Clean & Green Spotlight, April 2010: Mr. Ellie Pooh
I love it when a single offering addresses multiple social and environmental issues, providing benefits on several levels. And increasingly, I’m finding quite a number of them. One that has intrigued me since I first learned of it about a year ago is Mr. Ellie Pooh.
How’s this for capturing a whole bunch of birds with one photograph (my nonviolent spin on the old “killing two birds” proverb 🙂 ):
The venture that’s accomplishing all this is Mr. Ellie Pooh, which provides jobs to indigenous workers in Sri Lanka by—are you ready for this?—converting elephant dung into fine-art paper. The papers, which feel kind of like linen and would be at home in any art supply or upscale stationery store, are 75 percent processed elephant dung (which is mostly cellulose) and 25 percent recycled paper. Wow!
In a country where elephant habitat has been heavily encroached by clear-cutting for agriculture, and elephants are hunted for their negative impact on farms, coexistence is essential. And turning the waste into paper minimizes conflict between farmers and elephants, creates jobs, reduces clear-cutting and thus creates fewer greenhouse gasses. The elephants are alive, the farmers are happy to be compensated, and the tourists (and environmentally conscious shoppers in developed countries) have a beautiful and useful souvenir.
I’d suggest reading these two pages on Mr. Ellie Pooh’s site, for a better understanding of the positive impact this project can have:
https://mrelliepooh.com/aboutus.html tells a bit about the issues facing elephants in Sri Lanka, and https://mrelliepooh.com/mrelliepooh.html tells how founder Dr. Karl Wald decided to get involved. The website is a bit scant for my taste, but those two pages sum up the project pretty well.
I discovered Mr. Ellie Pooh while researching my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson) . The book has a number of examples of people bringing this kind of holistic visionary thinking to solving the world’s problems, including a big section on my favorite practical visionary, Amory Lovins (if we listened to him, we wouldn’t have an energy crisis ever again).
It’s this kind of holistic and systemic thinking that can make a real difference in the planet.
