A Startup Making Paper Out of Stone, Not Trees

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/the-former-used-car-salesman-who-s-squeezing-paper-from-a-stone

by T-A • 9 years ago

276 173 9 years ago

soupbowl8• 9 years ago

Just a note: paper is either made of dead standing trees or wood that is so full of rot/defect that no lumber can be made from it. It is a common misconception that live green trees and whole forests are destroyed for paper.

- a former woodsman for 13 years

Edit: My experience is in western Canada. I forgot that hackernews is a global site. Some countries do grow pine specifically for paper.

slap_shot• 9 years ago

This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing. I wonder what % of people know this.

tmnvix2• 9 years ago

It's not true. It's based on one person's observation (in this case a Canadian woodsman).

Plantation trees are used to make paper in New Zealand and Australia. That is my personal observation, but it is enough to disprove the claim that paper is only made from dead or rotting trees.

linkregister• 9 years ago

Do the waste wood chips from a typical lumber mill go into particle board or might they also go into paper?

soupbowl8• 9 years ago

It depends on the mill and the current economy. The wood chips will not be used for pulp but instead burned to generate power for the mill, made into fire pallets, particle board or other similar product. Based on what makes the most money in the current economy and the products the mill is equipped to make.

tmnvix2• 9 years ago

In Tasmania they are used to make paper.

Baeocystin16• 9 years ago

Just to add to this, I used to live near a paper mill, and had friends who worked there. More than half of their feedstock was sawdust and waste chips from the local sawmill, and about a quarter was recycled. Very little virgin wood was used, and what was used was not usable for anything else.

That being said, I wish this guy luck. Having different tech available for use in areas where it would be a better way to do things is not a bad idea.

emondi2• 9 years ago

Here in south America paper mills work with massive pine plantations, in deforested land or in former wetlands.

richdougherty• 9 years ago

Same in New Zealand.

soupbowl8• 9 years ago

I am from western Canada, I guess it is not the same every where.

mc32• 9 years ago

I know someone who used to work for a paper forrester --the trees they plant are exclusively grown in managed timberlands for conversion to paper --no other use. They use fast growing varieties of trees[1]. The likes of Wayerhaeuser and others.

[1]https://www.quora.com/How-fast-do-fast-growing-trees-for-pap...

EGreg• 9 years ago

But they grow the pines for paper and then regrow them? Is the whole operation sustainable? According to Penn and Teller's "Bullshit", it is.

PhasmaFelis• 9 years ago

I thought they mainly used fast-growing pine plantations planted specifically to harvest for paper.

(Which still isn't 100% ideal, because monocultured pine isn't friendly to the local species and they're generally devoid of animal life, but way better than clearcutting wild forest.)

soupbowl8• 9 years ago

It is possible that some where in the world people do that. Lumber is worth far more money than paper, especially in our current economy. Growing trees for paper in a forest rich area like western Canada is more effort than it's worth and more expensive.

mrcsparker• 9 years ago

Please write about being a woodsman somewhere and submit it. I would love to read about it

soupbowl8• 9 years ago

I am a terrible writer but I have still considered it many times. I've seen a lot of incredible things being out in nature all the time. Also there are many misconceptions about logging that I like to clear up. But my stories are usually better at a party with a glass of wine!

douche• 9 years ago

Yup, the shit wood gets put into pulp, the good stuff gets sawn out for lumber or veneer logs.

Hardwood pulp is just barely worth more than the stumpage fees that the loggers must pay to the landowners. Depending on the market, softwood pulp can be even less profitable.

kevinalexbrown• 9 years ago

I'm more curious about the byproducts and energy consumption of each manufacturing process. I have no idea, does anyone have a good comparison?

Aside: supposedly global pulp production is 34 percent recycling, 45 percent from sawmill waste, and 21 percent 'logs and chips.'[0] The wikipedia article later states, from another source, that 16 percent of production comes from tree farms. The gist of your general point stands, as I understand it: we're not going out and cutting old growth or even secondary growth forests for paper (though we make use of reject trees when we target them for other reasons).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_(paper)

atupis• 9 years ago

This http://bioproductmill.com/bioproducts is probably at the moment most advanced pulp mill in the world and it produces 1,800 GWh per year.

zebrafish2• 9 years ago

A large majority of the energy used in paper mills comes from the bark of the trees. Logs have to be debarked before they can be pulped and the bark eventually becomes fuel that supplies power to much of the mill.

troyvit• 9 years ago

What do we clear out to make room for the tree farms and what is their long term effect on the environment?

http://www.ibiblio.org/london/agriculture/general/1/msg00074...

http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-views/why-tree-plantations-...

