Seed Cardboard

For my bottle carrier, I want it to be as environmentally friendly as I can possibly make it, and as cardboard is a huge packaging offender in the industry I was trying to think of ways of making the cardboard, work beyond the secondary use it already has, so to a further third use. The idea that my tutor gave me was brilliant, use cardboard that has been impregnated with seeds, so once the carrier has completed the secondary use, rather than it being left the garden like huge pile pulp, having something grow out of it, sounds so beautiful, creating new life after helping a little one.

So I decided to do some research in to this, to see how it all works.

The first thing I came across was, the Life Box, released by Paul Stamets, a mycologist and mycomimicry.

 

 

the box can be torn up and soaked to activate the many seeds embedded in the cardboard. Each Life Box contains enough tree seeds to grow an entire forest ecosystem, with all of the species contained in the boxes approved as non-invasive in the United States.

 

The boxes are made from a specialist cardboard production technique that impregnates the corrugations with hundreds of tree seeds and thousands of beneficial spores, mycorrhizal fungi.

The concept is simple, as soon as you finish with the packaging, just tear it up and begin watering.  Within two months tree saplings will appear, which can be separated and planted.  The tree varieties include Alders, Pine, Birches, Hemlocks & Cedars, these represent a quarter of the species which thrive within the USA.  The company that produce the boxes estimate that one tree from the hundreds of seeds in each box should survive for around 30 years, providing one ton of carbon to be stored.

 

Roll-Out Veg Mat. Each season householders buy a new roll of corrugated cardboard impregnated with vegetable seeds.

 

I think this is a really good way to go for my product, as I think it would encourage people to build the hedgehog house, knowing that in a few months time after, they would then have a lovely flower patch, we could even use vegetable seeds to encourage home growing of vegetables.