Banana Paper

Richard Aedy: Hello, I'm Richard Aedy, welcome to The Buzz.

MUSIC: Banana Boat Song

Richard Aedy: There's only one Harry Belafonte but what he's singing about, the back breaking toil associated with bananas is closer to universal. Wherever the world's favourite fruit is grown, the people who harvest and move the bananas get injured.

I once spent a summer working on a kiwifruit orchard in New Zealand and I thought that was hard yakka but banana plantations are much more demanding. The sheer misery the work can inflict inspired banana farmer Tom Johnston to think there had to be a better way and as we'll hear, one thing led to another.

Tom Johnston: It's one of the worst jobs you can every possibly think of. They slice the tree and pull the bunch down onto a bloke's shoulder and then the bunch is cut off and they carry it across three rows and put them on the trailer. It's pretty hard work, some of these bunches weigh up to 70 kilos and I've invented a machine that can remove the bunch from the tree and put it on the trailer. Cuts down two thirds of the damage and it's a big issue with the workplace health and safety, we've taken the weight off the bloke's shoulders. And I've come up with it, I went to Komatsu Australia and in conjunction with them we've done three prototypes and this one is ready to go now, it's proven, we've done all the trials and we're just going to go from there.

Richard Aedy: Is it quicker, is it cheaper than using people?

Tom Johnston: It most certainly is, all the farmers have to do is to change over to a 100 day bunching period in their paddocks and we pick them ten times, that's 10% each time we go through. You know there's a lot of farmers changing over to that way so it will definitely suit my machine.

Richard Aedy: No this as I understand it leaves more of the tree intact, why's that important?

Tom Johnston: With this paper technology Richard we need that tree from the top to the bottom without any cuts in it. Now from day dot we've known that banana trees had fibre in it and they've been trying to pulp it and it won't pulp. But now Ramy has come up with an idea down at the Adelaide University to veneer it, then laminate it and we re-bond it using its own sap. We take the tree, we lay it down, put it in the spindle and veneer it and we can peel the piece of paper off as thin as a cigarette paper.

Richard Aedy: How do you veneer it, when you say veneer I think of Estapolling floors you know?

Tom Johnston: Much the same as logs, it spins at a thousand revs a minute and we peel it off like cheese, you know a real thin slice of cheese comes off about as thick as a cigarette paper. You put another piece of paper at 90 degrees on top of that like a cross-ply, then trick it into thinking it's alive again and it re-bonds with its own sap, there's no glues, no chemicals, it's all natural.

Richard Aedy: How do you trick it into thinking it's alive again?

Tom Johnston: That's the secret we can't tell you, Ramy's got the secret.

Richard Aedy: Now I read somewhere the approach you're taking is based on what the Egyptians did when they were making papyrus?

Tom Johnston: Correct. Much the same technique, only the papyrus comes from a reed. Now we've worked out to do it with banana trees, they are grown right round the Equator, there 3 trillion banana trees a year go to waste, you can make a product that's 300 times stronger than normal paper, it's waterproof, greaseproof, we need no water to make it, it comes with its own sap and its own water, it's not a big process to make. We don't need a lot of energy to make this paper.

Richard Aedy: What's it look like cause I was thinking with the traditional pulp and paper mills they use a lot of things like chlorine to get it all white?

Tom Johnston: Yep, we will get to white paper, at the moment we're just going with - it's a yellowy gold type of colour and it's a coarse fibre. We're making wallets; it's every bit as tough as leather and the wallets are doing the trick, no problems at all. And also business cards, I believe that the start to this whole industry is in the business card - we've got water proof ink, you can dunk it in water, take it out, iron it again and she's back to normal.

Richard Aedy: So this is banana paper but it's not the paper that most of us think of when you say paper, like the newsprint quality or like A4 that you stick in the photocopier or the printer?

Tom Johnston: Richard, 85% of the world's paper is in building products and packaging, cartons for fruit and vegetables and all that sort of stuff, cartons for TVs and videos and all that. All packaging products we can replace with this fibre. It's 300 time stronger than normal paper.

