Looking for sustainable souvenirs in Thailand? Or do you want something more unique and cheaper than the elephant sanctuary experiences? At the Elephant Poo Poo Paper Park, you can get an alternate experience with the elephants. This recycled paper facility has a beautiful shop full of beautiful environmentally friendly gifts as well as tours to show you how poop becomes paper. You can even get hands on and make your own little crafts. It’s a unique and fun experience for you that’s good for our planet and Thailand’s local economy. It’s a win-win situation for you and everyone else! But how exactly does poop become recycled paper?
Recycled paper drying outside
Beautiful boutique full of gifts made from their unique recycled paper
Sustainable souvenirs made from poop
Located in Mae Rim, it is a 20 minute drive North of the Chiang Mai city centre. On arriving, I was pleasantly surprised to realise there was no stench of feaces that I was expecting. It turns out that since elephants have a vegetarian diet, their poop really don’t stink at all when it dries up. At the entrance, there is a chic boutique that sells hand crafted journals, bookmarks and greeting cards all made of their recycled paper. As you wander further in, you’ll see it’s got a lovely little garden with a pond full of koi fish with the tranquil paper making facility on the other side.
Elephant Paper Poo Poo Park is an ingenious award winning entrepreneurial company that has found a way to incorporate 80% elephant poo, 10% recycled paper and 10% coconut husks into making a new kind of sturdy paper. Taking one look at it, you’d never even realised you’re staring at poop!
An alternate elephant experience tour
You probably cringing at the thought of all this poop talk, but don’t worry all this paper is 100% bacteria free. Going on Elephant Poo Poo Paper’s tour of their paper making process, I’ve learn they collect their raw materials from surrounding elephant sanctuaries all across Chiang Mai. When the poo is dried, they first rinse it off in multiple pots of water first before boiling it to kill any possible bacteria for hours. Yep, the result is Elephant poop stew; want some for dinner? Nah just kidding, we need it for the paper.
Stirring our pot of elephant poop stew
After the poop has been sterilised, they’re mixed in with coconut husks and recycled paper in a machine that turns it into a pulp. Food colouring is also added in at this point to dye the paper. This is also super environmentally friendly as no harsh chemicals are in the mix, hence leftover water can be used to water the plants around the park. From there, the wet pulpy paper mix is rolled out to be dried under the sun. And voilà, here’s your poo poo paper!
The poop paper tour was only 100 baht (5AUD or 3USD) but is definitely the more memorable than some of the 1000 baht tours I’ve done! Mai, our guide was super friendly, informative and made our experience there very enjoyable. At the end of the tour, there’s a workshop for you to create your own little greeting card, bookmark or journal from the poo paper. The prices for the workshop vary depend on what you want to make. I paid 150 baht (7AUD or 5 USD) to make my own journal out of the poo paper.
Food for thought
Did you know? Not only can you make paper with elephant poop, but you can do the same with horse and cow poo! Now given how many dairy farms there are in Australia, imagine how much recycled paper we could make! And if everyone just stopped buying so much white bleached paper from Office Works, how many trees would that save? Of course there’s lots of different issues to consider before we go around collecting all the cow poop across Australia, but here’s some food for thought. Maybe our future is full of shit, but perhaps shit is our better future.
How to find Poo Poo Paper Park
This was an unexpected
