How Paddy Started
A letter from the founders about a trip to Bangkok, a factory fire, and toilet paper made from rice.
A Trip to Bangkok
I went to Bangkok, Thailand for a vacation.
One thing immediately stood out.
The air quality was terrible. Especially the PM2.5 pollution. On some days the PM2.5 levels can get up to 108µg/m³.
To put that into context, the World Health Organization recommends PM2.5 should not exceed 15µg/m³!
So I started researching what was causing the bad air quality.
What I found was that the open burning of rice straw, a byproduct of rice product that is leftover after harvest, is one of the biggest contributors to Bangkok's air pollution.
Why Is Rice Straw Burned?
I kept researching.
I discovered that rice straw has almost no value after the rice is harvested.
For many farmers, it's cheaper to buy a match and burn it than it is to haul it away or find another use for it.
Every year, over 100 millions of tons of rice straw are burned across the world, even in the US! That releases as much CO2 into the air as driving 31.7 million cars for an entire year!
Could Rice Straw Become Toilet Paper?
Steve, our co-founder, and I started looking for a better use for rice straw.
After speaking with many industry experts, the consensus was that this was not possible to do, which is why it had previously never been done before.
Eventually we stumbled across a startup developing rice straw pulp after sourcing the rice straw from nearby farmers.
They had developed process to turn upcycled rice straw into usable paper pulp.
We partnered with them with the goal to co-develop toilet paper and paper towels made from 100% rice.
A decision that turned out to be much harder than we expected.
Nearly 2.5 Years of R&D
What followed was nearly two and a half years of relentless R&D. Making toilet paper from rice straw had never been done at scale, and there was no roadmap to follow.
We faced setback after setback. Natural disasters. Supply chain shocks. Manufacturing challenges we didn't see coming. Each one sent us back to the drawing board.
Every time we hit a wall, we regrouped, learned what didn't work, and started over. Slowly, the pulp got better. The process got sharper. The paper got softer.
Then, finally, it all came together.
It Finally Worked!
After years of development and many setbacks, we finally produced the world's first toilet paper and kitchen paper towels made from 100% rice straw.
Why this matters?
We think this is a HUGE win for the planet because the world produces between 800 million and 1 billion tons of rice straw per year during rice production, and over 100 million tons of it is openly burned. This is a major problem in Thailand, India, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. It contributes heavily to climate change and severe air pollution in major cities.
The US is actually a large producer of rice, specifically in California, Arkansas and Louisiana, where American farmers grow roughly 20 billion pounds of rice annually. Of this, roughly 40% of rice fields in Arkansas are intentionally set on fire each harvest season, meaning a massive amount of leftover rice straw is still routinely burned in fields in the US to this day! Even in California, state regulations still permit the burning of up to 125,000 acres of disease-infected rice fields annually.
And also, traditional toilet paper has not changed in 150 years. It's still made by cutting down virgin trees, which wipes out over 1 million acres of forest per year, just to use toilet paper once and then throw away.
There have been newer attempts at more sustainable forms of toilet paper in recent years, coming mostly from bamboo. Bamboo has to use new land in order to grow, many times wiping out trees and forests just to grow bamboo. Clearing forests just to plant bamboo completely defeats the purpose. At that point, we might as well just use virgin trees. And because it's almost entirely grown and manufactured in China, a massive portion of those climate savings is wiped out by the carbon emissions of shipping across the world.
That's why we are certain toilet paper and paper towels made from 100% upcycled rice straw waste, a waste that would originally be burned, and doesn't use any trees, is the most sustainable option available on the market.
Why We Believe Waste Is The Future
Rice is the 3rd most grown crop in the world. That creates enormous amounts of rice straw as a by-product.
Rice straw already exists.
No new crop.
No additional land.
That's why we believe the future isn't making more.
It's using what we already have.
This Is Only The Beginning.
Today we're making toilet paper and kitchen paper towels.
Beyond that?
We believe agricultural waste can replace virgin fiber in many everyday paper products.
If we can help farmers earn more from what was once discarded...
reduce open-field burning...
and save trees at the same time...
then maybe something as ordinary as toilet paper can become part of a much bigger change.
Thanks for being here.
We're just getting started.