Paper made out of poop | Sustainable solution
How is conventional paper made?
Is there a solution?
How is this paper created?
This poop is collected, dried, cleaned, dyed, spread, compressed and combined to make paper.
Which countries have implemented this?
A group of women in Uganda, living near the Queen Elizabeth National Park have started this paper-making business to earn a livelihood.
Thailand even has a special park where tourists are provided a proper walk through of the paper-making process.
Not a single tree to be cut…..
Not only elephants, this process can be used for horse, cow or even donkey dung too. India has a sizeable population of all these animals. According to the 2017 census, there are approximately 27,000 elephants in India. This very project can be very promising in these times of ‘Aatma Nirbhar Bharat’.Villages can become self-sufficient. This will not only provide locals with employment but also help India conserve the environment. Millions of trees will be saved with this small change.
Ultimate aim
Limitations
Paper is made out of fibers extracted out of trees. Many types of trees are used for this purpose. Millions of trees are cut every day and a significant amount of them are used for making paper. In 2019, the world lost almost 12 millions of hectares of forest land. That is like losing a forest the size of a football pitch every 6 seconds. Deforestation has become a major global issue in the last few years.
How much is recycled?
Recycling paper is an excellent way of stopping trees from being cut. Recycling 1 ton of paper can save approximately 17 trees. But there are many limitations to paper recycling. There are many constituents and chemicals present in the paper that can contaminate the fresh paper. For that very reason, fresh paper cannot be completely made out of recycled paper. New fresh pulp needs to be added for the production.
Is there a solution?
Papers need pulp eventually extracted from any fibrous substance. Someone in Sri Lanka had an absurd idea one day. Let’s use elephant’s poop for making PULP!!!!!
Sounds weird right? But it worked!
How is this paper created?
Elephants are huge herbivorous creatures. So as a matter of fact they have a huge fibrous intake and because of which have large amounts of fibres in their poops.
Now it may strike anyone ‘How many fibres a single elephant would provide?’ To everyone’s surprise a well-grown elephant eats 200kg-500kg of stuff every day and poops approximately 16 times a day!
Which countries have implemented this?
People from Uganda, Sri Lanka, Kenya and many more have started this as a small scale business in their local areas in their respective countries.
A group of women in Uganda, living near the Queen Elizabeth National Park have started this paper-making business to earn a livelihood.
Thailand even has a special park where tourists are provided a proper walk through of the paper-making process.
Fun fact, as elephants don’t eat any meat, their poop doesn’t even smell!!!!!
Vijendra Shekhawat, a Rajasthani villager from India had the same idea. He and his family too turned this idea into a small local business in their village. They call it Haati Chaap and sell their products on a website named Itokri.
This process is totally eco-friendly.
Ultimate aim
These products are sold even right now on online platforms, and people can surely order them for use. But buying 1 or 2 products from these websites as a souvenir won't help us. I am talking about totally replacing current paper with these products. More and more people will buy these products if they are sold at current rates and available in regular paper markets. To make this all possible, we will have to produce these products on a large scale, to meet the demand as well as reduce production cost.
Limitations
To implement this, there will be many limitations. Financial limitations, land requirement, raw material availability and many more. Research has to be done on this process in order to produce paper in large scale quantities. The workers need to be guided by an expert to produce quality paper.
But no big change happens in a single day. We need to explore more and more eco-friendly products to save the environment in coming years. Slowly and steadily we will get there for sure!
Those who are interested and want to know more about it, they can check out the links!
Sources and relevant links:
Whoa..that's amazing
ReplyDeleteYeah!
DeleteTopic is worth a research! The load on the traditional method of paper production can be reduced for sure! And this can also benefit small scale businesses!
ReplyDeleteBut is it possible for mass production of paper using this technique?
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteThat will be the challenge for experts in respective fields. But I believe with sufficient research on the topic, we can achieve that!
DeleteGreat share! As world is heading towards sustainability, definitely topics like these are worth research.
ReplyDeleteYeah. That is very true.
DeleteSustainable living is really a necessity of future. This is a great article about one of it's solution, but we need more.
ReplyDeleteSure.
DeleteI'm here cause 'poop' baited the click. Cool stuff though.
ReplyDelete