“Look what I just received, it’s beautiful!”exclaims Kitty Naslin, to the gasps of admiration from her students. “I was next to the trash can”The entrepreneur says, proudly showing the packaging of the television she has just found in front of her workshop. At the Cardboard School, containers rescued from yellow garbage bins are worth their weight in gold. Because in this workshop opened in 2014 in the 19th centurymy Paris district, Kitty Naslin, with a managerial tone and butterfly-shaped earrings, learns to make wardrobes, shelves, desks, armchairs and lighting from recycled cardboard.
The three students of the day, all in their sixties, work quietly, cutter in hand, with reggae playing in the background. “Making cardboard allowed me to survive, to get my head back”“This is the case,” swears his coach, a former executive of a large Swiss television group who came here after a burnout. His school has obtained the first state-recognised professional certification in cardboard making, and most of his students are financed by the region, France Travail or the personal training account. Some train for pleasure, while others try to make it their profession. Because cutting this material has become a (small) business, there are many companies and associations that offer workshops or “team building” courses in schools, social centres and hospitals.
Behind this new passion lies a desire: to build sustainable objects from containers that were once considered waste. An ecological material par excellence, cardboard paper is biodegradable, recyclable up to 25 times and in France it achieves a recovery rate of 82%, according to Ademe.
An isolated cardboard house
Invented in the mid-19th century.my In 19th-century England, corrugated cardboard, made from plant fibres, was first used for industrial packaging in the 1870s to decorate top hats. With the rise of e-commerce, cardboard boxes have invaded cities, piling up at parcel sales points and in building foyers. To prevent waste, associations such as Carton Plein in Paris and Nanterre collect and resell recycled cardboard boxes in the form of moving kits, employing socially excluded people.
Above all, their uses are diversifying: there are new companies offering furniture, bicycles and even buildings. Since he created his “cardboard house” company, MBC 56, in November 2022 in Morbihan, Nicolas Le Dirach has received requests from all over France. Whenever possible, he shows his clients his showroom model: the house he built for his family, made with a wooden frame and insulated with cardboard. “The advantage over glass wool is that it does not settle over the years. It also allows the thickness of the walls to be reduced and therefore gain surface area, while providing thermal and acoustic insulation more effectively.lists the entrepreneur. For Nicolas Le Dirach, who is currently the only one offering this type of construction in France, this insulation allows “Limiting energy consumption, with a house in which all components are recyclable”.
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