Taking advantage of some quality wandering around time before the show
opened this morning, Printgeek was taken aback to spot a stand advertising its
wares as "paper made of stone!". Muttering "paper... scissors... stone...??"
Printgeek immediately hurried to investigate this curiousity.
And it transpires that however unlikely it may sound, paper made of stone
is an accurate description of an intriguing substrate from Taiwan Lung Meng
Technology. It's taken more than a decade to develop, and the firm has lodged
something like 40 patents to protect its invention.
Its Rich Mineral Paper (RMP) is made by combining limestone powder (calcium
carbonate) with a non-toxic resin. The company is making great play of its
environmental credentials too. No wood pulp (obviously), no acid, no bleach (the
paper's whiteness comes from the stone itself), and no water consumption is
required during manufacturing.
And on the subject of water, RMP products can be completely submersed in
H2O without deforming, you can even write on the paper underwater with a pencil.
Veritable James Bond stuff. The attention-grabbing exhibition stand features
fish tanks with printed brochures happily bobbing about in the water without
warping or falling to pieces, the example shown in our picture has been in its
tank since day one of the show. Ideal applications for this "paper" include
printed matter for hostile environments, such as mining, and packaging that
needs to withstand moisture. But there's a host of other applications that we'll
return to when time allows.
What about recycling? I hear you cry. Well it's not suitable for recycling
with normal pulp paper, but RMP photodegrades after about 6-7 months or can be
recycled with materials labelled "2". Alternatively, you can set fire to it and
the resin will burn off without any toxic release, leaving the original
limestone powder behind. Weird, and very very interesting.
