Crayola has green ideas for solar power and recycled markers

When it comes to back to school time, many parents seek out green items to arm their children for the upcoming year. Recycled notebooks, backpacks made from sustainable fibers, and reusable lunch containers have become hot items. Crayola is trying to green their crayon manufacturing process with solar energy and add recycled materials to a very small part of their packaged markers.

Any parent can tell you that kids go through a lot of crayons during childhood. Crayola makes about three billion of the wax sticks annually and hopes to have a lot of them made using solar power. Hidden behind their manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania, the solar farm is made up of a 26,200 panel array and occupies 15 acres of land. The company expects that the 1.9 megawatt system will be able to generate 30 percent of the energy for the plant each year.

Crayola didn’t pay the entire bill for the solar farm and relied on $1.5 million chunk of federal stimulus money. In addition, PPL Corp. and UGI Energy Services Inc. supplied additional funds and have a deal to sell the solar power back to the crayon maker for 25 years.

While Crayola hopes to expand their solar farm in the future, they’re also making changes to their marker line. Green minded parents had taken to the blogosphere and Facebook to bemoan the fact that their markers were made of #5 polypropylene, a plastic that isn’t accepted in many curbside recycling programs. According to Earth911, there’s only one municipal program in the entire state of Michigan that accepts the plastic.

The company is changing from the familiar white barrel design to a black version that’s made from old plastic bottle caps. The problem is that the recycled barrels will be featured on only five marker sets when the company has over forty different sets available for purchase. Crayola has made no mention of using recycled plastic for the marker caps, only the barrel and plugs of the writing device.

While Crayola currently touts their green cred on their homepage, they can do more to help parents and educators. Putting more information about recycling #5 polypropylene on their site or a school based recycling program would be a great start.