She hopes to limit the environmental impact of dolls
Toys, according to Sally Edwards, a researcher at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at UMass-Lowell, are the next frontier in environmentalism. The idea occurred to her when she was watching her young daughter play with a doll.
"As children, we all love toys," said Edwards. "And as adults, we like to think that they're safe and benign. But are they as benign as they appear?" Edwards believes that something as seemingly innocuous as a child's doll could potentially raise a flurry of ecological and social concerns.
Is it manufactured using hazardous chemicals? What happens when it ends up in a landfill? Are the people who make it being treated unfairly? These sorts of questions are the subject of the emerging field of "sustainable design." Its practitioners, like Edwards, study the entire life cycle of a consumer product, from the factory, to the home, to the garbage dump.
"Seventy percent of the environmental impact of a product is determined at the design stage," Edwards said. "I look at who makes it, who uses it, and what happens at the end of its life."
Edwards, 49, has made a particular study of dolls. She has studied factories from China to Germany to Peru, examining differences in materials and design, and in how they put their dolls together.
Edwards knows a thing or two about environmental hazards. Before going to UMass, she spent 14 years working for the EPA, starting by managing the cleanup of a superfund site in New Hampshire. The experience of managing hazardous waste sites taught her a valuable lesson.
"It's very difficult to clean contaminated groundwater. In fact, it's a fallacy to even think that we can always clean up contamination. It's much easier and cheaper to prevent it." Prevention is the spirit of sustainable design.
Having shown a talent for talking to businesspeople about why they shouldn't spill toxins, the EPA loaned Edwards to the state government of Alaska to develop a pollution prevention program for the oil and gas sector.
"I recall my first day on the job," she said, laughing. "I walked into a literally smoke-filled room full of men wearing cowboy hats and boots. They weren't particularly happy to meet a young woman from Boston telling them about pollution prevention. But eventually we made progress."
Cathy Crumbley, program director at the Lowell Center, said Edwards is a natural at moderating such heated debates. "All these different companies, and organizations, and people -- it would make most people throw up their hands," Crumbley said. "She enables everyone to feel part of the process."
The daughter of a neurophysicist, Edwards showed an early inclination for sciences, getting a degree in biology from Stanford before studying Environmental Health Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. It was while researching her Ph.D. in "Work Environment" at UMass-Lowell that she hit upon dolls as a subject.
At the Käthe Kruse doll factory in Germany, which she visited for her thesis, she saw that high environmental standards and happy workers kept a business profitable for more than a hundred years. (It's still thriving today). In a village in the Andes Mountains, she found a factory staffed by single mothers who have become economically independent by making dolls out of wool and natural dyes.
The travels inspired Edwards this year to start the Sustainable Toys Initiative, which is an effort to try to bring together manufacturers, designers, and government with the goal of building toys that do not harm children, workers or the earth.
"I have a vision of being able to walk into toy store and not see a lot of toys I know were made with hazardous materials," Edwards said. "I want to see delightful things with no harm done."
Fact sheet
Family: Partner Sally, a geriatric psychiatrist. Daughter Hazel, 10.
Hobbies: Nature adventures like kayaking, rafting, and glacier skiing. Also, gardening.
Ambition: To see toys and other consumer products labeled for environmental sustainability, like organic food. "Consumers often don't have the information to make the right choices. How about a toy label that gives you information about how it's made?"
