Australian transforms wombat poo to paper

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(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-22 09:11

SYDNEY: An Australian entrepreneur has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "waste paper" with an ingenious green scheme to make luxury stationery from wombat dung.

Darren Simpson, a self-confessed "poo expert," has big plans for the square-shaped fecal deposits of a wombat named Nugget.

"It's not your normal poo. It's not round or long - it's actually little bricks and it's very, very fibrous," Simpson said. "Basically what you can see through it is plant matter. So they're a good little pulper."

With the help of Nugget's keeper, Simpson harvests the animal's droppings and then boils them down to the fibres to make handmade paper - the latest in his line of peculiarly Australian products.

The wombat poo paper, which is made by combining the sterilized waste with cotton fibres, was launched in Tasmania state last month, and follows the success of Simpson's "roo poo" paper, made from kangaroo excrement.

"People come into the business and can do a tour, and we use lots of recycled materials. When we kept getting to the roo poo sample, everyone would ask if we could use all these different types of animals. And the one that kept coming up was wombat poo. So we thought, well we better give this a go."

Simpson said his company Creative Paper would soon begin work on a wombat poo line of photo albums, journals and writing paper.

He said adhesive tape solved the one concern customers had when using his stationery. "The only problem we ever had was that no one ever wanted to lick the envelope."

AFP