(not to say a limestone quarry is a better solution...)

tomcam2• 9 years ago

Very much not true here in the USA. We have hundreds of thousands – probably millions – of acres set aside specifically for paper. It has been sustainable for well over 100 years and is super well planned, mostly by private companies.

kepano• 9 years ago

Was going to say the same thing. I recently worked on a piece that walks through the history of managed forests: http://blog.lumi.com/managed-forests

whistlerbrk• 9 years ago

The tree production may be sustainable, but if this article holds true, 100 tons of water for a single ton of paper can't be good for the environment.

doikor• 9 years ago

Can confirm from selling some wood from inheritance lands to pay the inheritance tax. Basically the good trees get sold for lumber and the ones not good enough become cellulose/paper (with the big machines you always do a full clearing as its more economical this way so you don't get to leave the small ones to grow etc.). This is from Finland.

And as others have pointed out most of the raw material going into the local paper mill was saw dust from the local sawmills.

Maakuth• 9 years ago

This is not completely accurate either, you don't necessarily do full clearing even with the big machines. Typically there's couple of thinnings in the growth cycle from sapling stage to old forest, the whole cycle taking something like 70 years. Mostly you do full clearing at the end and then replant. This is my experience, also from Finland.

_lbaq2• 9 years ago

This is not true, most of the material for pulp comes from forest thinning, recycled paper and leftovers from sawmills, at least if you talking industrial scale.

amelius• 9 years ago

It's not just wood. From the article:

To make a ton of regular paper requires 100 tons of water, TBM says, while its Limex paper is made without water.

distances• 9 years ago

This may or may not be a problem. Areas like Canada or Northern Europe have excessive amounts of water, and water preservation does not make sense. In some places domestic water usage is even encouraged to make sure the flow in fresh water tunnels stays brisk enough.

volundr-• 9 years ago

From the article: "In place of 20 trees, it uses less than a ton of limestone, as well as 200 kilograms of polyolefin."

200 kilograms of polyolefin, a class of compounds produced by polymerization of alkenes, which are derived from petrochemicals or ethanol, both of which come from water-intensive sources.

Also, is this stuff biodegradable at all? It's basically stone dust infused with an extremely stable plastic. This stuff would last a thousand years in a landfill...

abandonliberty• 9 years ago

People don't realize that we farm trees. It's a crop, like wheat or corn.

dTal• 9 years ago

If only this were true.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/26/sumatra-borneo...

Official figures show more than half of Indonesia's rainforest, the third-largest swath in the world, has been felled in a few years and permission has been granted to convert up to 70% of what remains into palm or acacia plantations.
Nine villages have been in conflict with the giant paper company April, which has permission to convert, with others, 450,000 hectares of deep peat forests on the Kampar Peninsula in central Sumatra. Because the area contains as much as 1.5bn tonnes of carbon, it has global importance in the fight against climate change.

ipsum2• 9 years ago

Would this be considered a business, not a startup? I don't see major disruption happening in this space. Lots of companies make non-wood paper, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_paper and plastic.

Cyphase• 9 years ago

Does a startup have to be majorly disruptive? Does it have to be (one of) the first in its market?

failrate• 9 years ago

Buried in the article is that the binder is polyolefin, which basically just means plastic. So, this is plastic paper. Granted, the examples given were for semi durable items like menus and business cards, but i still see that as a net negative.

wavefunction• 9 years ago

Depending on the type of restaurant menus can need frequent re-printing. I'm sure even at lower-end corporate chains there is a cycle time where new dishes are cycled through while older ones are removed.

squimmy• 9 years ago

I imagine in those types of restaurants, menus might be cycled-out due to wear and tear more often than due to changing dishes. In which case, the increased durability and water-resistance of this stone-based paper might result in less waste.

fnl• 9 years ago

Polyolefins are used to make stuff like plastic bags and are heavily researched due to their substantial and very negative impact on the environment. So that this stone paper stuff is sold as a more environmentally friendly alternative to paper is just a big hoax. Our oceans are already littered with plastics and aquatic wildlife is heavily impacted. Plastics made out of olefin polymers can survive a whole century - i.e., this "water-free" tech might dump a century worth of plastic paper into our oceans. Nice! :-(

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141391010... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079670010... asf....

http://www.plasticgarbageproject.org/en/plastic-garbage/prob... http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-plastic-is-har... etc....

philipkglass2• 9 years ago

To make a ton of regular paper requires 100 tons of water, TBM says, while its Limex paper is made without water. In place of 20 trees, it uses less than a ton of limestone, as well as 200 kilograms of polyolefin.

