Paper from Elephant droppings
Elephant droppings are the last thing an ordinary person would be interested in. But, Mahima Mehra, a psychology honors graduate student was more than just ordinary. With sheer determination she set up a production unit to manufacture paper from Elephant poop.
Sangner in Jaipur is famous for hand made paper. Mehra, right from her childhood was habituated to use that kind of a paper. After her completion of graduation in Delhi, she started developing different products from hand made paper with the help of Sangner people and she exported these products to different countries, especially to Germany for nearly 13 years.
One day, while visiting Amber Fort, she happened to come across elephant droppings on both sides of the road. As Amber Fort is one of the finest tourist places in Jaipur, people used to visit that fort on elephants. This explains the droppings on both sides of the road.
This was not the first time that Mahima came across elephant poop, but this time around she was very observant of the poop. She noticed the presence of fiber in the poop. She immediately got a brainwave to extract paper from it.
There was a certain Mr. Vijendra who supplied paper material regularly to Mahima. He listened to this idea and immediately agreed.
Failure followed by success:
Through ordinary means, Mahima was unable to separate paper from the elephant poop. Far from being discouraged, she started searching the internet actively and finally came to know from BBC regarding the production of paper in Sri Lanka. Atlast, after a tough one and a half year of hard work, she produced the first paper of such a kind in India.
Inspite of this tremendous achievement, she says that the biggest obstacle she faced was that of making people to use the paper made from Elephant poop. By ingeniously relating Elephant to Lord Vinayaka, she managed to convince the people that there was nothing wrong in using elephant poop to manufacture paper.
In the beginning, she directly participated with Vijendra and brothers in cleaning elephant poop as people initially were reluctant to touch it. But now, not only are everybody from the village are actively participating, they also are using the by-product of the elephant poop as fertilizer for their crops.
Mahima then started production of Book Marks, envelopes, bags etc from the paper in Delhi and also succeeded in selling her goods under “Nature Bazaar”. The brand name she used was “Haathi Chaap”.
She hopes for a bright future and plans to extend her units to south and east india where there are a lot of elephants.
You can check out her website:www.elephantpoopaper.com
Popularity: 100%
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:10 pm
this is for the first time i came to know abt paper from elephant poop…..interesting article