MNN - Mother Nature Network

The other day while taking out the trash I peered into my bathroom wastebasket and pondered (no, this doesn't happen that often) how I could possibly reuse the one item consistently dominating my bathroom waste stream: toilet paper rolls.

 

Reusing loo rolls is a toughie. When I was a kid, the rolls were diverted from the trash and given to my pet gerbils. They loved crawling in and out of the cardboard tubes and when they tired of that, they'd gnaw them to shreds to form nesting material. As a gerbil-less adult, I'm stumped on how to keep the rolls from being immediately trashed. I've read about incorporating them into arts and crafts projects but I can't say I've sat down to make sidewalk chalk or birthday card scrolls lately.

 

Enter "Day Re," a design concept from Kim Ji-eun that extends the life of the TP roll in a most unlikely way: after having served its initial purpose, the cardboard tube unfolds into a weekly planner/memo pad. How handy for those who do their weekly planning/plotting/brainstorming while sitting on the john!

A "Day Re" TP tube will eventually find its way into the waste stream since memo pads are used and tossed just as much as toilet paper rolls but I do dig this concept — especially since you could feasibly save money and resources by not buying other memo pads. What do you think? If "Day Re" ever became a reality, would you invest in a few rolls?

 

Via [Yanko Design]