Recycling sheep
St. Vincent de Paul in Eugene does some pretty innovative green projects. Like vermiculture (worm) composting at their day center where low-income and homeless adults drop in for lunch and showers. The worm castings are then sold as soil conditioners. Or there's their popular glass foundry, where old windows and bottles are recycled into vases and designer architectural glass. And their combination of junk donation candles and old mattress filling into small blocks of fire starter for campers that ignite even when wet. St. Vinnie's recycles unwanted materials and creates jobs.Today's Register Guard has an article about their newest endeavor, rescuing the thousands of sheep carcasses sent to Lane County landfills each year and rendering them into vellum for upscale printing. Vellum was the material of choice during the Middle Ages for texts, and some lawyers have already expressed interest in having their diplomas printed on it for $100.
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Seriously though, we now have at least four library folk doing home vermiculture. We all started with the same worm family, so they're probably pretty inbred. But that's ok -- they're worms.