator hysteria treatments, “I would
hazard a guess that the doctors did not purchase a new device for
every patient.” (Even if you have no qualms about unknown things in
your orifices, you should avoid porous toys and ones made with toxic
materials--a decent general rule for new toys as well.)
Go rogue.
Some people use them as artistic
inspiration.
Subtle Dildo, an
instillation art project, ponders the presence of plastic in our
lives with a photo series, each featuring a Where's Waldo-like hidden
dildo. Lovehoney offers a
cheeky list of sex toys hacks including a butt plug light pull, dildo
book ends, and a sex doll turned scarecrow. And, according to a
discovery by
this
dude on YouTube, some folks just toss their used dildos into the
empty lot behind the Peddlers Inn, in Ulysses, Kansas (not
recommended).
Sell them online.
Ebay doesn't allow it, but sites like
Craigslist, which technically also doesn't allow it, has a small
black market, especially for generally unaffordable high-end toys.
And the year-old
used sex toys
subreddit currently has almost a dozen items up for grabs, including
the WeVibe 4. New, they'll run you about $150, but the seller is
accepting offers. “Just doesn't work as expected for the wife,”
he explains. So far, there's one offer. For 40 bucks.
Postscript: If the idea of buying used
sex toys online skeevs you out, you should definitely not read
the National Association for the Advancement of Science and Art in
Sexuality's (NAASAS) investigation
that found that “many” online sex toy retailers were selling used
toys. To determine that the toys were used, these investigators
weren't using some sort high tech DNA analysis—they were just
looking at the stuff!
Reads the NAASAS report in a
particularly hideous string of words. “Indicators noted in the
study to determine if a sex toy had been previously purchased were
physical evidence found on the actual sex toys inside their packaging
such as human body hair (including pubic hair), vaginal and anal
secretions (including fecal matter), saliva, finger prints, lubricant
residue, animal fur, lint from clothing and more.”
I told you not to read it.
xoxo
jill
(This first ran in AlterNet. Photo courtesy Doc Johnson who gave it to me after my fabulous tour of their magical sex toy factory wonderland.)
