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89-year-old Wyoming woman makes beautiful gifts out of ordinary item |
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Wednesday, 23 April 2008 |
Jennifer Larson
Community Editor
Paper or plastic?
It’s not an unfamiliar question to have been asked sometime while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store.
The conundrum that vexed shoppers only a couple decades ago is no longer common place. The new trend, which happens to be eco-friendly, is going green.
Plastic bags are not just a nuisance by littering streets and the countryside but are also harmful to the environment. As they decompose, tiny toxic bits seep into soils, lakes, rivers and oceans.
There are so many ways plastic bags are used today. Not solely for toting items – whether that’s from a store or elsewhere – but lining bathroom trash bins or even storing other plastic bags.
Eventually, they’ll end up cluttering the landfills like diapers. However, plastic bags can be recycled into many different products, mostly into composite lumber.
But plastic bags can also be reprocessed into small pellets, or post consumer resin, which can become feed stock for a variety of products such as new bags, pallets, containers, crates, and pipe.
There are several retailers and municipalities that provide designated plastic bag recycling bins. Just returning clean, dry, empty plastic bags at select drop-off locations.
Plastic bags don’t have to be discarded. Wyoming resident Rose Kasma is making beautiful gifts out of the ordinary item.
After cutting several plastic bags into a half-inch strip, she balls up the continuous piece like yarn. From there, Kasma can crochet the plastic bags into things such as rugs, place mats, table runners and tams – a hat similar looking to a beret.
She also crochets the plastic bags to cover up coffee and frosting cans as well as glass jars.
Those unique containers can attractively hold cosmetics and toothbrushes to writing utensils and nails.
“My mother always said ‘never throw anything away,”’ Kasma said.
The 89-year-old is probably one of few to be more delighted by receiving a plastic bag than the present hiding inside.
She has friends and acquaintances collecting different colored bags for her ranging from white, yellow and brown to the harder to come by like purple, pink and red.
Kasma and her deceased husband, Ray, owned and operated a grocery store in Wyoming – where the River Bank now stands – for many years before selling the property in the late 1970’s.
Retired for nearly 30 years from Minnesota-based 3M, she is eager to show anyone how to craft handmade gifts out of plastic bags.
“You have to use your head to think of the all the things you can do (with plastic bags),” Kasma said.
She is listed in the telephone book. Besides demonstrating her form of recycling to anyone willing to learn, Kasma provides good conversation.
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