Japanese Knotweed

Japanese knotweed is a plant included into the category of 100 most invasive plants in the world. It came to Europe from Asia as an ornamental plant in 19th century. The plant spreads as a weed mostly on waste ground, less on cultivated land. The fast spreading of this plant reduces the biodiversity, has a potential to destroy the infrastructure and in the winter time, due to the die-off of the upper parts of the plants, causes soil erosion of the river banks. Currently Ljubljana Municipality, together with Snaga Public Waste Management company, is encouraging inhabitants to drop the Knotweed in the collection centres, the waste is then sent to the incineration plant. The initial project, called “The Knotweed games” was carried out in 2015 in the form of 3 workshops focusing on the biology of the plant, appropriate removal and creative usage of the plant (testing interesting food recipes, preparing homeopathic remedy, paper making and creating natural dye from the rhizomes of the plant) as well as community building and group work. In the second phase, a collaboration with the Paper and Pulp Institute was developed to verify if the knotweed was suitable for producing paper-based products. Lastly, a semi-industrial production was experimented: 1520 kg of Japanese Knotweed allowed to produce 415 kg of paper. Alongside this, two products have emerged, namely notebooks and paper bags, designed by the Re-generacija collective.