Sheep Poo Paper

HouseOfPulp in CreativePaperWales, Eco-Friendly, Environment, Products

Sheep Poo Paper™

Welcome to Creative Paper Wales the only craft paper mill in Wales.

We are makers of beautiful handcrafted papers and paper products including the unique and wonderful Sheep Poo Paper™.

All our paper is made from recycled materials and our processes are designed to live up to the highest environmental and quality standards possible.

Why not have a look at how it’s made or browse through our beautiful papers and paper products in our simple to use and secure online shop.

environmental:

We think our products and processes already say enough about our attitude to the environment, but our web designers say we should say a bit more about why we are making Sheep Poo Paper™ and what our philosophy is all about, so here goes:

We have sited the paper mill in one of the most beautiful places on earth, the southern reaches of Snowdonia National Park, only 3 miles north from the world famous Centre for Alternative Technology. We want it to stay that beautiful for many more generations to come, so we are committed to constantly pursue only the most environmentally friendly options and to work as part of a sustainable community.

The non-craft papermaking industry is notoriously intensive in its use of resources, destroying vast areas of forest every day and with staggering energy requirements (Paper Industry Fact: large paper factories often have to give advance notice to their national electricity grid networks before they can switch on their pulping machinery! Not surprising when you think about how much power it would take to chew up and spit out a forest or two every day). They also have a bad habit of using very large amounts of chemicals and other environmentally contaminating nasties in their processing – this is because trees are bound together by a tough chemical called Lignin, which is very, very (and very) hard to remove.

Creative Paper Wales (and Sheep Poo Paper™) is all about rejecting established thinking about what is possible or sensible and then transforming that impulse into action and actually doing something differently. We are setting out to upset conventions and trying to see the world and its possibilities in a new and more sustainable way.

Of course we also have lots of fun making paper – we think we’ve got the best jobs on the planet!

If you would prefer to read our environmental policy in its full (but slightly formal) glory please click here.

We don’t think we’ve solved it all yet though and we continue to examine ways and means to upgrade and improve our environmental position and impact.

how its made:

As every craftsperson will tell you, it all begins by using only the very finest materials. We take great care to collect super-fresh sheep poo from the beautiful (and rainy) mountains of rural Wales and take it back to the mill, situated in southern Snowdonia. We don’t just make Sheep Poo Paper™ and for our other papers we use waste paper, rag and textile off-cuts and just about anything else we can think of that has good length cellulose fibers in it. Of course, we don’t use tree – we like trees.
The sheep poo we have collected is completely sterilized by boiling it in a specially designed pressure cooker at over 120 degrees centigrade (using only the purest Welsh mountain water, of course) and then washed repeatedly over a period of days until it has lost approximately half its original weight (Sheep Fact: a sheep only digests 50% of the cellulose fibers it eats). The washing process produces a big pile of usable fibers and, as a by-product it also produces a clean, sterile, rich, liquid fertilizer which we store in a tank at the mill and pass on to local growers. (Do you want some fertilizer? Why not contact us to ask?) It takes many hours to beat the cellulose fiber and blend it with other recycled pulps until it reduces to a pulp suitable for making paper. This is a difficult process to get right and the exact method is a closely guarded secret.
Using only traditional papermaking techniques we then form the pulp into sheets using special sieves (called a “mould and deckle”) and lay them out in stacks using felt in between each sheet to keep them from sticking together. The stacked and felted sheets are then pressed under huge pressure to remove most of the remaining water and encourage the cellulose fibers to bond at a molecular scale – this is what gives the paper its strength. Hanging the paper up in the roof rafters of the mill to season them finishes off the drying process.
We also make some of our paper using a very old working example of a ‘Fourdrinier’ continuous papermaking machine which we periodically hire from a UK papermaking museum – this machine sprays the liquid pulp onto a continuous moving mesh and the water is squeezed out between heated rollers – this gives a stunningly smooth finish, although you can still see the flecks in the paper that come from the sheep poo. You don’t need to have all the expensive specialist equipment we use at the mill to make a little paper at home though. Why not have a go at making some paper yourself?