How to make toys from recycled materials: 7 original ideas

Would you like to make a fun, original gift that also helps the environment? Recycled materials are the perfect opportunity to give free rein to your imagination and create lots of toys. Cardboard boxes, plastic caps, straws, cork, anything you can find around the house can be used to get creative and make personalized, economical and fun toys for children.

Also, by doing this you will be instilling in your kids the importance of recycling and reusing. By the way! If you like crafts, we also have a fun post on how to recycle old jeans step by step.

Ideas for original recycled toys for children

If you also want to give a second life to waste and at the same time have fun designing and making crafts with the little ones at home, in this post we propose 7 ideas for making toys with recycled materials. Join Planet First!

An airplane with toilet paper rolls

The first thing you need to design a recycled airplane is a few rolls of toilet paper or kitchen towels that you have saved. Take two or four rolls, depending on the size, and open them in half to draw with a pencil two ovals (one should be twice as big as the other). Then take a paintbrush and tempera to paint the color of your choice on each of the ovals that you have cut out and that will form the wings of the plane.

Next, take a roll of kitchen roll that is quite long and paint it (don't forget to add the windows). It's important that you cut four holes on each side with a cutter so you can fit the wings. Then get creative and fill it with colour, pretty designs and stickers to make it even prettier.

Cardboard table football

Another of the ideas that we propose in this post is to make a foosball table. This recycled toy is very simple, but very original and fun. All you need is a shoebox, some tweezers and some skewers or long sticks.

Take the shoebox without the lid and make a couple of holes on each side to create the goals. Then make other small holes on each side to fit the toothpicks. As this is an ideal toy for two children, four long sticks, two for each child, will do the trick. Then turn the tongs into players, personalize them and put them on the sticks. And just like that, you'll have a table football made from recycled materials for the little ones at home.

A bowling game

If you are not very good at crafts, but you would like to make a toy from recycled material for children, we propose a bowling game. All you need to do is collect 6 or 9 actimel or smoothie bottles. Remove all the labels, paint and decorate each jar in a different colour. Then glue a ping pong ball to the top of each jar, which you should also have painted beforehand. Finally, get a ball and enjoy with your children!

A domino with cardboard

If you want to have a good time with your children and enjoy an afternoon full of fun, you can create a recycled board game as fun as dominoes, ideal for children between 6 and 12 years old. To do this, simply take a piece of cardboard, make the outline of each piece and then paint them with acrylic paint in black. Add the dots and lines of the pieces in white and your homemade dominoes are ready!

A recycled toy car

With a cardboard egg cup and four bottle caps you can design a fun toy car. The first thing to do is to take the egg cup and paint it. Depending on the size you want the car to be, you can cut it out or not. If you want a fire engine, for example, choose an egg cup of at least 8 pieces. And if you want a British bus, glue two egg cups, one on top of the other, to form the two floors of the bus ;)

Then take as many polystyrene balls as passengers you want to have in your vehicle and bring them to life by decorating and painting them. Finally, take the four plastic bottle caps and glue them together to add the wheels to the car made from recycled material.

Recycled puppet

We think this is a great idea to give a second life to paper rolls and plastic caps. To create your own puppet, you will need to take a toilet paper roll and paint it in the colour of your choice. Then design on a piece of paper or cardboard the face of the character or the head of the animal you want to represent. Glue it to the top of the roll and you will have the body and head together.

Then take four pieces of wool or string and glue them to the body to create the limbs. Don't forget to glue the bottle caps to the end of each limb. Finally, add four strings to each limb and tie them to two straws in the shape of an "X" to create the command to control the character. You're sure to have a great time making up stories - the kids will love it!

Snakes with cork

If you want to know how to make an original recycled toy, pay attention because you're going to love our last idea. Collect as many bottle corks as you can and when you have a few, cut them into three equal pieces each. Then, in each piece of cork, make a hole with an awl. Thread red wool through each of the holes, just as if you were making a necklace with beads, and add a knot at the beginning and at the end so that it doesn't come out.

Don't forget the head. For this we recommend that you take a whole cork, put some eyes on it with marker or stickers and let the wool stick out a bit to imitate the snake's tongue.

As you can see, there are a lot of ideas to make toys with recycled materials that besides being very economical, will help the environment. If you are a lover of crafts or you would like to have a good time with your children creating and imagining? What are you waiting for to choose one of these ideas?