Green gauntlet: Paper made from elephant pooh?

I'm big on using paper made from recycled materials. But this was something altogether different.

A guy from Brooklyn, Karl Wald, is marketing paper made from recycled paper plus ... elephant dung.

He's got paper, note cards, photo albums, memo books and more. His website is www.MrElliePooh.com.

This got me pretty excited. We certainly have to think of more things to do with animal waste, and surely there are lots of elephants. Apparently, an elephant's diet is mostly vegetarian, and what comes out the other end is a whole lot of cellulose. Which works great for paper, once you remove the stinky stuff.

I could hardly wait to tell Sylvie Verdant, my ultra green friend. I was so excited I almost hopped in my car to go faster to the solar-powered treehouse where she lives, but I knew I'd be scolded vigorously for wasting fuel. So...out came the bike.

Sylvie actually has been experimenting with paper-making. She's tried to use invasive species like phragmites as a basis, but it turned out so rough you could hardly write on it.

She was excited about the Ellie Pooh products, too. "Just think of all those zoo elephants who can now contribute to a greener world!" she gushed.

"Uhmmmm," I answered. "Actually, the elephants in question are in Sri Lanka."

Sylvie paused, utterly still and silent. I could see the rage building. "Sri Lanka?" she shrieked? "Do you realize what kind of transportation carbon footprint that has? Why not just bring elephant dung from the moon?"

Finally, after infusions of organic chamomile tea, I got her to calm down and mount her bicycle-powered generator so we could turn on the computer and check it out.

Turns out Wald, in search of a way to make a difference in the world, went to Sri Lanka to shadow an elephant veterinarian and teach English. There, a need for more farming has shrunk the elephant's habitat.  But the elephants are still there, which means they ruin crops, and the farmers shoot them.

While he was there, Wald met a paper maker, Thusitha Ranasinghe. As the web site relates, "Nightly, Karl and Thusitha would discuss the ongoing human/elephant conflict. How can they preserve Sri Lanka's wild elephant population? How can they appease a farmer who lost his crop in one evening to a hungry elephant? How do they prevent Sri Lanka from becoming like Thailand or Indonesia where their natural forests have already been cut down? Could pooh paper be the answer?"

They began hiring local residents to collect the dung. And hiring other residents to make the paper -- with nontoxic dyes and such, of course. If the elephant was seen as an economic asset to the community, then people might want to protect it more.

By this point in our investigation, Sylvie was engrossed and excited.  She was totally into the conservation aspect and the fair trade aspect.  She still wasn't going to let me off the hook, though. She still is threatening to declare the product non-green because of that transport footprint. But I can tell she feels a little bad about being so curmudgeonly and strident.

So we'd like to hear what you think. Please chime in by commenting below.

And to learn more about Sylvia, click on "File under: Green Gauntlet" below.