September/October 2010
Entrepreneurs are finding inspiration in recovered paper, using it to create innovative, Earth-friendly consumer and industrial products.
By Kim Fernandez
Rigid or flexible, durable or degradable, colorful or uniform—recycled fiber can take on a wide variety of physical characteristics. That might be why so many entrepreneurs look at the material and see green, both for its profit potential and its potential to become new products with minimal environmental impact. Though most recovered fiber gets turned back into paper or paperboard, these niche products showcase paper’s potential in a wide variety of markets.
Cat Litter
Using recovered fiber is old news to Nestlé Purina (St. Louis), which introduced its Yesterday’s News brand cat litter in 1987 (www.yesterdaysnews.com). Today, the cat, ferret, and rabbit litters and small-pet bedding materials made from recycled paper, cartons, and sawdust are popular products for the company. “On average, we use more than 44 million pounds of recycled paper in Yesterday’s News each year,” says Sheridan Budin, brand manager. The litter is virtually dust-free and up to three times more absorbent than traditional clay litters, the company says. It recently introduced a bag for the product that’s recyclable as well.
“Sixty percent of the corrugated cardboard in Yesterday’s News comes from Nestlé plants,” Budin says. Nestlé Purina also acquires paper from local recycling efforts near its plant in Springfield, Mo., including a program with the local Girl Scouts, who collect unwanted telephone directories and deliver them to the company. “We’ve turned more than 130,000 directories into litter that way,” Budin says.
Nestlé Purina sends the paper, corrugated, and reclaimed industrial sawdust through its proprietary high-pressure and heat system, which seals ink in with the paper and turns out moisture-locking pellets.
The end result is a product that is “good for the cat, the home, and the planet,” she says. “We feel like it’s part of our portfolio that offers pet owners a real environmentally friendly solution in the market.”
Coffins and Urns
The Ecopod (www.ecopod.co.uk) is a seed pod-shaped coffin handmade from 100-percent recycled paper and mulberry pulp. Inspired by her concern for the planet and her interest in ancient Egyptian rituals, British inventor Hazel Selina decided to design a coffin that was “as environmentally friendly as possible and offered only minimal pollution to the atmosphere when cremated and to the earth when buried,” says Cynthia Beal, founder of the Natural Burial Co. (Eugene, Ore.), which carries the Ecopod in the United States.
To make the coffins, a father-and-son team, Peter and Gar Rock, takes postconsumer newspaper and office paper collected by Magpie Recycling Co-operative (Brighton, England), converts it into paper clay, and spreads the clay into fiberglass molds in a factory in Brighton. The molded coffins are heated, dried, steamed, and sanded. The exterior layer is naturally dyed paper made from mulberry pulp, which comes in several colors and designs as well as gold leaf. The 45-pound coffin can be used for cremation, traditional burial, or natural burial. It biodegrades naturally over time when placed in the ground. The company also produces the ARKA Acorn Urn, another molded recycled-paper product designed to hold cremains.
“The feature that surprises most people about the Ecopod is how strong it is,” Beal says. “We often think that things made from paper are flimsy, but when you get the mix just right, make it thick enough, and cure it properly, paper clay products can be extremely durable.” The product has been a popular one for her company, she adds. “It’s a great teacher about how we all come from—and eventually return to—the earth,” she says. “With natural coffins like the Ecopod, life is one big recycling project.”
Countertops
Paneltech Products (Hoquiam, Wash.) says its PaperStone solid-surface countertops (www.paperstoneproducts.com) are a sustainable, durable alternative to plastic or stone. “By weight, a panel is 55 percent paper and 45 percent resin,” says Joan Julius, a company spokesperson. “And for all except one color, the paper is 100-percent postconsumer recycled cardboard or office paper.”
The company starts with Forest Stewardship Council-certified postconsumer recycled fiber. It saturates the paper with petroleum-free and formaldehyde-free resins, stacks it, and fuses it together with heat and pressure to create a solid-surface material that resists water and heat up to 350 degrees F. Beyond tables and countertops, uses for PaperStone include cutting boards, knife handles, bathroom partitions, wall cladding, and signs.
Julius says the material has drawn particular interest from government and commercial building projects, which can earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design points by using it. “A lot of those projects have green requirements, and we fit in very nicely” due to the product’s recycled content and its lack of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds. “There’s definitely a big interest in it and market for it,” she says.
Fire Logs
Prefabricated fire logs have long been popular due to their ease of use. One eco-friendly option in this market is the Enviro-Log (www.enviro-log.net), made from 100-percent recycled waxed OCC. “The wax box had no recycling option before this,” says Enviro-Log President Ross McRoy. “We make this product 100 percent from that material, and we’re the only sustainable outlet for the wax box” in the United States.