...

"Making paper from wood chips involves planting trees, which can be carbon neutral, so I’m not sure how much appeal this will have" from an environmental perspective.

Appeal from an environmental perspective: zero. Less than zero. Polyolefins are plastics. The vast majority are made from fossils. Polyolefins can be made starting from biomass but then so is ordinary paper. It's baffling if the inventor or his customers think that he's improved on the traditional environmental tradeoffs associated with paper production.

Baeocystin16• 9 years ago

Polyolefins are some of the safest plastics around, environmentally speaking, and are fully recyclable. The paper may actually be as good or better than standard pulp paper is.

It may not be, too! Calculating the lifecycle is complex. But it isn't something than is easy to assume one way or the other.

philipkglass2• 9 years ago

I did not say that polyolefins were dangerous. But they are less biodegradable and less renewable than the trees of which paper is normally made. And while polyolefins like empty distilled water jugs are easily recycled, I very much doubt that this blend of limestone and polyolefin can be recycled by the usual curbside collectors.

schiffern• 9 years ago

They're starting off by replacing a potentially renewable resource (trees) with two nonrenewable resources (plastic and limestone). It could still come out ahead in the lifecycle analysis, but it's not a great place to start.

and are fully recyclable

How about after mixing them with a bunch of limestone? Generally "hybrid" materials aren't recyclable (tetrapacks, mylar bags, wet strength cardboard, etc).

hn_throwaway_99• 9 years ago

Here is a Wired article from 2013 discussing the environmental concerns of stone paper: https://www.wired.com/2013/02/stone-paper-notebook/

ehnto• 9 years ago

Not to mention, limestone mining destroys the landscape just like any quarry does. Living on a 'limestone coast' I would hate to see that beautiful countryside pockmarked with any more limestone mines.

dragonmum2• 9 years ago

limestone mining destroys the landscape just like any quarry does

In South East Asia, limestone quarrying and mining has destroyed the habitat of many species. There are dozens of species that are extinct, or are going extinct due to limestone mining. They clear entire limestone mountain ranges and turn them into cement.

hvidgaard4• 9 years ago

All I can think is how this screws up existing recycle processes. In Denmark quite a lot of paper is recycled, but how does that work with this stone paper? If it cannot recycled together in a meaningful way, it's dead in the water.

Zikes• 9 years ago

I also wondered if it was recyclable, and according to the business's web site it is: https://tb-m.com/en/about/paper/

thinkcontext2• 9 years ago

Pulping involves heavy use of chemicals and then treatment of the waste water. It's not obvious which process is more environmentally benign and along what dimensions.

isaac_is_goat• 9 years ago

Silliness. Paper is a sustainable, and easily renewable resource...we don't need to find alternatives if we just keep planting trees.

tommoor• 9 years ago

From the article: "To make a ton of regular paper requires 100 tons of water". It hardly seems silly to avoid that cost, fresh water is on it's way to being a scarce resource in many parts of the planet.

trentmb• 9 years ago

dumb question: can we splice a gene or two from a mangrove with whatever trees are used for paper products to have salt-water paper trees?

turbohedgehog• 9 years ago

The water doesn't just disappear into thin air. It gets reused sometimes and then get treated and released or reused.

true_religion• 9 years ago

It's not a scarce resource in the parts of the planet where the paper is produced, and it is not cost effective to transport water to these places in sufficient quantities for it to no longer count as 'scarce'.

sschueller• 9 years ago

But that 100 tons of water will convert a large amount of CO2 to O2 as the trees grow. Rocks don't capture any CO2.

pmarreck• 9 years ago

This may be true but paper made from a different source might have other benefits like lack of waterloggability or general durability

johngrefe• 9 years ago

I wonder what takes more CO2 output. Mining stone, or growing trees and processing them in paper farms?

Smrt.

soupbowl8• 9 years ago

Processed wood is considered carbon neutral until it breaks down, minus the transportation emissions.

