Partisans of an environmentally friendly future often subscribe to the notion of a self-sufficient market, where raw material is constantly recycled and each discarded product becomes fodder for tens of others. Another attractive suggestion is the idea that we will have found alternative resources to replace traditional ‘virgin’ materials - biofuels, for example, generated from organic waste, would be used in place of natural gas and coal as we do now. Therefore, today I will investigate the ‘Alga Carta’, an algae-based paper that may very well be a prequel to the pulp and paper industry’s future.

In the 1990s, the Venice Lagoon was faced with an unprecedented problem: an abnormal algae infestation, caused by pollution in the canals and stagnant water movement, was wreaking havoc on the lagoon’s delicate ecosystem. The quickest solution, it seemed, was to gather the growth and deposit them in landfills; quick, yes, but hardly sustainable, since this led to reduction in available landfill capacity. The city therefore began looking for alternative and innovative ways to use this superabundant floc of algae as raw material in industrial processes.

Favini, a paper manufacturer, took the algae and turned it into a unique line of paper - a product that, by all means in shape and form, would be identical in quality to the traditional paper of wood pulp-base, but would simply use algae as raw material instead. The line, now subordinate to a larger collection of papers and termed the 'Shiro Alga Carta', is one of Favini’s best-selling eco-friendly products and one of the company's more iconic cornerstones in pioneering the eco-paper movement.

Algae is like nitrogen, so to speak, if we compare the world of flora to the composition of the atmosphere. There’s a lot of it - nitrogen makes up 78% of the air we breathe - but it’s not as valuable as oxygen, nor is it used for much except perhaps to keep our potato chips from going bad in the bag. Finding a way to take idle raw materials such as algae and create a product that is equal or even better in quality than the traditional ‘oxygen’-based one is a big eco-friendly gesture that many other industries could and should try to replicate. Like how the Alga Carta is showing us a sustainable future for the paper industry, perhaps other industries will find ways to improve upon the source of their raw materials.

^ beachcomber - Alga Carta’s book, a collection of Litho prints by photographer Lisa Woollett on Alga Carta paper.

In fifty years, if the human race doesn’t die out due to an incredibly toxic wasteland of our own creation, schoolchildren will probably still be carrying copies of Shakespeare in their book bags. The only difference may be that those books might be made out of seaweed rather than trees. Sustainable innovation such as the Alga Carta will hopefully continue to shape the future in ways more desirable than not.