Scientists Turn Cow & Elephant Poop to Paper

Scientists Turn Cow & Elephant Poop to Paper

We’ve all received statements from our banks, telecommunication and utilities companies with a simple message at the bottom urging us to “Go paperless, save trees”, often accompanied by a picture of a winding river or a green tree.

Implicit in these requests is the assumption that going digital is better for the environment. But the truth is- it’s just plain wrong and none of the two ways are helping us save any trees.

Now however, researchers have developed a way to turn cow and elephant dung into paper. Traditional paper production methods involve the chemical and mechanical breakdown of raw wood into pulp that can be turned into paper products, which can be an energy intensive process. This new paper production technique promises to reduce the industry’s reliance on wood by using animals- using their wastes- performing the breakdown functions themselves.

“Animals eat low-grade biomass containing cellulose, chew it and expose it to enzymes and acid in their stomach, and then produce manure,” Alexander Bismarck, a professor of advanced materials at the University of Vienna, said in a news release. “Depending on the animal, up to 40 percent of that manure is cellulose, which is then easily accessible.”

The dung-derived fibers could be fashioned into revenue-generating products such as wastewater treatment filters, writing paper, or as fillers to reinforce polymer composites. Not only that, the team is also in the early stages of developing a two-step process that would capture methane from the manure to generate electricity and then use the remains to produce paper.

To go from dung to a finished paper product, the manure needs to first be treated with sodium hydroxide. Therefore, the researchers began by treating the manure with a sodium hydroxide solution- thereby partially removing the lignin. Next, the material was bleached with sodium hypochlorite to remove the rest of the lignin and to make white pulp for paper.

This cellulose then needs minimal grinding to break it down into the nanofibers necessary for paper production. In contrast, when isolating cellulose from trees, much more processing and grinding is necessary. The cellulose from animal dung could likely be processed in the same factories where tree pulp is made.

“You need a lot of energy to grind wood down to make nanocellulose,” says Andreas Mautner, a postdoc student at the University of Vienna. But if you use manure as a starting material, “you can reduce the number of steps you need to perform, simply because the animal already chewed the plant and attacked it with acid and enzymes. You inexpensively produce a nanocellulose that has the same or even better properties than nanocellulose from wood, with lower energy and chemical consumption.”

The research team is currently exploring potential applications for the material. For now, they say it could be used as reinforcement for polymer composites or as filters for wastewater. It can also be made into paper for writing, though it may be a while until you see notebooks made from elephant dung at your local office supply store.