Fresh Green Commerce

Sometimes a story comes along to which I really can’t add much; it may be so filled with snarky comments that mine aren’t needed, or so completely obvious that my commentary would consist entirely of the work “Duh!” repeated over and over again, or so infuriating that my commentary would consist entirely of the symbols found at the top of your keyboard. And then we have the story from last month that begins “Finding your desk covered in animal dung doesn’t have to be a bad thing…”

You can find the original story from AOL News here if you want to, but the basic concept is simple: a company in Thailand is recovering wood fibers from elephant dung and using those fibers to make paper products. Elephants, it seems, will eat almost any vegetation they come upon, but can’t digest a large percentage of the fiber from the plants they eat. So the entrepreneurs in the story gather up the elephant dung, separate out the fibers, and then process them the same way any other paper company does, eventually turning the product into stationary, greeting cards, notepads and boxes, photo albums, and a variety of other paper products. You can find the website here if you want to check out their story, or browse their unique items for sale…

The company claims that their method of obtaining wood fibers is both cheaper and more ecologically sensitive than any of the more traditional methods, and that the response to their initial operations has been so impressive that they are now using cow, horse and giant panda dung as well. A quick glance over their online store site suggests that their prices are reasonable, and their actual products are available in a wide range of attractive styles – all of which would be impressive in any start-up company using the Internet and featuring environmentally correct methods, but is truly staggering when we realize what the company’s primary raw material actually is…

Over the years, I have encountered a number of different business models that make use of waste products and by-products from other businesses, the most noteworthy being a disposal company in California that gets paid to haul away garbage which they then pile into a huge composting operation, which produces top-quality compost, which they then sell at a huge profit. The paper company in today’s story has taken this one step further, using actual waste products as their primary raw ingredient – which could only be more perfect if they were actually paid to haul away the dung for disposal. I’m not sure if their product will ever find the sort of acceptance that good compost does (given that most companies sell compost by the ton, and there will never be any lack of customers who want to buy the stuff), but I can think of a dozens of uses for their stationary without even leaving the realm of humor (printing your letter of resignation on it; sending a letter or greeting card to someone you don’t especially like, etc.), and potentially thousands of mainstream paper applications as well…

Of course, some people will never accept the use of paper that began life as elephant dung. These individuals will insist on good, old-fashioned paper products that are obtained by clear-cutting old-growth forests, killing off thousands of animals, plants and birds that once lived there, pulping with dioxins and bleaches that will kill everything (including all of the humans) downwind or downstream from the paper mill, and a variety of wood processing stages that actually smell even worse that elephant dung does in the first place. In which case I believe that we are completely justified in asking who the joke in this story is actually on – or at least sending them a card…