Enviro-Log was born from the idea to use wax boxes—the kind used to transport fresh produce—for fire starters. At first, “the idea was to cut the wax boxes into small pieces and use them to light wood pellet stoves,” McRoy says. “From there, the idea grew into a firelog.”
The Fitzgerald, Ga.-based company procures broken-down, baled boxes directly from grocers. “We’re just like a regular paper recycler,” McRoy says. It cuts the boxes into chips, dries them, and compacts and extrudes them into a 3½-inch-diameter bar. The bar gets chopped into either 7-inch or 11-inch lengths that weigh 3 pounds and 5 pounds, respectively. The company wraps and boxes the logs for sale—in many cases, to the same grocery stores that provided the raw materials.
McRoy says the logs are cleaner, safer, and more efficient than wood. They produce 50 percent more energy per pound, 30 percent fewer emissions, 80 percent less carbon monoxide, and 86 percent less creosote. Customers can use them in fireplaces or wood stoves. “It can do all the things a piece of wood can do,” he says.
The company, which says it’s the largest recycler of waxed OCC in the country, reports selling more than 10 million Enviro-Logs in its six-year history. It plans to establish new manufacturing plants in additional locations and develop new products from the material.
Furniture
Making furniture from corrugated cartons is nothing new, says Jimmy Chiang, CEO of the Irvine, Calif.-based design studio Way Basics (www.waybasics.com), but in the past, the designs have “been seen more as art products, with a single chair going for more than $1,000,” he says. Chiang set out to market easy-to-assemble furniture that was both affordable and “green” because it was made from recovered paper. That’s when he discovered zBoard, a product designed in Taiwan after 10 years’ development.
The zBoard is made of 99-percent postconsumer recycled paper and 1 percent paper veneer sandwiched together to create a dense board. “It’s an eco-alternative to particleboard” or medium-density fiberboard, Chiang says, “and it’s 62 percent lighter than particleboard but just as strong.” Way Basics sells zBoard cubes, bookcases, shelves, tables, and recycling bins. The pieces arrive in flat boxes, and buyers assemble them at home via interlocking parts or included industrial adhesive tape. “It’s super easy,” he says. The products sell for about $20 for a shelf or cube to $130 for a grouping of multiple cubes.
“It’s for anybody,” Chiang says, “but two segments have found the products very useful, and those are parents and apartment-dwellers. You can set it up fast, it’s nontoxic—most particleboard has formaldehyde—and it’s human-friendly in very fun colors.”
Paper Bead Jewelry
Artisans in several countries have begun making jewelry and accessories from recycled paper beads, often as a way to help disadvantaged populations. Francis Oliveira started transforming unwanted magazines into jewelry while volunteering in a homeless shelter in Rio de Janeiro. “There was a woman called Isabel who had some kind of mental disorder, who spent the day rolling up pieces of paper,” the artist says. “When I wanted to create an income-generating activity for the group, we didn’t have a budget to buy tools or materials, so I got the idea to make the paper beads and create different objects.” The shelter closed in 2003, but Oliveira kept making the jewelry as a way to support herself.
She and the other artisans create the paper bead jewelry by cutting magazine pages into triangles, gluing them, rolling them up into round beads or cylinders, and applying varnish to protect them from water. The jewelry is available from a variety of shops and online vendors worldwide, including www.novica.com.
“I’ve sold more than 1,000 pieces,” Oliveira says, using magazines given to her by friends and people in her community. “I tell everyone that I need magazines,” she says, and her friends help spread the word as well. “I often receive phone calls from people who want to throw away old magazine collections. The other day, I received a big collection of National Geographic magazines, which are great for my jewelry because they’re colorful and glossy.”
Across the Atlantic Ocean, Barbara Moller, president of the nonprofit Voices for Global Change (Alexandria, Va.), established Paper to Pearls (www.papertopearls.org) in 2006 in two displaced-persons camps in northern Uganda. “This started as a poverty alleviation program for these women who had no ability to farm,” Moller says. “They were confined to the camps and relied exclusively on humanitarian aid as their income source to pay for food, medicines, [and] school fees.”
The beads are made out of paper collected in Uganda, Moller says. “A buyer goes to a huge market stacked to the rafters with recycled paper,” she says. “Church groups in the United States collect calendars and magazines and catalogs as well.” The artisans roll the paper into beads and cover the beads with a nontoxic acrylic coating. The project has its own online store and sells the bead jewelry through a variety of retail outlets.
Paper to Pearls now has the participation of 125 women from six camps and two town-based cooperatives. The artisans earn as much as US$120 a month, which is more than four times the national average in Uganda. The program estimates that each beader supports 30 people in her community. Moller says Paper to Pearls has gained popularity in the United States because its jewelry comes with a story, which makes buyers feel good about it. “Women like to help women,” she says.
