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SYDNEY, April 21, 2009 (AFP) - An Australian entrepreneur has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'waste paper' with an ingenious green scheme to make luxury stationery from wombat dung. Darren Simpson, a self-confessed 'poo expert,' has big plans for the square-shaped fecal deposits of a wombat named Nugget, whose waste is supposed to act as a territorial marker.
"It's not your normal poo. It's not round or long - it's actually little bricks and it's very, very fibrous," Simpson told AFP. "When you break it open, basically what you can see through it is plant matter. So they're a good little pulper."
With the help of Nugget's keeper, Simpson harvests the animal's droppings and then boils them down to the fibres to make handmade paper - the latest in his line of peculiarly Australian products.
The wombat poo paper, which is made by combining the sterilised waste with cotton fibres, was launched in Tasmania state last month, and follows the success of Simpson's 'roo poo' paper, made from kangaroo excrement.
"People come into the business and can do a tour, and we use lots of recycled materials: cotton rag offcuts, cotton thread that we get from a towel factory, denim from jeans, apples," he said.
"When we kept getting to the roo poo sample everyone kept asking us 'Can you make it from all these different other types of animals?' And the one that kept coming up was wombat poo. So we thought, well we better give this a go."
Most of the local wildlife parks refused to take him seriously, but Simpson said he eventually found someone who was willing to supply the poo - and then production began in earnest.
"When they do their poo, they will do it on the highest rock and basically that's a mark of their territory," Simpson explained.
"If you take it, they don't like that. They have to keep putting it back." The 'specialty' product would have a greenish tinge in winter and yellow in summer, depending on Nugget's diet, and was designed for use in art, wedding invitations, as gift cards or bookmarks.
Simpson said his company Creative Paper would soon begin work on a wombat poo line of photo albums, journals and writing paper.
He said adhesive tape solved the one concern customers had when using his earthy stationery.
"The only problem we ever had was that no one ever wanted to lick the envelope," he said.
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