A toilet-paper manufacturing company in Canada, Kruger Products Limited, is searching for ways to make tissue paper out of bamboo, as an alternative to traditional lumber used in its manufacture.
Toilet paper and other tissues are made from wood pulp, a sub-product of lumber production. And Canada remains the fourth-largest forest product exporter in the world, accounting for over a $9bn market alone in 2017.
According to the Chief Executive Officer, Dino Bianco, the idea of bamboo is to provide an environmentally sustainable option for consumers.
In a statement to the press, Bianco further said the company was researching ways to turn bamboo into quality tissue with the goal of adding the renewable resource to a special product line, likely by 2023.
He, however, said the biggest problem for, what he described as a large market, was in providing quality-grade pulp from bamboo to satisfy users.
“The biggest issue with bamboo is you just can’t get the quality that North American consumers want. We will try to improve the quality of it, and we would put it under our environmental brand as a choice for consumers who want that,” Bianco said.
The choice of bamboo, he added, is because “bamboo is considered a renewable natural resource as it is a perennial that grows quickly.”
Corroborating him, Stan Edom, an agricultural expert, lauded the choice of bamboo especially for its environmental benefits.
Edom said, “Bamboo is commonly found in forested zones of Nigeria and poses a potential economic and environmental benefits. The commercial value of bamboo farming has remained unexploited.”
He added that the country had remained at the level of using bamboo merely used for firewood, yam vine staking, soil erosion control, scaffolding, and building ornamental huts.
He said that unlike Nigeria, major Asian countries like China, Thailand, Indonesia and India, had bought into it as a major export and a source of revenue.
