Video How-To: Handmade, Recycled Crafts
With new suggestions about how to be eco-friendly popping up every day, the average person may start spinning in circles.
One expert may be encouraging people to switch to CFL light bulbs. Another environmentalist may urge everyone to buy hybrid vehicles. The next guy is suggesting solar panels.
Going green is great, but where does someone start with little time and energy?
A handful of Chicago women are providing an easy answer - stationary, wedding invitations and holiday cards all made from recycled paper. Women who are current and former participants and tenants of Deborah’s Place, Chicago’s largest provider of supportive housing exclusively for women, are employed.
Here’s the environmental impact calculated by WomanCraft:
Conserve a tree has a lot of great information and links to help you learn more. From this site we’ve borrowed a useful generalized calculation: 1 carton (10 reams) of virgin office paper = approximately .6 of the average felled tree. Based on these numbers we’ve worked out the following for WomanCraft:
1 WomanCraft Hollander beater (the machine that turns our shredded paper to pulp—ours is bigger than most) holds approximately 5 reams of shredded office paper (determined by weight of bagged shreds vs. weight of standard reams), so:
1 WomanCraft beaters-worth = approximately 1/3 of a tree
We estimate that we make about 2 beaters-worth of pulp each week, 48-50 weeks a year. Using the conservative number, we run our beater 96 times a year, so we create recycled paper equivalent to about 32 trees a year, and keep about 1000 pounds of paper from going to an incinerator or landfill!
WomanCraft, Inc. is a wholly-owned social enterprise of Deborah’s Place. Purchases help not only the environment, but also women working to create new beginnings.
Watch the paper-making process from start to finish:
October 22 2007 11:45 pm
