Waste Paper? Meet your destiny….”White Goat”
ByThis has to be seen to be believed and fortunately I have a video to include so that you know it’s not just a fanciful idea. I used to work at an 
office where over 600 employees occupied 3 buildings on a corporate campus, regrettably (and as recently as 2006) it was an environment that created an obscene amount of waste paper. We used to have training classes with 60 page staff manuals on paper, I’d attend meetings where in addition to the powerpoint presentation 15 or 20 of us might be watching we would each be handed a twenty page ‘deck’ so we could follow through the presentation from paper on our laps simultaneously! Sadly there were a high number of employees who were very ‘old school’ and emails containing policy or updates just didn’t exist to them unless the clicked their print button, hiked over to the printer and grabbed a paper copy to hide within a draw at their desk. It’s not real unless I can touch it seemed to the mentality.
Within the office they gradually moved to a situation where every 50 feet or so a giant blue paper recycling bin for paper would stand sentinel hoping that a small percentage of the forests destroyed in the name of profit might find their way back to paper mill for reproduction. To be fair some people even asked what these five foot tall plastic receptacles were for, as the months rolled on some people even started adding paper into them. Unfortunately just as many people filled their desk side trash cans on a daily basis with scraps and memos that never needed to be printed in the first place.
I won’t name the company for fear of causing outrage, let’s just say it’s a large and well known company who really should have enforced stricter recycling policy. By the time I left the company, when used to worked later in the evening I would see the cleaning crew come in and empty those recycling bins and would be pleased to see that ‘participation’ rates were beginning to improve. I wish that this product existed 5 years ago as I would have written to our executive board insisting it was considered for our office as well as the dozens of other equally large facilities throughout the world. It’s called White Goat and is named very appropriately.
In short it is a paper shredder designed specifically for large offices that create a significant amount of waste paper. That with water will pulp all waste paper and remarkably turn it into toilet paper. All of this from the same unit! It only takes 40 sheets of A4 paper to make one roll of toilet paper. The manufacturer estimates that ‘running costs’ will equate to about $0.10 per roll of paper. I believe that the company are only accepting pre-orders presently as the product was only recently unveiled at a Japanese ‘eco-trade’ fair late last year.
Watch out for staples!!!
5 Comments
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Well, if people use it instead of the trash can, that’s an improvement. But the paper could be put to better use recycled back in to a high value use like printing and writing paper. How much water is used in this? What happens to the inks? Where do the staples go (hopefully there’s a process to keep them out of the toilet paper)?! Paper mills can recycle and clean their water, and capture toxic inks and sludge and dispose of them properly. But it’s a cute idea.
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Great questions Amy - I agree it would be a step forward in either case (especially compared with what I used to see at work). As for the specifics - there isn’t that much information yet released, from what I understand it is still pending patent approval with a market date of this Summer. I’m sure more information will be released then, the manufacturer is ‘The Oriental Group’ in Japan.
February 4th, 2010 at 3:01 am
Great idea, but as Amy wrote, what happens to the ink and how much environmental friendly it is in fact?
I’d like to have similar machine at home…
March 14th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
WOW, amazing! I would love to see the spec of the machine as well, but it sound like a great all in one recycling option. Force employees to recycle by not providing them with any toilet paper!
March 24th, 2010 at 6:10 am
Seriously… How much more energy is used collecting and recycling used product than simply throwing it out and making something new from scratch?