Wheelchairs From Waste Paper? Retiree Makes Them, and More

Bevill Packer jumps up and down on his paper tables and dashes his paper chairs to the floor. They’re often stronger than wood, he declares, and they help save trees and energy.

Packer, 70, a retired college lecturer, is a proponent of a craft he developed in the late 1970s and dubbed “appropriate paper-based technology”--making things out of waste paper.

Today, Packer’s products, ranging from tables to toys to bowls to baskets, furnish schools and homes in rural Zimbabwe. His latest product, a paper wheelchair, is being tried out at a home for disabled children. Packer has even used scrap paper to make solar ovens with fronts made of glass collected from junk dealers.

“The beauty of it all is that all our articles contain at least 99% waste paper,” Packer said. Materials to make the items cost virtually nothing, their manufacture provides employment and they promote conservation.

Saving trees helps Africa, where about 80% of the energy is derived from wood. In Zimbabwe, many rural women spend half the day gathering firewood for cooking and deplete the forests in the process.

One drawback of Packer’s products is that they can deteriorate if rained on, so they are meant for use indoors or in sunny weather.

Three of Packer’s wheelchairs, requiring only paper and paste and 12 to 20 hours of labor, have been on trial for a month at a Harare home for disabled children.

One is being used by Darlington Zambe, who has spent most of his 6 years lying on beds and floor mats. When he wanted to move, his mother had to carry him.

“The joy that little boy gets from his chair is too wonderful to see,” said Packer, who was born in England and has lived in Africa for 45 years, the past 22 in Zimbabwe.

Wilson Ruvhere, manager of the home, said scores of parents with disabled children are eager to acquire a Packer wheelchair since a conventional one made locally costs 400 Zimbabwe dollars ($240) and an imported one around 800 Zimbabwe dollars ($480).

Packer has put no cost on his wheelchairs. He has donated the ones made so far, but he is the only person making them and hopes to train high school students to make them for charity.

Like all his articles, the wheelchairs are made by pasting together layer upon layer of scrap cardboard and paper. Old shoe boxes, potato bags, cereal cartons and other scraps can be pressed into flat surfaces or rolled to make such items as table legs or wheels.

The only cost is for flour to make the paste and varnish for the finishing. Packer said craftsmen could make paste from leftovers of Zimbabwe’s staple food, a thick porridge made from ground corn.

“We don’t buy paint to decorate--that costs money,” Packer said. “We use pictures from old magazines, or the colors from the pictures, to make mosaics.”

Children’s tables are decorated with racing cars, coffee tables are adorned with wildlife scenes and children’s chairs are labeled “comrade” or “commander.”

Packer’s wife, Joan, said one of her domestic workers who took a course in making the furniture earns about $54 a month in her spare time. That’s a tidy sum in a country where the minimum monthly wage is $45.