Mar 29, 2006

Penggunaan Eceng Gondok

Posted in Environment at 11:35 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment

I was intrigued by a rash of searches on the Sciencebase site from people looking for the phrase “Penggunaan Eceng Gondok”. A quick Google revealed that Eceng Gondok is the water hyacinth, although “gondok” itself is actually the Indonesian word for goitre.

A scan of three Indonesian-English dictionaries then revealed that “penggunaan” means employing or using, so visitors searching for “Penggunaan Eceng Gondok” were presumably looking for mentions of the uses of water hyacinth. Now, not having much experience of this aquatic plant, I did a little more searching and found that it is a common raw material in Indonesia for making sandals and woven goods, such as table mats it seems. As ever with artisanal and traditional crafts emerging from the developing regions of the world there is an “environmental” and “eco-friendly” tag associated with this material.

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