Anyone who has ever compared what goes in the front end of a sheep with what comes out the back knows powerful forces are at work.
Forget for a moment wool, mutton and lamb chops – a sheep’s main task in life is turning coarse fibre into finely chopped particles, much like a paper mill.
Unlike the pulp and paper industry, which accounts for 10 percent of all industrial energy consumption, sheep provide the service for free and without enormous amounts of pollution.
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Of course, separating the stinky parts from the raw, undigestible cellulose is the biggest trick in making paper from sheep manure. That’s where a small Welsh paper mill comes in.
Lawrence Toms, founder of Creative Paper Wales, said in an e-mail interview that the operation was inspired by a BBC news story about an Australian entrepreneur who made paper from kangaroo and wallaby dung.
He got the idea from reports that paper was being made from elephant manure in Africa and elk poop in Scandinavia.
“It was self-financed,” Toms wrote about the business he started two years ago.
“It was quite a struggle to get going, but we’re viable now after two years. We sell about 10 percent of our products on-line, and the rest is through a network of retail partners. Eco shops and Welsh tourism outlets seem to favour our products.”
Wales is not blessed with an abundance of trees, but it does have sheep. Toms’ company, which is the region’s only handmade paper mill, takes advantage of this abundance, as well as the fact that the animals excrete about 50 percent of the cellulose they ingest.
Creative Paper Wales, nestled in the scenic southern reaches of Snowdonia National Park, counts “rejecting established thinking” as its main philosophy in its attempts to look at the world in a new and sustainable way.
Unlike conventional paper mills, which use electricity and chemicals to process trees into paper, the makers of Sheep Poo Paper let the animals do most of the grunt work.
The process begins with gathering up only the freshest sheep dung from pastures and mixing it with a collection of cast-off fibres such as waste paper, rags and textile off cuts.
The dung is sterilized by boiling at 120 C and washed for a number of days until it is half its original weight.
The other part that comes out of sheep also happens to be a nutrient-rich, liquid fertilizer. It is stored in large tanks for cooling and given to local farmers to use as fertilizer.
At this point, the leftover pulp, which is now clean, sterile and white, is mixed with other fibre sources and beaten until it has been reduced enough to make paper.
The pulp is strained and laid out in flat sheets, with layers of felt in between each layer to keep them from sticking together.
The layers are pressed together with tremendous force to create bonding at the molecular level, a process akin to the old blacksmith’s technique of hammering two pieces of white-hot iron together to form a strong weld.
In the final stage of the process, sheets of paper are draped over the mill’s rafters to season them.
The company also rents an antique roller press from a local museum. The pulp is sprayed onto the machine’s rollers, which squeeze out water and leave a fine grade of paper.
On its website, Creative Paper Wales also offers its customers the option of custom-made paper manufactured from fibre sources supplied by the customer, such as Japanese knotweed, a sheep named Daisy, or old clothes. Leafy spurge, anyone?
The company adds value to its paper products by marketing postcards, stationery, bookmarks, postcards, business cards and its top seller, “I love ewe” cards.
It also sells home paper making kits that use raw materials prepared in a blender.
Although sheep never stop dropping the raw materials that goes into his paper, Toms said gathering it up is the hardest part.
Maximum production capacity is about 100 sheets of A2 paper per day, but the company is looking to expand production.
It received a $50,000 Millennium Award prize for social entrepreneurship, which recognized its creation of a uniquely Welsh, environmentally friendly product that foreign imports could not compete with.
