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It seems silly to chop trees down to make pencils; that little graphite rod in the center is the active ingredient, and the other 95% of the pencil is essentially a wasteful, disposable wooden handle.
Smencils makes their pencils by tightly wrapping newspaper around the graphite rod, then hardening it so it can be sharpened like a regular pencil. They also take advantage of newspapers' absorbent quality by pre-soaking them in liquid fragrances, hence the name; Smencils come in "flavors" like Chocolate, Watermelon, Orange, etc. (The previously available Toasted Marshmallow, alas, has been discontinued.)
You can also order custom-printed Smencils, though there's currently no option to spec out your own fragrance. Too bad--it'd be nice to disrupt your classmates by taking the SAT's to the strong smell of Drakkar Noir.
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Comments
right, so ordinary pencils waste wood. but packaging these stupid things in plastic is any better? get real. i'm tired of reading things from supposed design "experts" who don't know what they are talking about.
it also seems silly/wasteful to individually package pencils like that, even if the plastic does preserve the smell.
Let me get this straight - they're wrapping newspaper around the graphite core, claiming to do something good for the environment, then OVERPACKAGING EACH PENCIL IN TOTALLY WASTEFUL PLASTIC TUBES?
These are great. I got them for my sister in law. They scent is very potent even through the package and multiple layers of gift wrap.
Yeah, and on top of that, we don't really have a tree shortage, in fact we have too many trees (as shown by wildfires, etc). We have more trees now in the States than in 1776. Tree farms have the reforestation down pat (although clear cuts are bad and ugly).
This isn't the first time people have made pencils out of newspaper. Once, my friend's pencil broke and you could still read the Chinese newspaper.
"OVERPACKAGING EACH PENCIL IN TOTALLY WASTEFUL PLASTIC TUBES" agree! And as far a saving trees, these things are made in China, where most of the paper is made out of Rice right. Nice novelty for the kids, sure hope they are truly non-toxic
The tubes that the smencils come in are recyclable. They are not labeled with a recycling number, however. I emailed the company to ask them about this, but it was after closing on Fri and they had already left for the day. I think it is hilarious and disturbing that someone would say we have too many trees. Forest fires are NOT caused by having too many trees, first of all, and second of all, one tree can filter up to 60 pounds of air pollution a year. If every person recycled just 10% of their newspapers, we would save 25 million trees a year! Trees provide a lot of oxygen for us.