Families on holiday in Dubai buy an extraordinary volume of single-use plastic toys, beach kit and colouring pads — most of it used for a few days and left behind. Renting a mr.E toybox replaces that cycle with one durable, sanitised, re-usable set of toys shared across many families.
These are working estimates, not lab figures. They're published in good faith and updated as our fleet and reporting mature.
Estimated average across a mixed-age toybox vs. buying equivalent new toys for a 5–7 day holiday.
Each toy is inspected, cleaned and re-boxed for the next family. Retired toys are donated or recycled — never binned.
Boxes ship in reusable outer cases with a net-bag inside. No shrink-wrap, no polybags, no twist-ties.
A typical Dubai holiday sees families buy new toys, colouring pads, and a stroller — nearly all of it plastic-heavy.
Millions of families visit Dubai every year. Airport pharmacies, supermarkets and toy shops sell an enormous volume of single-use, blister-packed toys and beach kit that are used for a few days and left behind in hotel rooms or holiday-home cupboards.
The average plastic toy is played with for a handful of hours, then discarded within weeks. Combine that with holiday impulse-buys and you get one of the most wasteful categories in family retail — and it almost all ends up in landfill.
When one toy serves fifty families instead of one, its manufacturing footprint is divided by fifty. Its packaging waste is created once, not fifty times. And its end-of-life is managed by us, not by a housekeeping team clearing a checkout suite.
New toys arrive in layers of plastic — clamshells, twist-ties, polybags, cellophane. A mr.E box is a reusable outer case with a fabric net-bag inside. The only single-use item is the courier label.
The carbon and plastic cost of manufacturing a toy is fixed at the factory. Renting spreads that cost across every family who plays with it, so the per-child footprint drops dramatically.
Every mr.E toy lives in Dubai. No trans-continental air-freight for a single holiday purchase; most boxes reach guests inside a Careem-sized courier box across the city.
Toys are triaged after every return. Broken pieces are repaired or replaced. Retired sets are donated to Dubai-based children's charities. Only genuinely unusable plastic enters the recycling stream, sorted by type.
Where suitable, the outer box itself is the colouring activity — printed panels ready to be drawn on. That removes single-use colouring pads and their plastic wrap from the equation entirely.
Strollers, bikes and scooters are the highest-plastic, highest-emission items families buy on arrival. Renting them means one unit serves dozens of holidays instead of ending up in a landfill container.
We buy durable, repairable toys with replaceable parts — prioritising wood, fabric and recyclable mono-plastics over mixed materials that can't be recycled.
Every item is sanitised, counted and inspected between families. Damaged parts are replaced from a shared parts library, not thrown out with the whole toy.
Toys return to a reusable outer box with a fabric net-bag. No fresh plastic is added between rentals — just clean toys, ready to play.
When a toy reaches end-of-life, it's offered to Dubai charities and nurseries first. Anything unusable is disassembled and sorted for local recycling streams.
None of the numbers on this page work without the family at the other end of the delivery. These four habits keep the loop closed.
Pack the toys back into the net-bag before pickup — it keeps small pieces together and reduces the loss rate that would otherwise mean replacing parts.
Colour the box. Every panel used is one less colouring pad bought and binned.
Tell us if something broke. Honest reporting means we can repair rather than replace — the highest-impact thing you can do.
Choose rental over airport-shop impulse-buys. Even one family a week making that swap is meaningful across a season.
The figures on this page are our best current estimates, based on the composition of our own boxes and typical holiday shopping baskets in Dubai. They are not third-party verified. We publish them because "less plastic" is a claim families deserve to see worked out, not just asserted — and we'll update them as our fleet, reporting and partnerships mature.