Goin Green bananas

As part of my new year resolution to consolidate my blogs, for the first post of 2008, I present here a little story of how a crazy kid went green bananas... enjoy!

Funny how life moves in cycles. About 15 years ago I started a little eco company in Singapore called Green Bananas that made a paper making kit for people to recycle their own paper at home. Green because I wanted people to know it's environmental bent but more likely because I was totally green to the cutthroat world of business and Bananas because everyone thought I was crazy to give up a good and stable job for what? An unlikely little paper making kit that may not even have a market.

We did sell about 1,000 kits during the 2 or so years the little Green Bananas was out there doing paper making demos; giving magazine, TV & paper interviews encouraging people to start recycling paper in their own homes (in those days, Singapore had no recycling system for anything.


Things have changed now though) and even holding a handmade paper art exhibition called, you guess it, Paper * People * Planet.
Back then I had quit my well-paying
job as a writer for a Interior design magazine and put all my meagre savings into designing, manufacturing and marketing a simple paper making kit that made A4 paper.


It had everything you needed to make paper (apart from the blender) and packaged, quite charmingly in a jute bag.

How I managed to wrangle my friends & family to help out in it's publicity and sales I have no idea. I just stand in grateful awe that they did. We had quite a ride with it. I am willing to bet that at least 50 friends and family still remember how to make their own paper today. And if they've forgotten and would like to teach their children, the next post will help them along their way.

And this is was the purposely unintimadating instruction leaflet that came with the kit.

And now, here I sit years later, writing a blog on the beautiful diversity of handmade & recycled paper. On how people can use this humble medium of paper to help make this planet a bit better, by art & by recycling, for those who live in it now. And also for the children who will come after.

Greening the earth seemed so possible then.

And so it still is. It must be.

Because if not now, then WHEN?

And if not me, then WHO?