Rice's Cups Full of Hope

While look­ing for cute, high-quality, melamine dishes to use as tod­dler table­ware, I ran across a com­pany in Den­mark not only mak­ing fab­u­lous cups, plates, bowls and more, but that also has a con­science, Rice. Their prod­ucts are designed in Den­mark, then man­u­fac­tured in third world coun­tries by employ­ees who are treated fairly and are not dis­crim­i­nated against for any rea­son.  For this, Rice has earned the SA8000 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from Social Account­abil­ity Inter­na­tional.

Now, you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing, why melamine dishes?  Recently, Oliver has taken to throw­ing his dishes on the floor.  Since replac­ing our Ikea dishes every­time one is bro­ken is not some­thing we want to do often, I started talk­ing to friends.  Every­one has the plas­tic Ikea children’s dishes, and pretty much every­one com­plained about how they got scratched up and worn look­ing over time.  I did a lit­tle research and found that melamine dishes are unbreak­able, scratch-resistant, dishwasher-safe, and as far as unbreak­able dish­ware goes, are prob­a­bly slightly safer chemical-leaching-wise. They just aren’t microwave-safe, but I gen­er­ally try not to microwave any­thing in plas­tic con­tain­ers anyways.

In addi­tion to the melamine table­ware though, Rice has a lot of other really cute products:

Square Nat­ural Raf­fia Basket

Square Pink Miss T Pil­low Cover
Soft Toy Horses

In addi­tion to stuffed ani­mals, adult and children’s table­ware, bas­kets, floor cov­er­ings, pil­lows, aprons, and kitchen­ware, Rice also gives back:

Rice and The Dan­ish Refugee Coun­cil are work­ing together rais­ing money to African refugee families.

This year it is a so called ONE to ONE project — mean­ing that when you buy 4 spe­cial designed Rice melamine cups you give a refugee fam­ily in Africa exactly a large 20L. jerry can and a wash kit.

You can search for retail­ers in your coun­try on Rice’s web­site.  I wasn’t able to find any shop in the US that car­ries Rice prod­ucts, but I did find a site in Ger­many, Takatomo.de, that is in Eng­lish and Ger­man, and offers world­wide shipping.

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Tagged as: Africa, bowls, Denmark, dishware, Fair trade, Germany, melamine tableware, pillows, Scandinavia, social accountability, toddler