Elephant dung at Prague Zoo morphs into a new form: paper

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Prague (AP) – At first, their elephant dung was sold to gardeners as fertilizer.  Now Prague Zoo has come up with a new use for it: making paper.

The zoo has joined forces with the country’s famed hand paper mill in Velke Losiny to process the manure to be used in traditional paper-making techniques.

Petr Foucek, a director from Velke Losiny, says the 420-year-old mill has made paper from all sorts of materials but elephant dung “is something new for us.”

Visitors will also be able to make their own paper at a new zoo facility.  The announcement comes almost five years after the zoo began selling elephant dung in 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) containers.

The brains behind the project is zoo director Miroslav Bobek, whose surname literally means “dung” in Czech.