A new sustainable alternative to traditional pencils has recently been created by the Japanese company Mizuiro. Vegetable pencils are plant-based, environmentally friendly, and produced from food waste. The inspiration to create a safer, greener pencil came when Mizuiro’s founder, Naoko Kimura, quit her job as a designer to spend more time with her child. Looking at the pencils her daughter was using, she wondered, “Whenever kids are interested in something, they put it in their mouths. So why don’t pencils, something so close to most kids, seem so safe? ”

Most pencils on the market today are not environmentally friendly because they are made with paraffin wax (which contains petroleum, a poisonous chemical) and are dangerous for children if they eat them. accidentally. Additionally, according to the Crayon Collection – an initiative to recycle lightly used pencils for underserved schoolchildren in the United States – about 150 million pencils are thrown away by American restaurants alone, and they often end up in landfills. .

Many pencils, including the big brand Crayola’s, aren’t vegan because they’re made with stearic acid, which is derived from tallow or beef fat, which gives pencils their distinct smell.

Use plant waste

Kimura set out to make pencils that are safer for her daughter, and the project eventually evolved into a zero-waste green initiative using waste from her region’s crop farming industry. Vegetable pencils are made from a solid wax made from rice bran and liquid rice bran oil, both of which are byproducts of the rice polishing process. To add color to the pencils, Mizuiro uses discarded vegetables such as:

• The outer leaves of cabbage discarded during harvest
• The outer skin of the Chinese yam that is removed during processing
• Uneven pieces of corn that would otherwise be thrown away
• Apple skins that are peeled off and discarded during processing of apple chips
• Blackcurrant skins remaining from the juice
• Irregular pieces of sweet potato
• Food grade bamboo charcoal

This type of food waste is ground into vegetable powder to color the pencils. Eighty percent of the vegetables the company uses as pencil ingredients are grown and produced locally in Japan. For more color, Mizuiro uses food coloring certified as a safe food additive, but food coloring makes up less than a third of the pigments used in regular pencils. The colors of vegetable pencils reflect the vegetables used to make them and are named accordingly. Instead of standard color names such as yellow and green, Mizuiro uses names such as cabbage and carrot.

Help children learn to love vegetables

Mizuiro’s use of real vegetables is also aimed at helping children to further develop their interest and love for vegetables when they interact with and smell them. Each pencil gives off a slight smell of the vegetable it is made from. To provide further proof of their safety, vegetable pencils also carry the certification of the European Toy Safety Standard, which is considered the strictest toy safety standard in the world.

Earlier this year, Mizuiro ran a Kickstarter campaign and exceeded his fundraising goal, raising more than $ 9,000 to further expand the production of the Vegetable Pencil.