The inestimable Bill Nye the Science Guy snuck into stores this holiday season to brand this Paper Recycling Factory… you know, for kids. It accomplishes in colorfull plastic what you can do in a bucket in your garage: mash up, dye and hydrate old newspaper into paste, then squidge it into molds to make holiday cards and notebooks and the like. For $29.95, this seems like a good introduction to the principals of paper recycling for the young’uns: nothing teaches a kid about science better than the capacity to make a huge, stinking, goopy mess to their parent’s chagrin.
Paper Recycling Factory by Bill Nye [Discover This via Treehugger]
Wouldn’t it be more green to roll your own kit? I did this once under the direction of my homeschool group’s resident science guy when I was a kid. The only ingredients are water and paper and the tools were a blender, a window screen, and some newspaper and plywood. People have a lot of that in their homes already.
@shmerker – But it wouldn’t be a suitable holiday gift if it didn’t come in a colorful cardboard box, and wasn’t made out cheap Chinese plastic!
It’s a self-contained lesson in capitalism vs. low impact living:
Reduce (Consume), Reuse (Replace when it inevitably breaks), Recycle so you feel like you’re doing your part!
If I had received this when I was a kid, I would’ve been less than amused and it would’ve stayed in the closet until donation time.
To quote a sign seen in an artisan’s booth at a high-end crafts fair:
Sure, some people may have “a blender, a window screen, and some newspaper and plywood” just lying around the house, but how likely are they to put it together into a papermaking kit? Answer: not very likely, or they’d be doing it already.
My quibble with this kit is that AFAIK using newsprint as your starting material will yield pretty bad results. Starting with better paper — “get your folks to bring home used paper from the printer at work” would be one possibility — would result in much nicer cards, stationery, etc.