Overtonwindow• 9 years ago

I'm not sure about this. Trees are sustainable and renewable. Rocks are not. This is why mining can be so devastating to an area

Baeocystin16• 9 years ago

We're never going to run out of lime. Ever. It is literally everywhere.

matthewbauer• 9 years ago

We're never going to run out of coal either. Doesn't mean we should use it.

dragonmum2• 9 years ago

We're never going to run out of lime. Ever. It is literally everywhere.

Not true. Limestone suitable for mining is a limited resource. That's why cement companies like Lafarge pay millions for mining rights in South East Asia. They clear out entire mountain ranges to turn into cement.

saagarjha2• 9 years ago

Quick question: what are the properties of this paper? Can I burn it? Fold it? Eat it?

Baeocystin16• 9 years ago

Yes. Polyolefins are highly flammable. They aren't the worst plastic to burn, but they will melt and stick to things, and you really shouldn't breathe the smoke.

Yes.

With the right attitude, anything is possible! (really, don't, though.)

desireco42• 9 years ago

I had one of the most beautiful writing experiences with pencil on stone paper, it is amazing (Field Notes).

On the other hand, it is not for fountain pens. I think it is specialty paper that is very useful but will not replace regular paper and also should not be sold as ecological alternative.

oxplot• 9 years ago

There doesn't seem to be mention of few existing companies that have been producing notebooks and other products from limestone, for years now. One example:

* http://nuco-direct.com/nu-stone/

janekm• 9 years ago

Well, the article did say that the owner of the company saw this type of "paper" in Korea and decided to set up a similar factory in Japan...

dguo• 9 years ago

"He says it’s the answer to concerns over deforestation and water shortages, with world demand for paper set to double by 2030."

I'm very curious as to what is expected to be driving this increase in demand. If anything, I would expect electronics to make paper more and more obsolete. But what am I missing?

froo• 9 years ago

Looking at some of the pictures supplied in the article, it looks like they're probably expecting packaging and food service consumption to go up, which you can't digitise.

Jaruzel• 9 years ago

If we build enough desalination plants, there'd be no such thing as [fresh] water shortage; 2/3rds of the planet is covered in it.

That said... Why aren't Paper pulping factories located near the sea, and have desalination on site if using fresh water is such a problem?

usrusr2• 9 years ago

Paper pulping factories are built where fresh water is abundant, they don't have a problem. These areas also tend to coincide with wood sources. It would be incredibly inefficient to make paper on desalination water when you can just ship it from a rainy place.

Whenever someone is making a big topic out of water consumption (not to be confused with water pollution!) without specific ties to an arid environment it's just a desperate attempt at greenwashing. Water scarcity is real, but it is not universally real everywhere.

thinkcontext2• 9 years ago

Desalination requires a lot of energy and is very costly.

Zaheer• 9 years ago

Shipping boxes? <sarcasm> - I'm not really sure.

chefandy• 9 years ago

I have a notebook made from stone paper. I use it in my kitchen because water won't kill it and I can write on it in sharpie without it bleeding, even onto the opposite side of the page. This is not new.

everyone• 9 years ago

Isn't hemp one of the most ecologically sound materials to make paper from?

random link http://www.hemphasis.net/Paper/paper_files/hempvtree.htm

And one of the reasons marijuana was originally prohibited in the US was due to lobbying from wood-based paper companies.

badosu• 9 years ago

And one of the reasons marijuana was originally prohibited in the US was due to lobbying from wood-based paper companies.

The lobbying reason I heard of was it's fiber being used for ship ropes.

dsl• 9 years ago

The fact hemp is illegal is silly, but it isn't as amazing as all the potheads would have you believe.

Hemp is legal to grow elsewhere in the world, and importing it into the US has been legal since the 90s. Yet the worldwide demand for hemp has stayed flat, mostly because it requires a massive amount of water and humus rich soil compared to alternatives. The plant itself has a weak stalk that makes mechanical harvesting difficult, and can't be harvested year-round like trees can.

If it was a commercially viable alternative, you'd see usage in Europe and Asia. Remember that poor countries tend to gravitate to cost efficient materials for domestic use, yet almost all hemp produced is exported.

Quequau• 9 years ago

I've read this as well and from a number of sources.

elicash• 9 years ago

You can view the end result, including when they attempt to tear it, in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KchJZKoT16w

tray5• 9 years ago

I've got a notebook of stone paper that I bought from a local office supplier which I use for general note taking. It's not the brand in the article however. Writing on stone paper feels quite amazing. The pen just glides over the paper, and the paper feels very high quality. It's waterproof and doesn't tear like normal paper (when you pull it apart it pulls like a flimsy elastic plastic that eventually rips). I thoroughly enjoy using it.

