Poop to paper

I was amused to read an Australian report about a company that’s producing paper from wombat poop.

A north-west Tasmanian company is launching a product made from wombat poo.

Creative Paper attracted worldwide interest for its ‘roo-poo’ paper in 2005.

Darren Simpson from Creative Paper says the paper is green or gold depending on the time of year the droppings are harvested.

He says the company is pleased with its quality and texture.

“One of the things that we’re finding is that wombats are much cleaner and do a much better job of pulping it, so we’re finding it’s a lot easier to make paper from wombat poo in comparison,” he said.

Mr Simpson says they are careful to use only scats from wombats in captivity, because animals in the wild use them for communication.

“They’re very territorial,” he said.

“In fact what they do is leave their droppings as a form of saying, ‘this is my area’.

“So if you remove it, they have to keep putting it back.

“So we don’t want to wreck the balance too much if we can help it.”

Yes . . . I can imagine that a shy, sensitive wombat might get upset if its territory was invaded by neighbors because its boundary markers had been removed. It might even get constipated in protest!

Intrigued, I did a bit of searching to see how many varieties of animal dung were being used to produce paper. Apart from the wombat and kangaroo dung papers mentioned above, there were many varieties of elephant dung paper produced in Africa, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand (shown below); a paper made from combined elephant and rhino dung in South Africa; camel dung paper in India; sheep dung and (coming soon) reindeer dung paper in Wales, UK; bison dung paper in Idaho; panda poop paper in China; and, from the same Hindu fundamentalist group in India that wants to produce sodas from cow urine (about which I wrote recently), a plan to produce paper from cow dung. Since the cow is sacred to that religion, it’s perhaps inevitable that the news story about its paper plans was headlined, ‘Holy S**t’!

There’s even ‘The Great Elephant Poo Poo Paper Company Limited‘, which specializes in importing paper made from dung, from many sources around the world. Its slogan is, ‘We’re Number One at Number Two!’ An article in Forbes about the company discusses how the paper is made.

The dung is collected in 50-pound rice bags, for $10 a bag, from domesticated elephant herds that are used to work on farms and give rides to tourists. Each adult elephant generates 250 pounds of dung a day. The waste is delivered to Flancman’s operation in a rural orchard in San Patong. There, an employee–there are 65–boils it in 50-gallon cauldrons for three hours to separate, soften and disinfect it. After that the sludge is mixed with fiber and skin from seasonal fruits to help hold the paper together. It is then spread out evenly on mesh screens, dunked in water and left to bake in the hot sun for four hours. What’s peeled off is paperlike. It gets cut, counted, folded and glued to make envelopes, journals and accessories.

One curious reader went so far as to ask Yahoo! Answers, ‘Can human dung be recycled into paper?‘ Their answer was a qualified negative (for which I’m truly grateful!).

The things a simple news report can lead one to learn . . .

Peter