New waste paper processor can turn useless old paper sheets into something we all need – pencils.

 

From Chengzhu Ruan, Yuanyuan Liu, Xinwei Yuan & Chao Chen comes a design that will get the lead out…or in, actually, when it comes to turning waste office paper into something useful.

 

They’ve come up with the P&P Office Waste Processor, which has already gone ahead and won a LiteOn award owing to both its inherent “neatness” and the fact that it apparently turns old sheets of paper into…wait for it…pencils.

 

The information about the device is sketchy, at best, but from the conceptual designs it looks like the machine they’ve so devilishly designed goes ahead and takes in waste paper, rolls and compresses it, and then inserts a lead from a small stock kept in the machine. A glue reservoir is also needed, as it appears pure compression isn’t going to do the trick.

 

The P&P Office Waste Processor looks a great deal like a portable shredder at first glance. Paper is feed into a top slot, and “after a moment” – according to product docs – a fully-formed pencil pops out of a slot at the end.

It's a pencil: woh'd a thunk it.

It’s a like a reverse pencil sharpener – instead of taking your pencil away, it’s making you a new one. 

 

In theory, the machine will have a bunch of warning lights that will tell users when new lead cores are needed or when the glue supply is running low, and will “only take a moment” to create a new pencil.

 

At this point, the whole thing is theoretical, and though we have high hopes that the pencilmatron will make both fast and furious writing tools, we do wonder just how sturdy these things are going to be. The documentation seems to show a 1:1 ratio between paper sheets and pencils, but that seems a little thin for a writing tool that’s going to stand up to any sort of punishment.

 

Still, many offices don’t even employ a recycling program at this point, so anything that can mitigate the large amounts of paper waste heading to landfills gets an A+ in our book.

 

Of course, we’re just going to put that in pencil in case it needs to be changed