Love doesn’t always last forever, and neither do sex toys. Whether your relationship with your sex toy has just gotten old, the toy has lost its steam, or you’ve found someone else, at some point you and your sex toy will have to part ways. So where do sex toys go when they die?

In most cases, sex toys (and their packaging) find their final resting spot in the purgatory of a landfill, where they’ll likely remain for a long, long…long time. 

Unfortunately, there seems to be a dearth of recycling possibilities for plastic, rubber and silicon toys. Technically, these materials can be recycled.

Whether paralyzed by taboo or just because no one has really thought hard enough about it yet, it seems that efforts to address the waste generated by the bedroom (or wherever else you like to play) are a little slow on the uptake. After long hours of intense research (or rather, a quick Google search), I did discover a company donning a cheeky logo and appropriately called Sex Toy Recycling that claims to, well, recycle sex toys. By either mailing them your old “friend” or dropping it off at one of their covert collection centers (which they fail to mention the locations of), they’ll sterilize, sort, salvage or grind up (depending on the toy), and recycle your sexy trash into someone else’s sexy treasure.

Though great in theory, I caught a whiff of illegitimacy when exploring the site. The key piece of evidence that leaves me skeptical is: their sparse website has no contact information. The only method of contact they offer is a comment box that goes to a secret email address. The safety and sanity of their process also seems questionable. According to Brandy Woustra, store manager of It’s My Pleasure, who I interviewed for Sex and Sustainability Part 1, sex toy waste is technically considered a biohazard, much like medical waste. This makes a sex toy made from 95% post-consumer material seem much less appealing. Thus, perhaps more research needs to be done to determine the true potential of universal sex toy recycling.

Currently, it seems that only our transatlantic friends, the Brits, have a “safer” sex toy disposal option. The UK-based company LoveHoney, which makes the infamous Rabbit vibrator that starred in Sex and the City, created LoveHoney Rabbit Amnesty, a program that accepts old, cleaned, hop-less Rabbits for recycling and, in return, will send the original owner a shiny new Rabbit at half the cost (though, doesn’t this just conduce the eventual creation of more bunny waste?). The program is a response to the EU Waste, which mandates that manufacturers of electronic equipment create the infrastructure for their customers to send back their old products for recycling – an initiative motivated by the concern for environmental contamination by the hazardous materials found in electronics. To provide some transparency for the skeptics, LoveHoney produced a YouTube, which shows, somewhat indistinctly, a herd of old Rabbits riding a series of conveyer belts, in what we must assume is a recycling facility. Though this conflicts with the notion that sex toy waste is considered biohazardous, it’s certainly offers some hope for the fate of sex toys everywhere.

Unfortunately for American Rabbit owners (yet fortunately for the Earth), in an effort to limit the carbon impact of the operation, LoveHoney only accepts Rabbits hopping from within the UK. Thus, it seems American sex toy owners and operators are faced with another inconvenient truth – no one has yet mastered the art of sex toy recycling on American soil.

In the end, perhaps the greenest option for playtime is to just play the au natural way, without the use of gadgets and goos. Not only does this eliminate the generation of waste and reduce your bedroom’s environmental impact, it also opens the doors for communication and imagination between you and your partner….which, in and of itself, is just healthier. Plus, it’s free.