RECYCLING
Elephant Poop used to create handmade paper
The Poop Paper Chase
Rucha Biju Chitrodia meets an entrepreneur duo who saw an opportunity in an elephant’s bad digestive system
The ride on elephant-back to Jaipur’s mystical Amber Fort on the jagged Aravalli hills would leave any turbanned tourist, even an Indian, feeling like a maharajah. What he might not know, however, is that the ride inadvertently leaves behind a certain odorous trail. It is not pretty by conventional standards, but it has its uses. At least to those who look for uses.
Five years ago, Jaipur-born Delhi paper entrepreneur Mahima Mehra, 37, and her companion, Jaipur’s Vijendra Shekhawat, then a small-time executive in the paper industry, decided to skip this royal treat for a plebian walk. That’s because the 26-year-old Vijendra has always feared elephants.
As the two made their way along the path on that windy day, a lot of dust got into their eyes. They stopped and squinted at its source—traffic-flattened, dried mounds of elephant dung. “We both had a eureka moment at the same time,’’ laughs Mahima. “Since we are into handmade paper, we constantly look for new kinds of fibre. We discovered this poop has a lot of it. It has the thickest and longest fibre among all animals. Elephants basically have a bad digestive system.’’
Unmindful of the looks and nudges from curious tourists and their suspicious mahouts, the two scooped up as much of this fibre as they could carry (117 pachyderms are normally on royal duty), and lugged it home on a bike.
Then the experiments began.Vijendra first used a little, just six percent, to mottle or dot cotton rag, the primary raw material of his handmade paper. The results looked good. Emboldened, he cooked a lot more of it in water for a couple of hours with soda and salt to rid it of its distinctive smell and make it flexible. The sterilised material then went into a beater and came out looking like straw. “Actually it looks like nothing on earth,’’ says the petite Mahima, candidly, “It looks like goo.’’ It was now sieved and put through a paper beater. The resultant pulp was made into a thickish, coarse paper. For binding, it was mixed with cotton rag, imported from South India’s undergarment factories, but in a 3:1 ratio. In other words, this paper is 75% elephant poop and 25% human banian.
The production cost is minimal. The dung is almost free. Reluctant elephant owners are cleverly given a cut in kind—their elephants are fed poop-generating sugarcane, atta and jowar. The paper is coloured with vegetable dyes—grey from dried pomegranate shell, yellow from local kesula flowers and pink from kitewood.
Ironically, this very eco-friendly paper was along the way faced with a moral crisis. Washing and sterilising the raw material on a commercial scale meant a lot of water. So a relative was suitably convinced, and his farmhouse pump came in handy. The leftover water, enhanced with poopy fertilisers, was poured back into his farm.
Vijendra had thus created a completely indigenous and viable elephant poop paper, and Mahima had an exotic product waiting to be distributed. She created bookmarks, notebooks, coasters, photo albums, memory books and even toy elephants and camels with it.
But people couldn’t stop themselves from smelling them first. “Let’s face it, not everybody will buy it,’’ says Mahima. After the initial disgust, at least Vijendra’s family came around. “Cattle dung is considered auspicious and we worship elephants, so what’s wrong with this?’’ was Vijendra’s incontestable logic. His family eventually even started helping him in his labour-intensive passion. “A hundred kilos of dung turns into only 15 after drying. This gives us 800, 22-by-30-inch sheets.’’ He now employs two helpers. Business has grown.
In their struggler days, the dung was ferried on cycles, but now tractors are hired. “We buy Rs 4 lakh worth of paper from him every year,’’ reveals Mahima. Initially, the products were exported only to Germany and the UK, but since last December they finally started selling at home. “We discovered people might be finally interested. Delhi is a ‘handicraft’- friendly place,’’ says Mahima tentatively. The products now carry a cute brand name—Haathi Chhaap—with an unparalleled tagline ‘Made from the finest dung available in India’.
Mahima zeroed in on the name because she wanted to give it an “Indian identity’’. It’s a good thing she did, given that elephant dung products have been respectably around in pachyderm countries such as Sri Lanka and Thailand, and on a much smaller scale, in the elephant conservatories of the developed world. “But the methodology and look of the paper are different in different countries,’’ says Mahima, who is trying to cope with the pressures of retail. Scaling up is a little difficult as there are only so many elephants in Jaipur and their dung can be collected only eight months in a year. Monsoons are off limits.
Which is why the resourceful entrepreneur has an agenda for the next six months. She has marked the southern Mudumalai and Bandipur national parks for their tuskers. “We’d like to speak to the forest officers about our plan. But it’s difficult to collect dung from wild elephants,’’ she concedes with a sigh. TNN
BEFORE & AFTER Workers with the elephant poop (above); Mahima Mehra with the finished products (right)