rock paper ... you know what comes next

[piranha]

i can't seem to comment on the blog entry itself right now (errors out), so i'm leaving this here to remind myself to try again later.

re: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/viastone_biodeg.php#perma which links to several companies that create papers from minerals and a binder, who all tout themselves as environmentally friendly: viastone, xterrance, and terraskin.  the papers are all 100% tree-free, and are made from mineral powders with a non-toxic resin binder.

the viastone link in the treehugger entry doesn't work; it should be http://www.viastone.net instead.  also, the link to xterrane doesn't actually link to the company's website; that should be http://xterrane.en.ecplaza.net/

i don't know how i feel about this rock paper (beyond wanting to take scissors to it right away :). tried to find out more about its manufacture, but all the named websites are fairly worthless on that account. googling didn't get me much further, but i came across another company, Taiwan LM Technology Co. making such a paper, who actually list their european patent number, which allowed me to look up their patent. 

limestone isn't exactly a renewable resource.  tree farms aren't great, but limestone quarries are worse.  the process, however, might well be more environmentally friendly than what paper-and-pulp factories do these days.  gotta read the patent to find out; they're claiming some nice stuff.  i also wonder about the archival qualities of such papers; we've learned a lot about cellulose over the years, but we know nothing much about this.  but i'll definitely gonna get me some to try them out.

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that you didn't need tree farms - that you could make much more environmentally friendly paper from hemp. There's just the other thing hemp is grown for...

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, the process can be much less troublesome, though from what i recall, china, which is the leader in hemp production, doesn't do it in a particularly environmentally conscious way. but it can be done; there's spiffy new enzyme technology. hemp is also great for fabrics, but it'll have a long way to go before it ousts cotton (also mostly not produced environmentally friendly, and in the US possessed of a strong lobby, and subsidized). there is some movement in canada in that regard -- i've heard that hemptown, a vancouver company, is pushing to have the canadian team's olympic uniforms made from hemp, *grin*. that ought to be especially popular in whistler (in-joke: one can get a contact high walking through whistler, and whistler happens to be one of the main venues for the 2010 olympics).

but the growing, if i think of scaling that to grow hemp at a rate to replace wood altogether -- i don't know that miles and miles and miles of hemp fields would be all that environmentally awesome either; probably less so than silviculture because they'd get harvested much more often and therefore would provide even less environment for wildlife. there's always trade-offs. but i certainly would like hemp to become much more widely used than it is now. those stupid people with their war on drugs piss me off. why can't we have a war for something useful for a change, like a war on environmental abuse.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

The reason I got excited about hemp was that it was claimed you could get the same amount of cellulose in a year, as from 40 years growth of forest. So you'd need 1/40th of the area set aside for growing paper, and you could make some of the saved space even more environmentally friendly forest that wasn't going to be mown down every 40 years.

(And in Australia, the silviculture for paper is Pinus radiata, which is not a good environment for the local wildlife.)

In general, I'm not in favour of monoculture, and I hope that for crops that are hard to harvest and process mixed that they could at least be grown in strips, between more ecologically diverse, and even undisturbed strips. That'd be better for wildlife, pest control, and so forth. Probably better climatically too.

Unfortunately, I think the people who organise those wars on nouns might be among the worst offenders when it comes to environmental abuse.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i mostly agree with you.

i know way, way too little about the relevant ramifications of alternatives. it's on my list of things to research, but it keeps getting bumped. *grump*.