Witness the seemingly guileless Crayola marker. Most of us used them as kids -- if your parent/teacher was extra awesome you had access to the 12-pack with obscure colors like Sandy Tan and Blue Lagoon -- and never spared a thought as to what happened to them after the ink ran dry.

But the world is a very different place these days and kids start worrying about the planet seemingly from birth. So it was inevitable that someone would eventually grasp that all of those spent markers represent a lot of plastic that isn't getting recycled...