In the bathrooms at Morgan’s Rock, the trash cans are little green plastic bins covered in what appears to be painted wickerwork. However, closer inspection reveals that the woven material covering the bins and little caps is in fact newspaper that has been twisted into long strands and braided into shape. Despite the paint job, one can still see the letters and broken images on the baskets, and this simple artisanal craft adds a creative and rustic touch to what would otherwise be a banal bathroom fixture.

The bungalows are equipped with the above rectangular variations of newspaper bins for composting, recycling, and trash, and seeing the different colors next to each other convinces me that the unpainted version is the most attractive. Unfortunately, it is also the least common, as all the bathroom trash bins I’ve seen look like this.

I spoke to Alba, the General Manager, about the bins and asked where they were made. She answered that several towns in and around the Rivas area have handicraft shops, and that as part of community support Morgan’s Rock purchased these sorts of things for both utility and decoration. Rivas is a city and a department (sort of like a province, I think), so I will need to find out how widespread this newspaper craft actually is, because there could be an important collaboration between Nicaraguan and Indian newspaper craftspeople (Kerala in particular has been working on an utilitarian recycling over the past few years).