Automatically translated from Basque, translation may contain errors. More information here. Elhuyarren itzultzaile automatikoaren logoa

Wood for 18 billion pencils

  • Since I was a kid, I liked pencils. To draw, and because it couldn't be otherwise, we only had a pencil and a row pen. The pen was loaded with ink for each stroke to be performed… Loosening the screw of the extreme pen, the thick line, tight thin. By the time you took us, the rhotrine and all the lines of the same thickness appeared. But the pencil was a world.

05 February 2024 - 06:00
Last updated: 07:31

It was from home the carpenter pencil used by my father in the sawmill; I especially don't know how to say it: dictionaries say oval, oval and vulgar. School pencils were hexagons or round. Copy or indelible round and normal hexagons. The latter also paint on the bust and are made not to lose the writing.

For me, the pencil wood was curious. The bite of the child's back tip was not surprising, and by sharpening it on the tap, it freed creative dependency. Cedar was a family of smell that I've been living all my life on a pituitary membrane, now I live surrounded by cedar wood.

Soon this addiction started working: I started collecting pencils. At first I would gather all those around me and then I looked and continued searching. More dependent. I met a lot, I have boxes and a plea of half full fanega... I have it very far, but Aaron Bartholmey, with his 69,255 pencils of the Guinnes record.

Pencils also have a rich and beautiful geology. Her soul is graphite but mixed with caolina. This mixture heats up to more than 800 degrees, even for brushing, to write gently. According to the mixture, pencils have a hardness scale: the hardest is 9H and the softest 9B, in center F and HB, with 20 levels. If you have eraser gum on your head, the backing foil is made of aluminum from bauxite and the eraser rubber mixture of stone foam and sulfur.

I, however, am interested in wood. The cedars we know, the true cedars, those of Atlas (Cedrus atlantica), those of Lebanon (Cedrus lebanese) and those of Himalaya (Cedrus deodora), are not used for pencils. Other conifers with similar odor are the most commonly used. Three are the main characteristics required of wood for pencils: soft, resistant and sharpened easy and clean. The giant tuya (Thuja plicata), the Brazilian pine (Araucaria angustifolia), the Caribbean pine (Pinus caribaea “Hondurensis”) and especially the insect cedar (Calocedrus decurrens), as well as the school tree (Alstonia scholaris), the gijicaricamiche (Delicarichia). The latter are used to make cheap wooden pencils outside the coniferous people’s crew. Because it won’t be easy to get enough wood to make 18 billion pencils a year…

These include those carried out by Sprout. At the back end they carry a capsule where there are plant seeds. When the sharpened pencil is a tiki that cannot be held between the fingers, it gets upside down and plants form: basil, parsley, cilantro, thyme, poppy, carnation, etc. Among them, the fir, with the sand of a pencil, will form a fir that will then give wood to make 180,000 pencils.


You are interested in the channel: Landareak
January, the dream of the walnut
I painted with purple color the first month of the year, with the color of creativity, imagination, knowledge and spirituality.

2025-01-06 | Nagore Zaldua
Cantabrian calm
Works of art of the warning
Colorful, bright, in shapes as strange as beautiful, nudibranchs seem to be coming beings from another planet. These naked creatures of the seabed dress the vivid colors of the crests of the 1980s and the architectural fashion of the great names of the Parisian seam.

2025-01-06 | Jakoba Errekondo
The need to live with each other
A Chilean friend has told me a story about his village and left me a mouth full of implants. It is from a plant there known as “quintral”, Tristerix corimbosus. It lives in the warm forests of southern Chile and Argentina, and the plant is very similar to the tongue (Viscum... [+]

2025-01-06 | Garazi Zabaleta
Trebatu Association
Project to boost relief in the primary sector in Gipuzkoa
The Trebatu association has been in operation for years in Ipar Euskal Herria, with the objective that those people who want to start this project can be trained beforehand. Taking as a model the project of Ipar Euskal Herria and pulling the same idea, in Gipuzkoa the... [+]

2024-12-27 | Leire Ibar
The success of the champagne industry is based on exploited labour
The Guardian newspaper analysed the situation of migrants working in the champan industry in Épernay, France. The study reveals the precarious and illegal conditions of those working in vineyards of luxury mushroom brands.

At Christmas, consume local and seasonal and, by the way, boycott Israeli products
Hunger is one of the main weapons used by Israel for the genocide of the Palestinians. On the one hand, the ban on food entering Gaza and, on the other, the abolition of Palestinian food sovereignty.

2024-12-23 | Jakoba Errekondo
Pea hearing
We will soon have delicious pea tears all year round (Pisum sativum). But it is still winter and spring, the season of fresh peas almost entirely; now begins the planting of the last peas we will eat in spring. And now we're going to eat those who sowed towards October.

2024-12-23 | Garazi Zabaleta
Ekin Dulantzi
Agri-food test area in Dulantzi
We have more and more agricultural test points, that is to say, training spaces in agriculture and livestock before we start your project. The Zunbeltz space of Navarre and the Trebatu de Gipuzkoa and Ipar Euskal Herria are some of the examples that have been launched. Since... [+]

2024-12-23 | Irati Diez Virto
I'm not a mouse, I'm not a topo; I'm a mousetrap.
When you hear the word mammal, often the first representatives that come to mind are the biggest ones: the bear, the wolf, the deer… Sometimes the first ones to appear are the domesticated cat or the dog, or distant lions and elephants. Spectacularity usually gains competition... [+]

2024-12-16 | Jon Torner Zabala
Sidra Vasca
North and South, centuries-old tradition under the same hat
The Euskal Sagardoa Designation of Origin has been challenged: Collection of apples and sidreros from all over the Basque Country. “The cider culture is all over the territory and apples have been kept for cider throughout the territory,” says Unai Agirre, coordinator of the... [+]

2024-12-16 | Garazi Zabaleta
Production of Ozaeta apple juice (barrundia)
8,000 litres of apple juice produced in 900 inhabitants
“Will I take out an apple juice?” With this question begins an interview with the members of the Economate of Barrundia Koldo López Borobia, Susana López de Ullibarri and Santi Txintxurreta. We've gathered around the apple bridge and in the garden surrounded by apples. This... [+]

2024-12-16 | Garazi Zabaleta
Group of Zuberoa
Collective garden in Maule to sow social relations
One of the lines of work of Xiberoko Kolektiboa is to promote the network between citizenship and spaces for social life. On this road, in 2020 they were presented with the opportunity to create a collective garden in Maule and, no doubt, decided to undertake the project. “It... [+]

2024-12-16 | Jakoba Errekondo
Business chocolate addiction
Chocolate is born from cocoa. Cacao is called Theobroma cacao; Theobroma means “food of the gods.” It's been a long time since the cult of chocolate; what was of the gods we did quickly. In the Basque Country, it is one of the largest in food imports along with sugar and... [+]

Gold in the head, most in aquaculture
There are several species that seem forced to always remain in the fishmongers. A fish among them has a special glow, because it looks at us with a golden crown: golden (also in Spanish, obeying the same characteristic, golden). Along with them there is a lot that look like... [+]

Where is the people?
The boundary between micro and macro concepts is diffuse, and although interaction is diffuse, it also influences. Also in us. The problem comes when in the fog blindness we don't get right where we are, where the people are.

Eguneraketa berriak daude