This company wants to disrupt the $90B paper industry with books made of stone

On the surface, Karst notebooks look like those of any other luxury paper brand with colorful covers and smooth white pages. But while the $90.6 billion worldwide stationery industry relies largely on wood pulp, the Sydney-based startup creates notebooks that aren’t made from trees. Instead, they’re made largely from stones that are mixed with a small quantity of resin, a type of plastic.Get more news about Waterproof Stone Paper Notebook Cheap Envelopes,you can vist our website!

The hardcover notebooks, which cost $24.95 each, feel much like ones you might get from a competing brand, like Moleskine or Baron Fig, but the pages are also waterproof and tear-resistant. They are also fully recyclable, biodegradable, and carbon neutral, manufactured through a process in which stone—otherwise known as calcium carbonate—is ground up. In this state, stone is actually a very malleable and versatile material. It is commonly used in toothpaste, makeup, and pharmaceuticals.

Since Karst’s notebooks do still use some plastic, they’re not a perfect solution: They need to be recycled as you would recycle plastic bottles. If the customer doesn’t recycle the notebook and it ends up in a landfill, the stone will biodegrade within a year. The company claims that the resin will break down through oxidation, since it is found in such small quantities.

The notebooks are a case study on the complexity of developing alternatives to the materials used to make paper products, including packaging and mailers.
Karst’s founders, Jon Tse and Kevin Garcia, first came across the idea of stone paper back in 2016, on a vacation to Taiwan. A Taiwanese factory had originally set out to create paper made out of stone for food packaging because the material had all the functionality of regular wood pulp paper, but it also happened to be waterproof.

Three years ago, stone paper was completely new—and the factory was using it largely for industrial products. There were certainly no consumer paper products made from stone. It dawned on Tse and Garcia that stone paper could serve as an alternative to traditional wood pulp paper. “It quickly dawned on us that we should be the ones who could trail blaze,” Tse says.Many industries rely on wood to make everything from furniture to toilet paper to cardboard boxes. The problem is that trees take decades to mature, which means that when you fell a tree, you cannot quickly replace it. Most American paper products come from Canadian forests. Between 1996 and 2015, more than 28 million acres of these forests were logged, an area the size of Ohio. More than 90% of this logging was done by clearcutting, which removes nearly all the trees from the area. It will take more than a century for this land to return to its pre-logging condition.

Canadian forests contain at least 12% of the world’s carbon in its plants and soils, removing the greenhouse gas equivalent of 24 million passenger vehicles. But as we tear down these trees, less and less of this carbon dioxide is getting pulled out of the atmosphere.