Firm recycles paper from your potty

Green technology has come to your toilet. Or rather, green technology can now take your fecal waste and turn it into paper.

Rafael Aharon, founder and CEO of Israel-based Applied Clean Tech said, “We’ve actually discovered a new source of paper. A real good source if you collect it from the point we do, the point before the biological processes of the wastewater treatment plant destroy it.”

It's unclear at exactly what point Applied Clean Tech collects the fecal matter from.

It's not just fecal matter that the company uses, but rather it converts the cellulose in sludge, meaning toilet paper, fecal matter, and other material, into paper. The resulting paper is odorless, clean, and biologically safe and harmless.

The question is, will consumers go (no pun intended) for the new paper. Since many products are already labeled as using recycled paper, we wouldn't think that would be a big issue in and of itself, and those products don't drill down into what the paper is recycled from.

The company believes it could eventually supply as much as 10 percent of the paper market. Let's be honest: the world's population isn't going anywhere but up, up, up. As that happens, the amount of waste material will increase, too, and so will the amount of paper that can be produced.

Applied Clean Tech was founded in 2007. It has previously been received financing by sich venture capital firms as Saturn Venture Partners in Boston, Mass.