Okay; we’ll avoid the bad jokes, rhyming and otherwise, that come to mind when you’re invited to sit on a park bench fabricated from elephant poop. Let’s just say that Amsterdam’s Artis Zoo has found an unusual way to sit on it.
The bench is actually 65% dung and 35% recycled plastic (certainly that all qualifies as post-consumer waste!) and is being evaluated near the elephant enclosure at the zoo; if it works out, it will become the zoo’s standard bench.
The bench was designed by Circulus, a street furniture company, using the material, which was developed by a student group at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions.
The dung is fiber-rich, because the elephant dung, some 300 kilos a day of it, is about half undigested plant material. The coarse structure of the dung is said to give it a unique pattern. Other projects at the zoo use collected poo as manure and as a medium for composting.
