Researchers at a giant panda reserve in southern China are looking for paper mills to process their surplus of fiber-rich panda excrement into high quality paper.
Liao Jun, a researcher at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base in Sichuan province, said the idea came to them after a visit to Thailand last year where they found paper made from elephant dung. They thought panda poop would produce an even finer quality paper, he said.
“We are not interested in doing this for the profits but to recycle the waste,” said Liao. “It’s environmentally friendly. We can use the paper ourselves, and also we can sell whatever is left over.”
The center’s 40 bamboo-fed pandas produce about 2 tons of droppings a day, but Liao said he was not sure yet how much paper would result.
I wonder if this would work with ruminants as well as it obviously does with other herbivores? Maybe we could save a few trees? Pollute a few less rivers?
One word why this will not catch on: envelope.
seems like a good material to make toilet paper out of…..
I can’t wait for PeTA to raise their Animal exploitation banners and suggest we kill all the pandas because that’s the humane thing to do just because they said so.
hmmmm – 40 bears and 2 tons ? 4000 lbs = 100 lbs of err, waste a day? Seems like a lot! Guess that answers the age old question of whether a bear does his duty in the woods
#4 – That’s a load of crap.
Maybe my local paper will use it for printing their editorial page. 🙂 (hopefully it won’t be “scratch-n-sniff”)
this is great, but imagine the dangers. if production gets sloppy, there could be an e. coli outbreak in the op-ed section of the new york times!
Hewlett Packard picked a peck of panda poo poo paper.
Sounds perfect for the NY Times
#4
I’m surprised too, and I thought only the Whitehouse could produce that amount of sh*t per day.
What, no one here reads boingboing? They had a story last week about paper made from elephant dung http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/23/elephant_shit_paper.html
Rupert Murdoch has been able to turn papers into shit. No big deal here.
Think of all of the trees we’d be able to save if we tapped into the SFO sewer system. It would be very low quality!