everydaytrash

Update: photos!

Excuse the delay, I’ve returned in a daze from Malawi and my jet-lagged brain is having trouble re-sizing photos for everyday trash.

So trust me when I say I have pictures of elephants and of their dung and of that dung being processed and of the beautiful handmade paper that results from the process.

The elephants I saw at a well-stocked game park called Liwonde. The paper-making from their dung I saw in the city of Blantyre, a pleasant little town with purple flowering trees and even a side-walk or two (in sharp contrast to the dirt roads throughout the rest of the country).

PAMET is an NGO in Blantyre set up by a British woman and now Malawian-run that collects discarded bits of paper and cardboard and shreds it, along with plan fibers, elephant dung, burlap sacks and baobab bark to make thick and delicate sheets of paper from one or all of those ingredients. They also have an educational program whereby they teach others to make paper or briquettes to heat their homes by packing it all into disks. I took a photo of an old school exercise book on the floor of the old paper stock room waiting to be made into pulp for new stationary. It’s a wonderful cycle if you think about it: making new paper out of an old exercise book in order to sell and then be able to afford school fees and a new exercise book.

I made a solo roadtrip to the rural north of the country and along the way talked to many, many Malawians, all of whom mentioned bad economy and expensive school fees as factors holding them and their country as a whole back in this world.

Oh, and no I didn’t see Madonna. In fact, Madonna didn’t come up once in conversation while I was there except in the form of emails from home.

Photos coming soon. And by the way, it’s nice to blog again. I missed you all!

I remember in college when the show Futurama came out, many people I know were very excited. Some of them even convinced me to watch the first episode of the cartoon to see if, indeed, it was as funny as The Simpsons (I will refrain from live-linking here on the assumption that most readers are familiar with the show).

Not being a huge fan of The Simpsons, it’s not surprising that I didn’t end up following Futurama. I will never foget, however, a brief flash in one scene to a planet piled high with thousands of AOL CDROMs (and nothing else) as a nod to the fact that 1) everyone throws them away and 2) that’s where all our trash might end up some day.

So imagine my amusement when, years later, I came accross this CD coaster craft project on About.com. It’s one of hundreds of “Trash to Treasure” projects compiled on the site ranging from corny (avoid the “blue jean” section entirely) to inspired (see above). In fact, an entire section is devoted to ideas for those soon-to-be-obsolete disks once used to store music in the Global North and still used to ship research at cheap rates to the South.

Today was the last day to drop off registered entries in the Waitakere City Council Trash to Fashion show in New Zealand.  If last year’s winners are any indication, competition this November should be fierce.