Siding
When he first broached the idea of creating exterior building siding out of recycled paper, people thought he was crazy, says KlipTech President Joel Klippert, but his EcoClad product (www.kliptech.com/ecoclad.html) is growing in popularity and sales.
Paper siding was not his idea, Klippert says. “There have been products coming from Europe for decades that are made from virgin-fiber papers,” he explains. “Our customers asked us to create an exterior siding product that would replace those products coming from Europe. They wanted something domestic and sustainable.”
EcoClad is made in the United States from an FSC-certified blend of 100-percent postconsumer recycled paper and bamboo fibers that are bound together with a VOC-free and benzene-free resin. It’s both dense and sustainable, Klippert says. The standard 7-mm-thick sheet comes in 10 stock wood-grain finishes or 10 stock colors, with 200 wood grains and custom colors, sizes, and widths available by special order. It’s suited to both private and commercial projects, he says.
EcoClad is not Klippert’s first foray into recycled fiber products: He invented PaperStone 10 years ago, a brand he later sold to Paneltech Products.
Shoes and Bags
Wood, eel skin, fish scales—unusual materials are all in a day’s work for shoe and accessory designer Colin Lin, but recycled newsprint is still a notable choice for her Taipei, Taiwan-based company, ACL Footwear. To create the shoes in the All Black line (www.allblack.com.tw), workers weave the newsprint into a lattice pattern by hand, then they coat it with plastic for durability and waterproofing. Each pair of shoes uses just three to four pages of newsprint, the company reports. The unique primary material and the handcrafted construction ensure that each pair is one of a kind. The shoes sell for $110 to $230, and the company has extended the line to a series of woven handbags.
Wallpaper Tiles
Textured wall coverings have long been popular in commercial settings and cutting-edge homes. Thanks to the Philadelphia design firm MIO (www.mioculture.com), those wanting this fashionable look now can get it without contributing to pollution. “We were interested in creating three-dimensional surface coverings that would use [scrap paper] as a raw material,” says MIO’s Jaime Salm. “We tried several formats of tiles as well as molding technologies before finding the most appropriate one for the application.”
PaperForms is a modular system of 100-percent recycled kraft paper tiles in four designs: three decorative and one acoustical tile for sound control. “Most of the material comes from neighboring companies’ waste streams,” Salm says. The company pulps the paper, dilutes it in water, and creates forms over metal tools using suction. The forms are pressed in heated stations to create even, dense tiles. The company offers an optional fireproofing treatment to make them suitable for commercial use. Do-it-yourselfers and designers can use them to create all sorts of shapes and patterns on walls by hanging them with double-stick tape or wallpaper paste. They sell for about $32 for a 12-tile pack.
“We wanted to create value through design and transform waste, or what could be considered disposable, into something beautiful and durable,” Salm says. “We believe there is huge potential for modular surface coverings. The flexibility of the product and the effects that customers can achieve make the market unlimited.”
Protective Packaging
UFP Technologies’ Molded Fiber brand (www.ufpt.com/moldedfiber.asp) helps manufacturers minimize the environmental footprint of their product packaging. The Georgetown, Mass., company’s molded pulp consists of 100-percent recycled newsprint and water. It’s highly modifiable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly, the company says—and it provides better cushioning and vibration protection than popular alternatives, it asserts. Among their other benefits, molded pulp products are static-free and they nest for shipping, potentially reducing shipping costs. Molded Fiber has been used as packaging for a wide range of products, including wine, electronic devices, rifles, plumbing fixtures, and beauty products.
Automobile Insulation
Federal-Mogul (www.federalmogul.com) is keeping cars quiet in a loud way. The company, headquartered in Southfield, Mich., turns packaging and other byproducts that are normally discarded at vehicle manufacturing plants into QuietShield Green Non-woven (GRN) acoustical padding, an automobile insulation in headliners and door panels that reduces noise in vehicle cabins at lower costs while reducing landfill waste and disposal costs. The 2010 Buick LaCrosse was the first vehicle to use QuietShield GRN, which received both General Motors’ Environmental Excellence Award and the Environmental Management Association’s Environmental Achievement Award for demonstrating commitment to the environment. “QuietShield, and innovative products like this, [will] have a larger presence on vehicles and many other applications in the future,” says Rene Dalleur, Federal-Mogul vehicle safety and protection senior vice president.
Kim Fernandez is a Bethesda, Md.-based writer. Scrap intern Alex Pham contributed to this story.
Entrepreneurs are finding inspiration in recovered paper, using it to create innovative, Earth-friendly consumer and industrial products.