Students produce paper from cow dung manure

Melike Çalkap - BURSA

Within the scope of a school project, a group of high school students in the northwestern province of Bursa has succeeded in producing paper from manure made out of cow dung, bagging an award in a national competition.

A group of nine students from Bursa’s Tofaş High School worked on an eco-friendly project to compete in a national high school entrepreneurship competition organized by the Junior Achievement Türkiye Foundation. They won the “Most Innovative Product” award for making paper out of manure.

Ahmet Naim Yılmaz, a sophomore student, has always been interested in biology. The young student, who was upset about the fact that many trees are cut down to produce paper, thought about what he could do to prevent this situation and started researching.

Speaking to local media, Yılmaz said that the competition was an opportunity to put his research results into practice.

“As a team of nine people, we worked day and night for eight months. We chose cattle dung as the type of fertilizer, as cattle can produce about eight percent of their body weight as manure every day. In other words, the daily manure production of a 500 kg animal is about 40 kg,” Yılmaz said.

“We can produce 480 grams of cellulose, the material needed to produce paper, from each kilogram of this manure. We obtained cellulose by sending manure to the paper production factory. In the first stage, we used a kilogram of manure and produced eight sheets of paper,” he added.

While explaining that their project is currently only at the experimental stage, Yılmaz said they aim to increase cellulose production with cow dung manure and end Türkiye’s dependence on foreign sources.

“I know that one day when we stop cutting down trees completely, we will be a country that exports cellulose. I am very hopeful and assertive about this,” he added.