The 12 people who still write with pencils will be excited about this Kickstarter, funding production of a pencil that sprouts into flowers or herbs when it gets too short to use. This will solve the rampant problem of discarded pencil stubs filling up landfills with … uh … wood and rock. Okay, it won’t solve any problems, but come on: you stick the pencil in some dirt and it grows a radish! That is neat.
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The creators suggest this for classroom use, and I have to say I love that idea — elementary schoolers presumably do still work in pencil (or do they all have their own little laptops now?), and once they’ve worn them to a nub, they can each have their own little basil plant or whatever. For a kid, that’s a pretty good incentive to write more, so you can get to the planting stage.
The Kickstarter is going through Sept. 19, so you have plenty of time to back this cute project, and almost every donation level gets you lots of seed-pencils. The perfect gift for people who do crosswords but aren’t very confident about them, and then get bored and want to eat a tomato!
