Artist creates colourful tiles using paper digested by molluscs
 A Dutch artist has found a bizarre way to create colourful floor tiles – by using snail poo. Lieske Schreuder thought of the concept when she noticed a plague of snails in her garden who enjoyed eating paper and cardboard. The designer noticed that snails not only ate coloured paper, but also recycled it in that same colour because their bodies reject the colour pigmentTo see how colourful the poo could be, Ms Schreuder brought close to a thousand snails and built a laboratory test that measured the colour of snail poo based on the type of paper eaten. ‘Walking outside, in the garden or on the streets, we are constantly walking on snail excrement,’ said Ms Schreuder. ‘But because these excrements are very small and look like normal dirt, we are not aware of this. This made me think of a situation where these excrements are in colour.’
HOW ARE THE TILES MADE? The snails are fed paper which they then excrete. The waste product is coloured because the snail's body rejects the paper's pigments. The poo, which has a malleable texture, is the collected and fed it into a specially-designed portable machine that mixes and presses it into floor tiles of the same colour. The faeces can also be pressed into a mould using a spatula to create delicate 5-mm thick thread. One metre of thread takes around an hour to create and contains six grams of snail excrement that is ground before processing
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