Inspired by techniques used in Asia, a Serbian couple, Dragan and Slavica Markovic, decided to change their careers and create pencils from old newspapers.

New Pen makes its eco-pencils from graphite, recycled unsold and old newspapers, and edible, locally sourced, corn starch glue. Graphite is the only raw material the company procures abroad.

“Manual labor dominates in our manufacturing process,” explains Slavica. “We start by cutting newspapers into equally sized strips and then we unfold the strips and hand-paste the graphite core into them,” she adds while demonstrating the process.

In order for New Pen to be financially sustainable, Markovics had to build, with the help of a local engineer, a trio of simple machines that partially automate their production process.

Quality control and boxing of pencils are also done manually. “We inspect every single graphite and colored pencil manually, to make sure that they are of the same length and nicely sharpened,” explains Slavica.

Dragan says he had “a good fortune” to meet early on an executive of the Berlin-based Pelikan Group, one of the world’s leading providers of school and stationery material, who recognized the appeal of New Pen’s environment-friendly pencils and introduced them to German wholesalers.

New Pen currently sells only a fraction, or around 5 percent, of its pencils in Serbia, while the remaining 95 percent are sold to wholesalers, primarily in Germany, but also Austria, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

The company currently employs eight people and plans further expansion after it won last year financial and technical backing from a European Union project supporting the green transformation in Serbia.

“Our company has several missions,” Dragan Markovic says. “The first is to make environmentally friendly products, and second to educate young people.”

For that purpose, the company uses the boxes in which it packs its pencils as a calling card.

Written in English and French, on the back of each box, buyers can read that “(our pencils) are fully recyclable, that no new trees were cut to make them, that our manufacturing process is energy efficient, and that they are healthy,” he adds.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.