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Greenwaste paper

katharinakennedy

Here at Paperscape, we specialise in papers made from non-woody plant materials. While our main resource is harakeke (NZ flax), paper can be made from lots of different plants – generally, the leaves and stalks of plants that contain strong fibres are suitable. This includes New Zealand native plants like tī kōuka (cabbage tree), raupō (bulrush) and nīkau palm, as well as exotics with similar characteristics.

The strong fibres that make these plants great for papermaking also mean that they are hard to compost. They take longer to break down and can cause problems for shredding machinery. Many composting facilities around New Zealand won’t accept plants like harakeke, palms or bamboo, meaning that greenwaste consisting of these plants is sent to landfill. Our local composting facility run by Composting New Zealand collects these materials that are unsuitable for the standard composting process in a large static pile, where these plants can sit until they break down – sometimes several years. The resulting compost is sold as lower value topsoil. We have had an agreement in place with Composting NZ which allows us to collect from their static pile. For us, it’s like going to a sweet shop – you never know what you’ll find but there’s always something good.



Last year, we picked up a load of Trachycarpus palm fronds, which consist of a fan-shaped leave and a long stalk with two rows of strong thorns. We separated the leaves from the stalks, and then removed the sharp edges of the sides of the stalks – while somewhat hazardous to handle, these sharp-toothed edges made exceptionally good kindling. Leaves and stalks were then retted (submerged in water and fermented like sauerkraut or kimchi) for a few months, then washed, boiled, and pulped, before finally being made into paper. 

We like our first batch of Trachycarpus paper – it’s a slightly darker shade than our standard harakeke paper but has a lovely tactile texture. For our next batch, we will adjust our processing to see if we can produce a lighter-coloured palm paper. Fun times.

Finished Trachycarpus paper

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