Odpanda FROM USA TODAY…

 

This morning brings us yet another story about people using feces to make paper.

A few years ago, we told you that President Bush received a box of “elephant dung writing paper, envelopes and name cards” from a visiting Sri Lankan dignitary. (This website sells pachyderm paper.) Then we heard that a Thai zoo was peddling souvenirs made from the undigested bamboo pulp that its two pandas excrete each day.

Now, some enterprising Chinese researchers are planning to make paper with the 200 tons of poop that their dozens of giant pandas produce each year. “Pandas’ excretion is a perfect raw material to make paper due to pandas’ high fiber diet,” Huang Xiangming, an official at the panda breeding center, tells the Chengdu Daily newspaper. He says bamboo scent will be added to some of the environmental souvenirs, which should hit the market next year.The process, according to the AP, “involves a daylong process of cleaning the feces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun.”