At Home for Earth Day: Make Your Own Paper with a Recycled Egg Carton
Reduce REUSE Recycle!
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, this project will practice reusing! The DIY activity uses old egg cartons and repurposes them in a fun and interactive way. Use your paper creation and decorate it however you like. There is no limits to your creativity with this project! Follow the steps below to create your own paper from home. (This project takes a little over a day to do because the paper needs to dry.)
1. Find an old paper egg carton. Egg cartons work well for this project because they are already recycled paper and break down more easily.
2. Tear the egg carton into small pieces. The smaller the piece the better. This will help in the process of creating a pulp later on.
3. You will need adult help for this part! Boil 2-3 cups of water and add it to your shredded egg carton until all of the pieces have been soaked through. (I let my wet mixture sit for about an hour to let it soak before I went on to the next step.)
4. You will need adult help for this part! Take your wet mixture and blend away. Blend your mixture into a pulp. Try to get the mixture as smooth as possible, this will help make the paper thinner when laying it out to dry.
5. Take your mixture out of the blender and put it back into your bowl. It should be more uniform now. If you don’t have a blender, skip step 4, and just mash the mixture with your hands or a potato masher until the consistence is uniform and smooth. Squeeze out the excess water from the mixture.
6. Lay your mixture out on a piece of fabric or cloth. Spread out the mixture like you would a pizza dough on your cloth. Then put another cloth on top of your mixture and roll it out using a rolling pin. The cloth will help the mixture from sticking to the rolling pin. (It will stick without a cloth!)
7. When you have a uniformly even mixture, leave it to dry. It will take about 24 - 48 hours. If you want to speed up the process, set your oven to 200 degrees and put the mixture on a cookie sheet to dry out. (The cloth I put my mixture on was so wet that I transferred it to another cloth to help in the drying process.)
8. When your paper is dry, this is where the real fun begins! Your paper can be used as one big sheet or cut into pieces. I choose to cut mine into a few smaller pieces.
9. Cut your paper into pieces. Use these pieces of paper to create! I used some non-toxic paint I had, but other mediums should work as well.
