Forget bamboo. This startup wants the next toilet paper to be made from rice straw

Over the past decade, bamboo toilet paper started to go mainstream as an alternative to turning trees into something we flush down the drain. A startup called Paddy Paper now wants to use a more unusual alternative material: rice straw, a byproduct of rice farming. The project started on a trip to Bangkok in 2022, when cofounder Matt Dye was struck by the high levels of air pollution. He learned that the problem wasn’t coming only from traffic exhaust or factories, but from farms outside the city that were burning millions of tons of straw left after harvesting rice. “All the smoke from the fields was just drifting over to Bangkok,” he says. The city is sometimes so polluted by smoke from farms that schools shut down and people have to work from home. The problem isn’t limited to Thailand: globally, 450 million metric tons of rice straw are burned each year, creating both air pollution and climate emissions. Farmers burn the straw because it doesn’t have economic value. But Dye, who was working at a biomaterials startup at the time, started to wonder if something could be made from it. The case for rice straw The biggest opportunity he saw: turning it into toilet paper, and tackli…