Sunday, February 7, 2010

Now that's a good idea!


I'm amused to see that a Japanese company has found a way to recycle all the shredded paper that's produced by the ton in modern offices.

"White Goat" [is] a miracle-working machine by Oriental Co., Ltd that directly recycles office paper into toilet paper. Users need only add water along with any embarrassing e-mail printouts or unwanted TPS reports they need shredded, and out comes TP of dubious softness.

A built-in shredder starts off the action in a right satisfying way. The shredded paper then moves on to a pulper where it gets dissolved in water. The pulp becomes wet paper and is eventually dried and rolled up into ready-to-use toilet paper. We imagine that this mysterious process may resemble a high-tech Japanese version of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

"White Goat" reportedly will go on sale this summer. The machine takes half an hour to produce one neatly wrapped toilet roll and uses the equivalent of 40 sheets of standard office paper per roll. That supposedly saves 60 cedar trees each year ...


There's more at the link. Here's a video clip of the machine.





At a reported $100,000 per machine, the capital investment might be a bit steep for many companies . . . and I can't help but wonder whether employees might not add lots of staples and paper-clips to the shredded paper they use to make their bosses' TP!





Peter

3 comments:

Clay said...

I don't really seeing that machine being a big seller as I am sure most of your readers agree. However there are a lot of ways to get reuse out of your paper. I wrote on my blog site, Shredding and Recycling. It will give you more applicable ways to recycle.

Smart Dogs said...

We put shredded newspaper in the chicken coop and the chickens turn it into compost.

Much simpler and a lot more cost-effective!

On a Wing and a Whim said...

You know, the opportunity for some cubicle-dwellers to take their boss's micromanaging instructions or a particularly despised project and wipe their nether regions with it?

Priceless.

For everything else, there's plenty of other ways to recycle.