Animats• 9 years ago

Paper is a declining consumer of wood. "Peak paper" was years ago, after print newspapers tanked. There are many abandoned paper mills, if you want one. It's possible to make paper from rice hulls (works fine, and common in China, but a bit hard as a writing surface), kenaf (works, but nobody bothers), and hemp (niche product for potheads).

It's just not a problem.

_lbaq2• 9 years ago

It shifted rather, newspaper paper is down yes, but hygienic products and all sort of package material is up by allot

dx034• 9 years ago

Ecommerce will probably play an even bigger role there. The demand for paper packaging has been increasing constantly over the last decade. Amazon probably uses more paper than even a major newspaper.

id122015• 9 years ago

Going back to Flinstone age ?

bronz• 9 years ago

why is there no effort to make artificial tree mass? this could be done by creating genetically engineered trees that use as little resources as possible to grow as much wood as possible in lab environments. one could even go as far as powering the cells electrically -- it is theoretically possible and has been done in the lab before. or, why is there no effort to synthesize wood itself chemically, industrially?

vpribish• 9 years ago

are you serious? like - really? because we already do solar powered, mass-industrial-scale, genetically engineered, hyper-optimized paper feedstock production in forests.

scarlac• 9 years ago

I don't think that's an unreasonable question. Your answer suggests that we already have the most optimal solution, which by analogy cows would be too. I assume you know cows aren't.

But like with cows, it is not inconceivable that "regular" trees are not the most effective way of making wood. They need to stay alive which means they "waste" energy doing so. While I personally don't think we can outdo trees with regular chemical compounds, I think we can at least genetically modify some already-optimized tree family in a way that require less water, sun, etc.

adrianN• 9 years ago

Land to grow trees is cheap. Labs to grow trees are not.

jonah• 9 years ago

There used to be a company called EarthShell which made biodegradable food packaging and other containers out of limestone and other stuff. It went public in 1998[0], filed for bankruptcy protection a decade ago[1], and their twitter account was last updated in 2010[2].

I wish TBM better luck.

[0] https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/earthshell-begins-to-cr...

[1] "After losing more than $331 million during its 14 years of operations, EarthShell Corp. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection." - http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/stories/2007/01/29/stor... (paywalled)

[2] https://twitter.com/EarthShell

Interesting trivia: the founder and chairman, Essam Khashoggi, is the brother of Adnan Khashoggi - a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair.

tiplus• 9 years ago

I am worried about the dust this type of paper might produce when it is shredded or ripped, similar to the dust from rockwool insulation materials made from stone fibres. If I remember correctly, the persistence time of rockwool dust (current generation not 1970s) in your lungs is about 4 weeks, during which it is /may be cancerogenic?

dwenzek• 9 years ago

And this startup aims to replace concrete by a wood based material.

https://woodoo.fr/home/

Inconel2• 9 years ago

Years ago, when I got the original Nexus One smartphone, I'm fairly certain the box it came in contained a small card with instructions on it that was made from limestone. I can't remember the name of the company responsible but I remember it being printed on the card and that I checked out their website since I was intrigued. I never saw those non-paper cards in any subsequent Nexus packages.

Edit: I wonder why Google stopped using them. Or maybe they didn't and I just never noticed since they were so paper-like.

hkmurakami• 9 years ago

This seems way less sustainable than pulp based paper. What's the appeal?

george_ciobanu• 9 years ago

Trees aside, this is not a new concept, stone paper notebooks have been around for a while. The ones I had wrote incredibly smooth and I loved every one of them. I think Walgreens still carries a small one.

https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/oxford-stone-paper-note-bo...

grondilu• 9 years ago

Seems true. A "stone paper" search on Amazon shows there are items already available:

https://www.amazon.com/Stone-Paper-Notebook-13x21cm-Cobalt/d...

nottorp• 9 years ago

I'm assuming that besides it being waterproof, it's also fireproof? That would make it interesting.

Other than that, limestone isn't renewable while trees are so...

lazyjones• 9 years ago

I see 2 problems with this:

* the other ingredient is polyolefin resins - unless they are obtained from recycled plastic bags or similar, this probably makes Limex worse than normal paper (how much water is involved, we do't know for sure).

