**1. Introduction**

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The challenges of sustainability are already guiding today's scientific and technological progress, and because environmental awareness should necessarily be fostered from birth, toy design was selected as a field of inquiry for this contribution. The connection between toys and environmental sustainability is explored in this chapter in two main areas which complement each other. On the one hand, eco-design of toys is considered "tout court" (pure and simple). In this respect, the ecological aspects of the objects that support play (toys) should be considered at the level of the materials used, the expenditure of energy in their production and transportation, as well as in what concerns other issues related to the lifecy‐ cle of the product and for a combination of recreational, educational, and pedagogical pur‐ poses. On the other hand, children may also be actively educated to develop their environmental awareness. It is believed that these two approaches are complementary and that in an ideal scenario the toys for leisure activities given to children by their relatives, and those provided by nurseries, day-care centres, pre-schools, primary schools and even urban equipment available for kids in playgrounds should reconcile these two aims: minimizing environmental impacts (associated with pro-active eco-design, considering the whole life cy‐ cle of the recreational-educational product) and education for civic development in view of responsible citizenship with great emphasis on the foundation of environmental awareness and protection of ecosystems and the legacy for future generations.

To contextualise and underpin the development of this work, it proceeds with an initial gathering of information about the child's cognitive development, which is presented in the reminder of this section. The following sections seek to answer the questions raised as a re‐ sult of the proposed aims along with the presentation of design results.

© 2013 Coelho and Fernandes; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Coelho and Fernandes; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Coelho and Fernandes; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
