Fun and Practical Use of Origami
http://www.origamitube.com is just one of the many sites popping up all over the Internet featuring information about creating trash cans by folding up paper. Origami is the ancient Oriental Art of paper folding. Generally it is used to fashion ornamental objects such as a swan or a camel that will nod its head when you pull on his tail. This is a more practical aspect of the art.
The size of the container you end up with will depend on the size of the paper you start out with. Most of the videos found on YouTube seem to start with standard size rectangles of paper. This largely appears do to the ease with which the steps can be shown in close up detail. The box you end up with is about a third of the size of the sheet you use so you best not have a lot to toss out if you opt to start out with that size of paper.
Using broad sheets of
newspapers will result in a decent size container of about a cubic foot. This could be ideal for the office worker who has to throw out just a few sheets of paper and perhaps some food wrappers and a cup during the course of a day’s work. The person could carry the container out to a trash bin at the end of the day and simply toss the whole thing in. The next day, the person could simply fashion a new container and begin the process again.
A Good Tool for the Young
Children might do a better job putting their discards into a wastebasket if they had made the trash container themselves. In any case, origami is a fun activity for them to explore. Our society seems to be becoming inundated by paper. There is so much junk mail, advertising circulars, newsprint, instructions, pamphlets, and the like that almost everyone has access to plenty of free paper so there is literally nothing to buy in origami. There is no equipment. Your hands just fold paper into shapes meant to give delight.
Origami is a pursuit that widens the imagination. It shows how a two dimensional object such as flat piece of paper can be transformed into three dimensional objects that invoke wonder through human ingenuity. When done by someone that really knows their stuff, it never fails to hold an audience that generally can not
help but applaud when the finished object is held out for inspection.
Paper trash cans may also make it easier to recycle paper. If that office worker mentioned earlier would just confine the discards that he tossed into such a receptacle to paper, that person at the end of the shift could take the basket to a bin designated for recycling paper and toss the item in. In this fashion, the office worker would recycle both their work and the paper they had read on their lunch hour. This would be winning combination that helps the planet.