* what happens at the product's EOL? Will it end up together with recycled paper and cause problems in that process? Will it have to be recycled separately and if yes, who's going to be able to tell these types of paper apart?

Nursie• 9 years ago

Stone.... and polyolefins. This somewhat pollutes the message. Is it anywhere near as recyclable or biodegradable as 'normal' paper?

saalweachter2• 9 years ago

From a market perspective, there are really two distinct markets: temporary paper users (newspapers, mailers, the stuff you write your school papers on...) and archival paper users (eg libraries). For archival users, the biodegradability of paper is a bug, not a feature, even though for the bulk of overall paper users are probably the temporary users, and need to be able to compost or recycle your waste paper.

Imagine being able to drop your book in the bathtub and just shake it off; imagine future historians finding a thousand year old abandoned library in mint condition. A non-biodegradable paper wouldn't replace wood/rag pulp paper in any meaningful way, but it would have its uses.

med_abidi• 9 years ago

I guess this is what it mean to be written in stone.

MPSimmons• 9 years ago

Paper sequesters carbon. Why is using stone a good thing here?

bmcusick• 9 years ago

I wonder what the archival properties of this paper are like. Is it fully inert? That would be useful.

ccvannorman• 9 years ago

FINALLY, I'll be able to take notes while scuba-diving.

jcwayne• 9 years ago

world demand for paper set to double by 2030

We have failed.

iamatworknow• 9 years ago

I've been using these "Ogami Collection" notebooks apparently made from limestone for a while now: https://origin68.com/collections/notebooks-stationery/produc...

They're like much more durable Moleskins, in my experience.

dpark4• 9 years ago

So instead of carbon neutral pulp paper that can be recycled and biodegrades, this paper is 1/5 plastic, doesn't biodegrade, and probably ruins the batch if mixed with pulp-based paper for recycling.

The water savings are good, but this doesn't seem like a net gain.

needlessly• 9 years ago

paper? What is this 1995?

choward• 9 years ago

Computers and the Internet existed back then too. Over two decades later and sending paper through the mail is still a thing. WHY?!?!?!

Chaebixi2• 9 years ago

What's the archival permanence of this stuff?

jaddood• 9 years ago

I can imagine cutting trees, burning large areas of vegetation to allow for mining, which is even worse. Lands get deformed, parts of limestone mountains start collapsing. Plants never grow again in the area unless aggressive regenaration of the land and planting is done. The soil gets fragile and unstable.

I also wonder how the process of production is done. To process limestone usually produces a lot of co2 (I have no reference, but that's what I remember from reading stuff online). Additionally, as many have noted the plastics used (20% of the final mass of the product) still are plastics made from fossil resources. Is a way for recycling known, especially considering the final product is a mixture of plastics and limestone?

It seems that the producer does not have a real, scientific proof that his production is environmentally good, but does it as a 'novel', and 'fascinating' idea with the only goal of making money. The article itself says that the producer looks forward to making a product that will last, but does not indicate that the producer ever had a goal of protecting the environment.

Finally, the subject is very much worth of discussion in HN, and I personally feel thankful for the one who submitted it.

Someone• 9 years ago

https://www.wired.com/2013/02/stone-paper-notebook/: "this paper is made from stone, but it isn't exactly eco-friendly".

Not surprising given that it is around one fifth plastic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_paper: "The process for creating Stone Paper was first developed by Taiwan Lung Meng Tech Co. in Taiwan during the late 1990s. Stone Paper has been patented in over 40 countries, where its products are marketed under a variety of other trade names such as GPA UltraGreen, MIST Paper, Parax Paper, Terraskin, ViaStone, Kampier, Limex, CleanSlate, EmanaGreen and Rockstock, Pixz Printing, KYStone Paper and Nu Stone."

So, the main idea it isn't new either. What, if anything, is special about this startup's process?

rollingpebbles• 9 years ago

Just an FYI that Koch-owned Georgia-Pacific papermills release tons of cancer-causing pollutants including PCBs, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, formaldehyde, dioxin, acetaldehyde and chloroform into neighboring communities.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/1007148

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/04/29/crossett-arkansas-georgia...

bighi• 9 years ago

Trees = renewable resource

Stone = not renewable resource

I don't think we should waste stone even faster than we already are.

A Startup Making Paper Out of Stone, Not Trees

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