110418.mp3
(8分11秒)

今日のゲストは、スウェーデン出身の環境コンサルタント、ペオ・エクベリさんです。ペオさんと奥様の聡子さんがザンビアで始めたバナナペーパープロジェクトについてお話しをお聞きします。

バナナの茎から作る紙は、木材から作られる通常の紙にくらべてどのようなメリットがあるのでしょうか。ペオさんに質問してみました。

■関連リンク
・アフリカから「サステナブルな紙」の誕生～質が良く、自然と人を守る紙。

■出演
・ペオ・エクベリ（Peo Ekberg）
環境コンサルタント、OneWorld Network代表、One Planet Cafeアドバイザー

■聞き手
・青樹洋文

——————————
番組 Transcript
——————————
The merit, first of all, that you never cut a single tree, when you make paper from banana. And then that protects forests. That is the main merit. And if I explain it simply, it is not fruits that we make paper from. It is the plants or tree where the fruit grows on. Every time you take down the fruit to eat it to enjoy the taste, there will never become a new fruit again on that particular brunch, 枝 in Japanese, right? So you have to cut that brunch. You cut the brunch. And then you will have a new banana fruit glowing back. And within 3 to 8 months, there will be new brunch. Within one year you have a new banana brunch, which means, compare to trees, it takes ten years to fifty years, right. So that is absolutely a big merit. So you have an incredibly renewable material here, right? That is very interesting.

And now we have to understand that like a tree, when you make paper, you need fibers to bind the paper to make strong paper. And in normal wood for the forest, and normal tree, their fibers are very, very short less than 1 cm. But the banana tree has fibers that are more than 1 meter. It is incredibly big difference, which makes the paper from the banana wood stronger maybe even than the normal paper. So it makes a very high quality paper. It is a big difference from for instance elephant dunk paper or some other recycle paper that is mostly made for souvenir. We don’t make paper for souvenir. We make paper that you can use for business cards in Japan. That is a high quality.

Another very good merit compared to tree paper is that the banana has very a few chemicals. Or if you succeed all way, it has no chemical when you make paper. When you make normal from wood, you always need a lot of chemicals to really make it white, to make it stronger. But banana paper, you don’t need so many chemicals or none chemicals at all.

So the banana paper we make, it is from African plantation in Zambia. It is a fantastic place called South Luangwa National Park, where there are elephants, giraffes and zebras roaming free all over the place. And there are some really quite villages, where people are very, very poor. They have no jobs. So we have to create employment in these villages by employing the women mostly. And in these villages to do the first step, which is taking the fibers from these banana plants, and then send these fibers to Japan. We will make paper in a very special machine that uses absolute no chemicals.

And above all, this is very interesting, but the banana plantation where we will get fibers from, the banana plantation itself is organic too, no chemical at all. That is very unusual actually.