a tisket a tasket

Use old newspapers to make a basket! I woke up the other morning thinking, as I often do, about trash. I didn’t used to think about trash so much. I just threw it out, and off it went to the landfill. But now that I’m tasked with dealing with an entire community’s trash problem, I give it a good deal of contemplation.

The women of my mom’s club are a fabulous group. They have taken the simple ideas of recycling I’ve brought and turned them into an art form. Their latest creation is tote bags made out of plastic milk and juice bags. Here milk and juice come in one liter plastic bags (no worse a waste of resources than the cardboard oj cartons or hard plastic milk cartons we have in the states I suppose), and the bags make for a fine designer material. I have yet to see a cool purse made out of one gallon milk jugs anyhow.



So the other morning, as I was thinking sweet thoughts about the new line of oki milk tote bags, I had an idea. Why not make something out of paper, too? Seeing as all trash in Oki is currently burned (paper, plastic, diapers, aerosol cans and all), reusing the trash instead of sending it to the burn pile does a favor to both the air and our lungs.

So I got to it, ripping up a stack of magazines and newspapers we have lying around, and I turned them into a bowl. Turned out quite pretty, really, so I took it to my mom’s club to see if they were as impressed as I was. And they were! So, we sat at Kati’s table, ducks and turtles at our feet, Nescafe in hand, and ripped up page after page of magazines and newspapers. Each of us set out to make our own basket of recycled paper and said we’d bring them back the next week to show and share.

Was work back home ever this fun? I love this stuff.