國營事業◆英文題庫下載題庫

  Newspapers have traditionally been made from wood for many years. But what would happen if the process were reversed? Could wood be made from newspapers to complete the full cycle? A Dutch designer sought out the answer to this question. 

  Mieke Meijer was a student when she first began exploring a way to extend the life of newspapers and make something useful from waste. The result of her project was the creation of a new material called NewspaperWood, which reversed the traditional wood-to-paper process and results in a wood-like product from recycled newspapers. She later joined a design team that helped her simplify the process so that it was less time-consuming and less complicated. The process of making NewspaperWood involves coating each sheet of newspaper with environmentally friendly glue and then rolling the sheets up together tightly to form logs. The logs are then milled into planks just like wood. The result is a product that can be sanded, nailed, cut, and treated just like any other wood product. It can be used to make many items but cannot be used for largescale construction. If you cut open a NewspaperWood log, you can see the layers of paper that look like the lines of grain in a piece of real wood.     NewspaperWood is not invented to be a replacement for wood. It aims at making use of the surplus of waste paper and creating something more valuable out of it. Meijer calls the process “upcycling.”   NewspaperWood is being used by several designers to create products ranging from small pieces of jewelry to larger pieces of furniture.