THE last time I took the cudgels for the environment, it was in high school. I was involved in veganism, as I was in an Adventist school where you stumbled upon “veggie meat” (the most sorry-looking “meat” one could ever see, made out of, well, vegetables and batter) and quickly guilt-tripped by an enumeration of what’s so wrong about eating pork chops.
I sat my mother down and seriously talked her into veganism. “Mom, pork chop isn’t cool,” I would say. “Do you know how hard it is for the mommy pig to lose her baby pig?” I would go on and on but, as it happened, you can’t always have your way and every time I saw pork on the dinner table, I wondered what would the mother pig say if she saw us eating her baby pig: “Kanina lang pinapadede pa kita, ngayon, ulam ka na!”
Which brings us to the plug of the day.
Apart from the fact that they’re the reason we take to the streets in the first place to kvetch and hawk environmental protest and pay lip service to help save a “dying” planet, the thing with kids is that when they declare they care for the environment, they genuinely care for the environment. They don’t demand airtime to make a show of it. They don’t have to produce grim statistics of rising sea levels, carbon footprint and what the government should do about it, save for a piece of a grade-school science project inscribed with “Illegal logging is bad,” and then they make a beeline to the garden to water the plants.
Sometimes we shrug them off, sometimes we sit them down to discuss climate change, sometimes we buy them school materials from Cool Kids.
The flagship brainchild of Funtastic International, one of the leading kids product-line distributor in the Philippines, the Department of Health-passed and Food and Drug Administration-approved Cool Kids products are, per se, environmental education by any other name.
“It is something you hear about everywhere in the media—you see it on TV, you read it in print: ‘The French president is here [to talk about climate change].’ You’re talking about that, but nobody is focusing on the children,” Funtastic International President Rex Daryanani said. “Nobody is teaching kids how and what their roles should be in taking care of the environment.”
Make no mistake about it: it is not just Cool Kids’ corporate social responsibility, but its raison d’etre. “For us, it’s not just about selling a product; it’s about selling a product and, hopefully, being able to spread our advocacy to future generations,” Daryanani said.
If you look at the Cool Kids bags, they all have different characters—Royal Princess, Glam Girlz, Forest Fairies, Viron Transformer, robots and space rangers, to name a few—each with his or her own role to play in, say, teaching environmental care.
“We have 18 different characters. For example, Speedy the Car is an antismoke belcher. One of our robots fight alien beings that steal the Earth’s natural resources. Our princesses, they advocate for keeping the environment clean. Our fairies advocate reforestation,” Daryanani said.
The hope is that when these kids grow up, they won’t be smoke-belchers, illegal loggers and dynamite fishers. Funtastic is hopeful that it is instilling this message in young consumers, not via elaborate equations or an emotional weather report, but in a way the children would understand.
“When they have a bag—say, ang bag n’ya is si Speedy—and it says in the bag that ‘Belching ain’t cool’, ’pag dala-dala nya ’yung bag, he kind of knows that ‘Oh, smoke-belching is bad.’ When he sees a car that is smoke-belching, the message comes to mind,” Daryanani said. Besides putting messages of its environmental advocacy in its products, Funtastic International donates a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Cool Kids items—bags, shoes, accessories, plush and baby toys—to environmental care. This means that you don’t only help save the planet but you really, well, help save the planet.
