Elephant dung at Prague Zoo morphs into a new form: paper

PRAGUE (AP) — At first, their elephant dung was sold to gardeners as fertilizer. Now Prague Zoo has come up with a new use for it: making paper.

The zoo has joined forces with the country's famed hand paper mill in Velke Losiny to process the manure to be used in traditional paper-making techniques.

Petr Foucek, a director from Velke Losiny, says the 420-year-old mill has made paper from all sorts of materials but elephant dung "is something new for us."

Visitors will be able to make their own paper at a new zoo facility starting Friday. The announcement comes almost five years after the zoo began selling elephant dung in 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) containers.

The brains behind the project is zoo director Miroslav Bobek, whose surname literally means "dung" in Czech.