BEIJING – Nothing says “I love you” like a photo frame made from panda poop.

The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base has come up with a dung-for-profit scheme that turns droppings from the endangered species into odor-free souvenirs ranging from bookmarks to Olympic-themed statues of the animals, state media and base officials said Monday.

The facility in the southwestern province of Sichuan houses about 40 bamboo-fed pandas who produce less than a ton of excrement a day.

“We used to spend at least 6,000 yuan ($770) a month to get rid of the droppings but now they can be lucrative,” Jing Shimin, assistant to the base director, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The products will be made at a local handicraft company mostly from undigested bamboo culled from the panda waste through a special process, Xinhua said.

An official who answered the phone at the Chengdu facility said the dung is “carefully selected, smashed, dried and sterilized at 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit).” He refused to give his name but said the products will be of all colors because they will be dyed.

“They don’t smell too bad because 70 percent of the dung is just remains of the bamboo that the pandas are unable to digest,” Jing said.

While no price has been set, he said the most expensive souvenirs will contain a panda hair – collected from the wild – in each package.

The 2008 Olympic statues will feature “athletic pandas performing various Olympic sports,” Xinhua said.

In March, base officials said they were looking into making high-quality paper from the fiber-rich panda excrement, inspired by a trip to Thailand, where they found paper made from elephant dung.

The Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand already sells multicolored paper made from waste produced by its two resident pandas. Making paper there involves a daylong process of cleaning the feces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun.

The panda is one of the world’s rarest and most beloved animals, with about 1,590 living in the wild in China, mostly in Sichuan and the western province of Shaanxi. Another 180 have been bred in captivity.

New York to auction off foreign coins collected from city’s parking meters

NEW YORK – The city is selling 500 pounds of foreign coins that found their way into its parking meters this year.

“We have pretty much every denomination from every continent,” said Anthony Alfano, the city’s deputy chief of meter collections. The most common coins are Greek drachmas, he said.

The Department of Transportation, which makes about $90 million from parking meters annually, has collected bids for the foreign coins and plans to announce the best offer Monday.

About a decade ago, the agency decided to sell foreign coins it collected because it was impractical to exchange them for U.S. currency. In previous years, selling the coins has netted the department between $2 to $4 a pound. Last year’s highest bidder for the coins was Jim Corliss, 60, of Braintree, Mass., a longtime collector. He also bid this year.

“Every once in a while I find something of value,” he said, pointing out that he once came across an 1835 British shilling worth $5

From Associated Press reports