
No really. This pencil grows into a tomato
What happens to a wooden pencil after you wear it down to a stub? It gets tossed into the trash.
“There are 15 billion pencils made annually, and three million of those just in the United States. That’s a lot of pencil stubs thrown away,” said Michael Stausholm, CEO of Sprout World.
Denmark-based Sprout World wants to shrink this waste. The startup makes plantable pencils that grow into vegetables, herbs or flowering plants once you’re done using them.
Stausholm said the pencils, made from cedar in Pine City, Minnesota, are the perfect sustainable product because one “dying product is literally giving life to a new product.”
Where a typical eraser would be, these wooden pencils have a capsule made from biodegradable material that contains a small mixture of seeds and peat.
You plant the capsule in a pot of soil and use the stub end of the pencil as a marker. The capsule dissolves and the seeds grow into a plant.
The pencils come in 14 varieties ($19.95 for a pack of eight), including tomato, lavender, basil, sunflower and green pepper.
Source: CNNMoney (New York) November 4, 2015: 1:50 PM ET