Spending about 7 yuan ($1.11) to eat one or two meals a day, Dong Yufei is trying to save every penny to collect discarded plastic pens to protect the environment, and has successfully collected about 180,000 such pens in the past two years.

Dong, 22, a sophomore at Henan College of Finance & Taxation in Zhengzhou, was born into poverty in the village of Yanshi, Henan Province.

Students are the main consumers of stationery and discard huge amounts of used pens every day without realizing the bad consequences this can have on the environment.

The ink contains carcinogens and cannot be recycled, while the pen casings are made of plastic which is not bio-degradable, according to Dong.

To share his ideas about environmental protection and encourage students to collect their old pens, Dong established "Know & Do," an environmental protection society, at his university last year.

How best to proceed

The idea of collecting pens came to him when he finished the national college entrance examination in June 2010.

"Seeing many students throw them away, I decided to do something to stop this and do something meaningful to start my college life," Dong said.

He then began his research and pondered how to collect the pens and recycle them during the 2010 summer holiday.

In September 2010, Dong finally came up with a plan laying out how harmful the pens were to the environment and the best techniques for recovering them.

One month later, he returned to his hometown to talk to local students and bought many new pens, exchanging them for old ones at a ten to one ratio.

"He has a very special quality. He was born poor but never gave up," Zhou Yanyan, a 21-year-old freshman and also president of "Know and Do," told the Global Times.

However, Yang Yabo, a sophomore of Henan University and a good friend of Dong said he could he not wholly support the idea.

"He is a really nice guy. I understand what he is doing but he lacks money and the recycling problems are still unresolved," he told the Global Times.

Outside support

Dong has persisted through financial difficulties and the worries of his friends and family. He has also won some small financial support from other sources.

Zhai Zhen, a professor of Zhengzhou University donated 300 yuan to Dong after hearing about him.

He started to call for donations in colleges and universities and finally collected 1,143 yuan in 2011.

With this sum of money, Dong and his fellows successfully collected more than 80,000 discarded pens.

Shanghai M&G Stationery Inc then got in touch, retrieved all pens collected so far, and awarded "M&G Environmental Protection Star."

The company's regional manager for Luoyang, surnamed Guo, said that he heard Dong's story and decided to use it as part of the company's recycling activities.

"Most of our sale stores have recycling bins for the consumers to return the empty pen cores. We collect them and then mail them to our head office in Shanghai for processing," Guo told the Global Times.

Potential problems

"The fact is that the cost-recovery is so high that the stationery company can only collectively shred and bury them, and so there is still some damage to the environment," said Dong.

"There are no rules and regulations governing how to deal with office waste," Dong Jinshi, an environmental expert, told the Global Times.

He outlined three methods of disposal: incineration, sanitary landfills and compost. Landfill is the simplest and least costly but causes a waste of resources and farm land while polluting downstream water sources.

The core of a pen is plastic and though it can be washed, traces of ink remain which can cause secondary pollution due to containing heavy metals, said the environmentalist.

Dong Yufei is now seeking help to find more effective technology to recycle the different components of the pens and is even thinking of establishing a company to realize his dreams after graduation.