This book (might one day) be printed on banana paper

Note: This entry originally appeared on the Penguin authors' blog, which I contributed to this week.

If you've bought my book, then you know that the subject - saving the banana from a disease that currently threatens it - has, as its background, the notion of monoculture: relying on a single crop, rather than diverse ones, leaving that crop open to all-in-one-blow disasters.

One way to expand bananas beyond the modern monoculture would be to recognize that the fruit is usable for other products. One of the most intriguing of these is paper. The banana "tree" isn't a tree at all - it is a giant herb. That means a lot of things (for example, a banana plant has no bark), but for the sake of making paper, the big advantage is this: a banana plant grows like crazy. A productive plantation can see tiny stems reach as high as twenty feet in a single year. Each "tree" produces one bunch - about 150 individual bananas - of fruit per year; it then gives "birth" to another tree. The process can continue virtually forever. The big question has been what to do with those giant trees, which quickly fall over one they've fruited, and usually are discarded after they've been.

More after the jump; or watch this informative (but very dry) video about the banana paper manufacturing process.

On an individual basis, people have been using fallen banana plants as lumber, for building houses, fencing, or even boats - for centuries. But industrial usage has been more or less nonexistent. Here's an idea, from an Australian company called Papyrus Australia: paper. The "trunk" - also know as the "pseudo-stem" or rhizome - of the banana plant is insanely fibrous. Fiber is what's needed to make paper.

It turns out that bananas are far better for making paper than using wood pulp. First of all, bananas are a renewable resource - trees can be replanted, but getting them to grow to sizes that would be useful for industry takes a long time. Not bananas: with their rapid growth cycle, they can be harvested in huge quantities, yearly, and that's after they've already served a primary commercial purpose. Even better, banana fiber is especially suitable toward pulp production: to make paper from banana trees, you end up with a process that is much more streamlined, and more environmentally friendly by orders of magnitude. A flow chart for banana paper looks like this: plants grow, fruit is harvested, waste is gathered, paper is made. With wood-pulp based paper, the process adds: trees cut down (the banana trees have already fallen, so there's no extra forest impact, as with logging), gathered, and debarked, wood chipped, ground, bleached, and made into paper. Even recycled paper is less optimal, since it also has to be gathered, bleached and de-inked, then processed again. A study conducted in Australia indicated that the cost per metric ton of conventional paper was about $700; banana-based paper would be less than twenty percent of that.

So, what kind of paper is my book printed on? As with most books - which account for about two percent of the world's paper consumption - it comes from wood pulp. Publishers like Penguin are moving toward using more recycled paper (see the Green Penguin FAQ, here) for more info, but there's little doubt that every paper-using enterprise can do do more, and that looking at the most sustainable sources of paper - those which bypass trees entirely - could be a huge jump-start toward the more earth-friendly publishing.