Red, blue and yellow are very popular colors for toys. They’re thought to spur childhood development but now a new color is enticing toymakers… green. When you consider that most young kids will chew on anything put in front of them, healthy toys make a lot of sense.

Children probably don’t think about where toys came from or where they're going.

But Amy Hampton is.

She runs a day care and preschool where these kids learn and play every day.

"There are various things that you look at when you're purchasing toys," J.R. Slater says.
Slater works at the Target Toy Department

Some of the things she looks at include educational value, life-span and safety.

These days people really want to feel good about the toys they’re giving their kids.

"Especially with all the scares and stuff like that, about paint and about all the recalls and that kind of stuff they've been having. People are really looking for something that's going to make them feel better about giving a toy to their child," Slater says.

Many toy manufacturers are beginning to use recycled or environmentally friendly materials.

"A lot of those companies are seeing, 'What can we do to give back?' Whether it's the plastic, whether it's the box we put it in, whether it's even screws and nuts and bolts,” he adds.

Recycling makes a lot of sense to big toy companies particularly when you consider the scale of their operations.

"Whenever you're sending out 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 different toys and each one of those boxes is recycled, that's saving something," Slater says.

The bottom line for Amy Hampton is simple. She wants to give her kids safe toys from a clean environment.

Wooden toys are often a great choice but keep two things in mind.

Look for FSC-certified wood. That means it came from a sustainable forest or plantation. And for the really little ones look for unpainted and untreated wood just in case it becomes a chew toy.