Why not, asked Mahima Mehra and Vijendra Shekhawat. Today, their poo-paper sells out of posh lifetsyle stores in metros.
“The first time I confronted an elephant’s rear end, paper was the last thing on my mind — I was too busy avoiding drowning under a mound of poo!” says Mahima Mehra, founder of Haathi Chaap, a Jaipur-based handmade paper business that creates paper out of elephant dung.
Mehra, a psychology graduate, had wandered into paper-making by way of photography and working with NGOs and was in the business of creating handmade paper out of natural fibres in collaboration with Jaipur-based paper producer Vijendra Shekhawat.
On the day in question, Shekhawat had taken her to a shrine atop a hill near Jaipur. They walked, but most tourists prefer to go up the hill on elephant back. “There was dry elephant dung underfoot, and suddenly, it struck us how similar it looked to the raw fibre from which we made paper,” says Mehra. Inspiration struck and the duo decided to experiment with producing paper out of elephant dung.
Its high fibre content makes elephant poo an ideal raw material for creating paper, says Shekhawat. The initial challenges revolved around cleaning the elephant dung, divesting it of its natural odours and finding a binding agent that would allow the paper to be rolled into sheets. “Initially, we tried making paper out of 100% elephant dung but the paper turned out to be very fragile,” says Shekhawat.
Mixing it with cotton rag — mostly waste cotton scrap sourced from garment manufacturing factories — proved to be the answer. Today, the elephant dung is mixed with about 25% cotton fibre to create ‘poo-paper’.
Most of the dung used by Haathi Chaap is sourced from in and around Amer Fort near Jaipur, where elephants used to give rides to tourists have been pressed into service to provide the raw material to create poo-paper; of course, by an entirely natural process.
The best quality dung comes from elephants that have been fed on a diet of jawar and bajra, says Shekhawat, and the 16 elephants whose digestive by-product helps Mehra and Shekhawat in their astoundingly eco-friendly business produce about 1 to 1.5 tons of dung every week.
After processing (see box on the paper-making process) this amounts to about 300 sheets of paper. Haathi Chaap currently makes about 250-300 sheets a day, says Mehra.
“Quality control does work out to be a problem as we’re dependent so much on a raw material that changes all the time,” says Mehra. Elephants fed on a different diet in different seasons, or those given inferior feeds, produce dung that is not conducive to the paper-making process.
Do people find the idea of paper made of animal poop slightly icky? “I think mostly the reaction of ickiness is for fun... nobody’s really reacted to it badly. We did think that it would be more difficult for us to convince Indians to buy the paper, but have been surprised by the easy acceptance and fun factor seen among Indian buyers,” says Mehra. It perhaps helps that the paper is used to create whacky, nifty everyday items such as paper bags, photo frames, notebooks, writing stationery, bookmarks, pen-holders and clocks.
Haathi Chaap products are available at Mother Earth,
Koramangala Intermediate Ring Road (080 65397958). For more details, go to http://elephantpoopaper.com
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