Interview
What’s green and might just save the planet?
With plastic pollution hitting the headlines once again following COP26, the toy industry is stepping up its efforts to innovate and find new solutions to the problems of waste and landfill. ToyNews checks out the latest superhero material steering us towards a more eco-friendly future: Incredible Husk™
W
e’re focusing on decarbonising the toy industry by 2030.” As a company mission
statement, it’s ambitious to say the least. Keith Ridgeway, CEO of Green World Award Winners and Green World Ambassadors Incredible Husk International, is outlining its plans for the next 10 to 15 years. The plant fibre technology R&D company is putting its faith in products made from its world IP-protected mixed plant husk materials, produced using a top-secret binder recipe, to revolutionise the way toys are made, ensuring a fully sustainable, carbon negative earth-to-earth life cycle.
Sounds too good to be true? “That’s been the initial reaction, when I first get in the room with toy companies,” explains Keith. “They just don’t believe it at first. But when they touch and feel the product…” Decades in development, Incredible Husk is a simple idea that belies the clever science behind it. Millions of tonnes of plant husks – left over from the harvesting of wheat, corn, rice or other crops – are produced each year as an agricultural by-product, and are usually burnt, producing vast levels of CO2. Incredible Husk crushes these leftover husks and has found a way of binding them, using a
68 | toy news | Jan/Feb 2022
patent-protected, top-secret natural organic recipe, to transform them into an incredibly versatile material that can be compressed or injected to form items as diverse as cutlery, straws, toys, tableware, pet chews, sportswear and fashion accessories; Incredible Husk can also be made to look – and feel – just like stone, wood, cardboard or leather. But perhaps the best thing about the product comes at the end of its life cycle. “You can simply crush it up, and it becomes an organic fertiliser,” says Keith. Despite Incredible Husk’s multiple applications, its journey began with making toys. “At Nuremberg and London Toy Fair we use the trademark Husk Toys, and the strapline ‘The Little Car that Changed the World’,” says Keith. “How it came about is that I met my Swedish friends Manqui and Ting, and Malaysian inventors Peter and Lee – all brilliant engineers and scientists
– when they were showing their products many, many, years ago. And I looked at their range and said, ‘Have you tested them?’ They said yes. So I asked if they wanted me to test them, and when they agreed I dropped one on the stone floor and it cracked into thousands of pieces, because the recipe had too much starch in it. I thought Peter would chase me away, but instead they removed the product from the stand, because they knew it was dangerous to children. “Eventually, they came to London to meet me, and asked if I would set up Husk Toys with them. I agreed, they went back and perfected the product and the compression and injection processes, and that was that.”
Incredible Husk, Keith explains, is actually
two products: Incredible Husk, which is the basic material, and Incredible HuskPlus, which can be combined with plastic waste to make automotive parts, furniture, bricks, cladding, barriers and fencing, even gravestones. At every stage of production, processes are in place to ensure zero carbon production as a minimum, “but we strive for negative carbon production at all times,” says Keith. Meticulous care is
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