Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain stuff, Lauren folk bomb here it's become an evergreen piece of advice for aspiring writers. Put your button the chair and write a first draft, no matter how crappy. Now, thanks to a breakthrough in chemical technology, that first draft can be literal crap, or at least printed on it. Researchers announced at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in March that it's possible to turn manure from cows, elephants, goats,
and other grass munchers into yes paper. As you may already know, paper is made from cellulos that usually comes from trees. Not every place has a lot of trees, but as we all know, everybody poops, and some of those poopers leave patties around for stepping in or collecting if you're of a mind to collect poop like these a c S scientists are One of the researchers who presented this idea at the a c S meeting. In question, Alexander Bismarck, PhD. Was driving around crete and watched goats
eat grass and poop it out. He thought that maybe the goats were doing to the grass what paper manufacturers due two trees turn it into cellulose that could be made into paper, because of course that's what you think of while you're driving around an idyllic island. Cretion excretions. Some animals, it turns out, do a pretty good job pooping out paper ready cellulose, depending on which animal is doing the manure manufacturing, Bismarck said in a press statement.
Up to that manure is cellulose, which is then easily accessible to make paper from trees, the trees have to be ground way down by a machine into a pulp before being made into proper paper. Goats do that work for free every day of their grass muncheon poop leaven lives. The only thing they require is more grass, which makes more poop, which makes more paper, and they need some water to drink and maybe scritches on their little chins.
But either way, it's a more environmentally friendly process than traditional papermaking. And it's not just goats. The researchers moved onto piles of patties from horses, cows, and elephants. To elephants in wildlife parks in Africa are number one at going number two at the San Francisco Zoo alone, an adult male African elephant can produce three hundred pounds. That's six kilos of pooh. That's a lot of potential paper. The first uses for this pooh paper would probably be industrial.
According to the researchers, it could filter wastewater before it's released into the environment, which seems fitting. But poop pyrus, or nanopaper, as the researchers rather boringly call it, could also be used to write on. So don't give up, fellow writers, Our first drafts could soon be really truly crappy. Today's episode was written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other topics with big potential, visit our home planet, how
stuff Works dot com. M