Sustainability: New bench at Artis zoo made from elephant dung

Artis Zoo in Amsterdam has taken sustainability to a new level. Working with students from the AMS Institute, the zoo created a park bench made of 65 percent elephant dung and 35 percent recycled plastic.

The zoo’s Asian elephants produce around 300 kilograms of poop per day. The zoo was looking for creative ways to deal with this manure. So it recruited five students from the AMS Institute, set up a “living lab” for them, and left them to experiment.

Over the past four months, the students dried the dung on improvised pallet constructions and in a specially purchased second-hand magnetron and then pressed it in a heat press. “The result is a sturdy bench,” the zoo said. “The course structure of elephant dung also gives the bench a unique pattern.”

Artis made the bench in collaboration with Circulus, a company that has been creating street furniture from “waste products” for some time. If parts of the bench break, Circulus will replace them and return the broken material to a form in which it can be reused. “In this way, we keep the recycling circle as small as possible.”

The zoo is currently testing the durability of the prototype. If it proves reliable, Artis plans to eventually replace all its park benches with this sustainable model.