How to make papers from elephant poop.

GROWN-UP ELEPHANTS CAN EAT MORE than three hundred kilos of food—basically grass, twigs, foliage, and tree bark—in a unmarried day. In the identical period, they'll defecate sixteen to 18 times, generating over two hundred kilos of dung. In Randeniya, a small village withinside the decrease wetlands of Sri Lanka, elephant poop is a renewable resource. The sun-dried, deep-brown dung piles up like haystacks in a portray via way of means of Claude Monet. Visitors might be forgiven for questioning that the poop is useless. But at Eco Maximus, a producer in Randeniya, it takes on a 2d life. More than two decades ago, a person named Thusita Ranasinghe noticed a few dung and had an idea. “He notion he may want to make paper from it,” says the organization’s emblem designer, Susantha Karunarathne, with a smile. 

At his workplace withinside the organization factory, Karunarathne wears a inexperienced t-blouse which says #elephantdungpaper and suggests off a number of his latest magazine designs.

At a nearby table, several women are carefully designing covers for notebooks of various sizes. In another, the finished product is packaged and ready for shipment. Today, Maximus manufactures a range of stationery and souvenirs that are sold in the local market and in 30 other countries around the world. 

Eco Maximus was one of the earliest producers of elephant dung paper and the first in Sri Lanka and refining the manufacturing process required a great deal of trial and error. Elephant dung is brought in from nearby sanctuaries, Karunarathne says on a tour of the factory.Fresh semi-solid green elephant dung smells bad. But after drying it under the hot tropical sun, the smell will disappear. Harvesters collect the dark brown, fibrous heaps in a very hot boiler. “We cook for an hour to make sure the manure is sterile,” says Vibhatha Wijeratne, the operations manager, who shows me a pile of cooked manure wearing yellow gloves.

In a corner of the factory, bundles of paper with crumpled edges are stacked on top of each other. There are different colors: earth tones, blue tones, tropical green tones and intense red tones. Thousands of years ago, much of the writing in Sri Lanka was engraved on stones. Later, islanders wrote on leaves, like the fronds of the palmyrah palm, known locally as palmyrah. "The Palmyra leaves were boiled for writing and dried in the sun, which was called pus kola (old leaves)," says bright-eyed Randika 

Jayasinghe, who teaches biosystems engineering at Sri Jayewardenepura University.Conventional papermaking began after Sri Lanka was colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch and then the British, who referred to the island as Ceylon. Most paper uses pulp as its main material, which is fibrous and rich in lignin and cellulose. "It's made by chemically and mechanically separating the fibers from the wood," says Jayasinghe. "These chemicals are then released as wastewater." The problem is that nearly 4 billion trees are cut down to make paper every year.Some are managed in 

, others are harvested from managed and mature forests. "Because paper is biodegradable, we consider it environmentally friendly compared to plastic," says Jayasinghe. But it comes at a significant environmental cost.

After the British left Sri Lanka in 1948, the local government opened 12 factories in the 1960s to use the waste straw from the paddy fields to make paper. But by 1993 only two remained. One of them was led by Shirani Fairbanks. "I went to the Export Development Board in Colombo and happened to see a piece of paper made out of banana fibers," says curly-haired Fairbanks, picking up a packet of bright wrapping paper from her office desk. . "It inspired me to start Trickledown.Over time, his company went beyond traditional papermaking when it began using waste materials (tar scraps, banana peels, pineapple fiber) to make paper. “There is tremendous market demand for paper products made from elephant dung,” says Fairbanks. They have a unique aesthetic that many young people love." The company now sources paper from manufacturers across the country for its stationery, crafts and other products. One of them is Echo Maximus.Back at the Eco Maximus factory, manager Wijeratne shows off a 1,000 liter cement tank known as the mixer. A rubber hose directs water from a nearby faucet into the tank, and an employee uses his bare hands to dump steamed, cooked manure that now resembles a ball of earth fibers. "This is the pulp we use for the inside pages of notebooks," says Wijeratne. "One-third of this pulp is elephant dung, while two-thirds is trimmings." Offcuts come in two forms: scraps of paper from camps in Colombo and scraps of paper from Eco Maximus that have been leveled and cut to size.Finally, a bucket of deep magenta liquid is added to the mixture. (Eco Maximus also makes paper using only elephant dung, but its fibrous texture makes it unsuitable for writing or drawing.)

In one of the final steps of papermaking, a female pours a jug of pulp onto a skinny steel mesh. The mesh is dipped in water, and she or he makes use of her arms to combine the pulp for some seconds, leveling it at the mesh even as the water trickles down. “This is for one hundred fifty GSM writing paper,” Wijeratne tells me, the usage of the enterprise acronym for “grams in keeping with rectangular meter.” (Printer paper is typically much less than one hundred GSM, even as enterprise playing cards may be as excessive as four hundred GSM.) Two girls preserve the mesh up and press it onto a barely large cotton material, that's laid flat on a desk via way of means of a 3rd female. She then folds the material edges in and seals it, which creates a material-pulp sheet. Smiling and chatting, they quickly make a pile of sheets. “We use this gadget to compress the water out,” says Karunaratne, pointing to a huge electric powered gadget. A middle-elderly guy manually controls the gadget, which squeezes a package deal of material-pulp sheets as water drips down. “Now you could dispose of the cotton material, and permit it dry.” Karunarathne takes me to a huge phase of the manufacturing unit wherein colourful papers are smartly racked. Drying takes location beneathneath the asbestos roof, as direct daylight ought to bleach the blues, tropical greens, earthy tones, and deep reds.

Finally, two cheerful women stand next to a large sheet of aluminum and smooth out creases, corners and edges sheet by sheet. "Ironing is the final step in base paper manufacture," says Wijeratne. These sheets of paper are cut, flattened and made into stationery. The transformation from poop to paper is complete. Outside, in a neighbor's garden in front of the factory, everything starts all over again.An elephant struts by, holding a tuft of grass under its trunk. Drop a bunch of poo before moving on. "It will be paper tomorrow," says Karunarathne, laughing.