between modesty and ignorance

Sofia Henales |

Madrid (EFE).- City councils and specialized shops promote recycling initiatives for sex toys such as vibrators, since modesty and ignorance means that many users do not know what to do with them when they want to throw them away.

The quick answer would be to go to a clean point to deposit them, but many people have doubts about where exactly, since they are made of plastic, silicone and batteries when not of other types of materials, several specialists in the sector have explained to EFE.

For this reason, a few weeks ago the Castellón City Council inaugurated its ‘vibrator cemetery’, a recycling project for this type of sex toys in collaboration with the three erotic shops in the city so that “people can deposit their device when it is broken” instead of leaving it anywhere, explained the councilor for waste, Ignasi Garcia.

“What we did was leave a box in each store and when it is full we pick it up to take it to the circuit of an eco-park”: in this way they hope to boost this service and “infect other municipalities to make them reflect that everything should be recycled, even a ‘satisfyer’”.

This type of initiative “has a provocative part and a controversial part, since there were people who applauded it and others could be modest…, you have to be daring to do it”, has acknowledged García who, even so, affirms that “it has worked very well ”, because only in the first days 25 toys were collected.

The idea came from the owner of the Kinplaer erotic shop, Inma Molina, who asked the councilor the possibility of installing these containers “just like there are places where you leave the batteries”, given the evidence that some clients were already delivering broken devices. before putting the plan into action.

Precisely one of the users of the service, Ángela Moya, has been the designer of the graphic image of the campaign, which highlights the importance of “making visible and naturalizing the sexual”.

Moya acknowledges that he had “a toy that was already very old” and before working on the project “I didn’t know where to deposit it”, although on the Internet “I saw that you can send it by mail to some companies that are responsible for cleaning it, separating the motor and its components and get rid of it.

The chain of erotic supermarkets Lys Erotic Store, located in Madrid, is one of these companies and its manager, Óscar Fernández, has explained that since 2016 he has been in charge of “breaking them apart and depositing their parts in clean points so that recycling is done correctly”. .

Before that, “only one company in Belgium recycled sex toys” and for this reason they began to offer this service since “vibrators are considered small electrical appliances, but nobody said what to do with them” when they stopped working.

Fernández regretted that there is no “technical service” in charge of repairing these devices intended to give pleasure, since “the entire electronic system is encapsulated, integrated, and it costs twice as much to fix them as to buy new ones.”

In her company “we recover the cables, plates and small microchips so that it is possible to produce other dildos, ‘satisfyer’ and other products”, thus avoiding “the excessive consumption of resources and the environmental cost”.

When a utensil of this type arrives at the clean point, it is not recorded exactly what device it is, as explained by sources from the Madrid Commonwealth of the Northwest, but rather “it is deposited in the ‘small electrical appliances’ line, in the same place as a calculator or a radio.

Later they separate and take advantage of their pieces.

Sales of sex toys increased by 300% in 2020 in full confinement, and in 2021 they increased another 30%, according to a study carried out by the parapharmaceutical multinational Atida Mifarma.