The paper industry buys more than 30% of all the industrial wood sold worldwide.
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00:00My name is Valentin. I'm a co-founder and CEO of Relief Paper Friends. We are a manufacturer of the paper from fallen leaves.
00:09The idea appeared when I was studying at school. I did it together with my chemistry teacher.
00:13We tried to explore what else we can use instead of using wood to make the same paper.
00:18Leaves is a part of wood. With the Relief, you don't need to cut any trees. It's just naturally falling down annually,
00:25getting us raw material to make the same paper and saving trees. We are partnering with the companies
00:31which are paid by cities and they are already collecting the raw material.
00:36So they have a finalized infrastructure.
00:38All what we need is just to find them, contact and convince to provide these leaves instead of burning to us.
00:44We are working only with the leaves that we are getting from the cities because we cannot use the leaves from the forest.
00:51It's not easy to collect them in the forest and there is no need because it's an ecosystem. In a city,
00:56it's a green waste that should be collected, relieved and a good solution because we are keeping the balance.
01:01We get a fiber for the making paper and
01:04returning a lignin as a semi-fertilizer for the cities to fertilize the gardens or like the trees.
01:10So it's like a win-win model.
01:11We did a lot of experiments in the lab scale to get the first fibers. The structure of the leaves is super soft
01:18so it's easy to treat. That's why we use less electricity, less water,
01:22and we don't use any chemicals to solve the competence in the leaves.
01:25It's just a pure thermal mechanical process which allows us to have a very low CO2 impact on the final product.
01:32Well, the biggest dream is to be able to reshape the industry and to be able to provide new fibers for the paper manufacturers
01:40to make the paper more sustainable and renewable.