Copy paper made from wheat straw

Office paper may be virgin or recycled, but when it comes right down to it, most of it is still made from wood. Aiming to spare the tens of millions of trees felled each year for paper in Australia alone, Nature’s Paper offers an alternative that uses leftover wheat straw instead. When wheat is harvested, it’s typically just the grain that gets used for products such as flour and cereal. Left behind, however, are waste hull and wheat straw, which typically gets left in the fields to decompose. That’s where Nature’s Paper comes in. The company collects the leftover wheat straw and converts it into a paper pulp. The leftover waste hull, meanwhile, is used to produce an organic biofuel that not only helps power the company’s plant but also heats the self-collected and repeatedly recycled water that’s used to clean the paper. The whitening process is both sustainable and chlorine-free, using sodium salt and oxygenization instead. High-quality, wood-free A4-A3 copy paper is the result, and Nature’s Paper even converts the waste from its own production process into cardboard boxes to hold the paper. Nature’s Paper looks, feels and performs just like standard copy paper, and it’s priced comparably as well, the company says. It’s sold through a variety of retailers within Australia; within the United States, it’s distributed by Enviro Green. One to help bring to your part of the world…? (Related: White lines make paper stand out.) Spotted by: Dustin C.