Richard Aedy: Why is it so strong?

Tom Johnston: It's the technique of cross plying it Richard that makes it really strong. Fibres running at both angles and therefore that gives it its strength, it won't tear down the middle of the long fibre, it's got a cross ply on it. You take a cement bag, it's got about 8 layers of paper in it and one layer of plastic in there. The reason being is one is to hold the weight with the 8 pieces of paper and one piece of plastic to keep it dry. Now we can make bags out of this paper and just use one sheet of the paper and it'll do the same job.

Richard Aedy: So you're saying one sheet but in fact it's got multiple layers and they go at right angles to one another, one on top of the other?

Tom Johnston: Yeah, that's right. It's still only not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

Richard Aedy: But it's strong enough to bag cement with?

Tom Johnston: That's right.

Richard Aedy: How big are those big bags of cement?

Tom Johnston: Oh, they weight about 25 kilos.

Richard Aedy: 25 kilos.

Tom Johnston: Yeah, I think they're about that Richard yeah.

Richard Aedy: And you can do that with one cigarette paper width of your paper?

Tom Johnston: That's correct.

Richard Aedy: Crikey.

Tom Johnston: Yes, it's a big find; I believe it's the biggest technology on the face of the earth right now. Ramy's taken a fair bit of time to put this all together and the more I work with it, the more uses that we're finding it can adapt to and I'll go back to the wallets, you know we've found a paper that can make a wallet that's as good as leather. Now that's got to be a big find, and it's coming out of a waste product and it's a renewable product because it's back there every 8-10 months.

Richard Aedy: Now what then is stopping you from taking over the world with this?

Tom Johnston: Money. Between the South Australian Government, the Adelaide University and them, they've put about $640,000 into it down their end of the paddock. Up here in Queensland I've been the only one pushing it along and I'm having a little bit of strife convincing farmers that it's going to happen. And I'm having a hell of a lot of strife convincing governments that this thing can happen. And I've invested about $600,000 of my own money and I've got to look for investors now and we have a 30% stake in Transform Australia up for grabs for an investor and we can build their first factory and then we'll be going after the shopping bag market. That's a monster.

Richard Aedy: A monster shopping bag market.

Tom Johnston: They use about 7 billion plastic bags a year in Australia and the Federal Government is about to put a 25 cent tax on every one of them so they're making a market for us. I need a mill, a factory big enough to make one sheet of paper a metre square. At the moment we've got little prototypes, we're sending a product from Mareeba down to Adelaide where the prototype's working and it's making the paper, Ramy sends the paper back up to north Queensland and then we make the products from up here.

Richard Aedy: So it's essentially happening by hand?

Tom Johnston: It is.

Richard Aedy: That means you're going to have a small number of retail outlets for a very small number of products?

Tom Johnston: We've got about 28 products on the market at the moment ranging from business cards, candles, wallets, lights, different other various things, wall hangings, postcards, prints.

Richard Aedy: Now what about the giant paper companies of the world, are they not beating a path to your door?

Tom Johnston: They've shown a bit of interest in it but I don't think they'll be real keen on us coming into the market as they've got a hell of a lot of money reinvested in reafforestation. But the three things we need on earth Richard is water, food and fibre and we're running out of fibre. We can't replace the trees as fast as we're knocking them down, we're knocking down 7 million hectares of trees a year to make paper and we can replace 85% of that with a waste product right around the world. In Third World countries we can turn some of the Third World countries into the richest countries in the world using the fibre within that banana tree.

Richard Aedy: Well what's the next step for you now?

Tom Johnston: To build a factory up here in north Queensland and that will be the pilot factory and then we can get investors from the rest of the world to come over and have a look and start sending the technology out to the rest of the world.

Richard Aedy: Well good luck with it Tom and thanks for coming in and joining us on The Buzz.

Tom Johnston: Thank you Richard, good to talk to you.

Richard Aedy: Banana farmer and director of Transform Australia, Tom Johnston.