A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The sharing economy comes for us all, including kids. Reporter Buffy Gorrilla takes us to Philadelphia in a paid library for toys that hopes to keep playthings out of the landfill.
BUFFY GORRILLA, BYLINE: Bubbling with excitement, Krystal Cunillera watches the Rutabaga Toy Library door open. Her first Rutababy - as she calls them - of the day waddles in.
KRYSTAL CUNILLERA: And our first little visitor. Hey, Auggie (ph).
GORRILLA: Auggie is a Rutabaga regular, and he's here to play. Auggie doesn't say much. After washing his hands - everything in the toy library is reassuringly clean - he smiles and throws me and my fuzzy microphone some wary side eye.
CUNILLERA: Are you going to go down now?
AUGGIE: Go down.
CUNILLERA: Yeah, let's go down.
GORRILLA: Cunillera spots Auggie as he climbs on a wooden structure with a slide, sitting in the middle of a colorful braided rug.
AUGGIE: Woo.
CUNILLERA: Woo.
AUGGIE: Woo.
GORRILLA: After becoming a mom, Cunillera started to think about ways to live more sustainably. And the biggest roadblock was the toy box.
CUNILLERA: We had these higher-end toys that I didn't want to just get rid of. So my group of friends, we started sharing toys, and it just felt like there was something more there.
GORRILLA: So it's a pretty simple concept.
CUNILLERA: A toy library is just like a book library, but for toys. You borrow them, and you bring them back and exchange them.
GORRILLA: But Cunillera runs it like a business. Families pay up to $65 per month, and there are scholarships.
CUNILLERA: They get to borrow four toys at a time with unlimited exchanges, so they literally can come back every single day and exchange one or all of them.
GORRILLA: That appeals to members like Kristin Stitt (ph). She loves that she can try before she buys a new toy for her son, Sean (ph).
KRISTIN STITT: I can take a toy home, see if he loves it. If he doesn't, I bring it back, and I haven't wasted any money on it.
GORRILLA: Rutabaga opened in 2019 with 300 toys, but now the selection is huge.
CUNILLERA: Now we have 1,800 items in our library for ages 0 to about 12 years old, and families use this as a gathering space, a resource for toys to not clutter their home, and a play space.
GORRILLA: Stitt and Sean are huge fans of the toy library.
CUNILLERA: Mix, mix. Are you making dinner?
STITT: We come to play here, like, three times a week. We love it. He's built such a little friend community. People know his name. He knows other people's names.
GORRILLA: Joe Shotkus (ph) and his son, Townes (ph), are frequent guests.
JOE SHOTKUS: The fact that we can bring our kid here multiple times a day for story time or just to play around, like, is pretty incredible. Without this resource, we don't know what we would do with him most of the day (laughter).
GORRILLA: But for the kids, it's really all about the toys.
CUNILLERA: Tow truck?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yeah.
CUNILLERA: Toe truck?
GORRILLA: And the Rutababies will be back for more.
For NPR News, I'm Buffy Gorrilla in Philadelphia.
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