What A Load Of Rubbish!

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Pens made from discarded computer printers. Pencil cases fashioned from old tires. These eye-catching and eco-friendly items hint at the truly remarkable range of uses for recycled office materials. A British company — called, natch, Remarkable — has developed a line of stationery supplies that demonstrates how ingenuity and good design can make trash flash. Ed Douglas Miller, an agricultural economist with experience of plastics engineering, dreamt up Remarkable in his London bedsit in 1996.

After devising a technique for turning used plastic cups into pencils, Miller followed up with ways to turn polystyrene packaging into rulers, tires into pencil cases and mousepads, and printers into pens, creating bright new products emblazoned with declarations such as "I used to be a car tire" or "We used to be computer printers." Remarkable has won awards from independent environmental group the Green Organization as well as the British government, and its $2.6 million turnover is growing by 30% a year. Its line sells not only through eco retailers but also in department stores such as Selfridges, Liberty's and smaller retailers internationally.

In December it relocated to a new factory in Worcester, quadrupling its research and manufacturing space. Now Miller is busy converting refrigerators into fridge magnets, car parts into key rings, and postindustrial baby diapers into document folders. "None of these items are extraordinary," says Miller, "but we highlight the fact that waste materials of everyday items can be given a second life as another performance-driven product." Piles of trash never looked so good.