Panda poo: It’s the new must-have souvenir
CHENGDU – The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base has come up with a dung-for-profit scheme that turns droppings from the endangered species into odourless souvenirs ranging from bookmarks to Olympic-themed statues of the animals.
The facility in the southwestern province of Sichuan houses about 40 bamboo-fed pandas that produce almost a tonne of excrement a day.
“We used to spend at least 6000 yuan a month to get rid of the droppings but now they can be lucrative,” Jing Shimin, assistant to the base director, was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency.
The products will be made at a local handicraft company mostly from undigested bamboo culled from the panda waste through a special process, Xinhua said.
An official at the Chengdu facility said the dung is “carefully selected, smashed, dried and sterilised at 300 degrees Celsius”.
He said the products would be of all colours because they will be dyed.
“They don’t smell too bad because 70 per cent of the dung is just remains of the bamboo that the pandas are unable to digest,” Jing said. While no price has been set, he said the most expensive souvenirs would contain a panda hair – collected from the wild – in each package.
The 2008 Olympic statues will feature “athletic pandas performing various Olympic sports,” Xinhua said.
In March, base officials said they were looking into making high-quality paper from the fibre-rich panda excrement, inspired by a trip to Thailand, where they found paper made from elephant dung.
The Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand already sells multicoloured paper made from waste produced by its two resident pandas.
Making paper there involves a daylong process of cleaning the faeces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun.
No doubt airport quarantine officers around the world will be watching panda poo developments with interest.
Ian Jarrett
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