Three students are thinking out of the box to find a substitute to burning rice hay, a fresh thought, argues Nader Habib Bahieddin Ahmed, Mohamed Fathi, and Tareq Amir are three senior college students who have staked their hopes on hay. The trio have devised a way to end the pollution related to the burning of rice hay in the countryside. "Rice hay is a useful raw material if we know how to use it," says Professor Hamid El-Mousili of Ain Shams University, who's helping them with the project. Ahmed, a student of production mechanics, says he got the idea from a news report describing how other countries use hay to produce paper. He started working on the project in the hope of submitting it to a scientific competition in Ain Shams University. "We had to look into various ways of making a machine that turns rice hay into paper." Since the beginning, El-Mousili has been involved, offering the trio advice and guidance. The three went to the Environment Friends Society in Manshiet Nasser to take a look at the existing devices. "To be honest, we didn't invent a machine for rice hay. The machines already existed, but they were traditional machines that turned the hay into pulp and produced low quality paper. We found that the machines were costly in terms of the use of electricity and water and at the end the product was poor. So, we redesigned the machines," Ahmed said. El-Mousili says the idea is not entirely original, for other countries have been doing the same. What is new about this effort is the way the technology is adapted to suit local material. The three designed an apparatus that turns hay into pulp, purifies the pulp, then adds starch to enhance quality. The pulp is then heated and pressed into the required thickness. The paper produced is useful as packaging sheets, postcards, paper bags, and stationary. The machines can also produce a thick cardboard used as an ingredient of plywood or to replace foam in artwork. Mohamed Fathi, a student of civil engineering, recounts the facts, saying that three million tonnes of rice hay are burned and wasted every year in this country. At the same time, Egypt has a shortage of paper, for it produces 385,000 tonnes of paper and consumes 836,000 tonnes annually. "Making paper out of rice hay would be like killing two birds with one stone," Fathi says. Interestingly enough, the Kyoto Protocol allows countries to buy carbon dioxide reductions elsewhere on the planet, so as to fulfil their obligations to the environment. "If successful, this would allow us not only to save the environment, but to make hard cash in the process," Fathi said. The effort is expected to be economic even in comparison to recycling arrangements. A tonne of recyclable paper costs LE400-LE1,200 and requires sophisticated stages of purification and separation, while the tonne of rice hay, in comparison, costs LE40 and is cheaper and easier to process. And the paper produced from rice hay is of a higher quality. "If we manage to save even 50 per cent of our paper imports, that would still be a considerable achievement," Fathi said. However, the trio's hope still needs a lot of financing, as argued by Amir, a student of commerce, who is in charge of the feasibility studies of the project. "The main problem is finance. To cover the cost of the machinery, working space, and operations, we would need LE400,000 for starters." Banks which were contacted told the partners the maximum funding for small projects is LE10,000. Without help from the ministries of environment or industry, they say, it will be hard for them to raise the necessary funds. Until the money comes through, their plans will remain on paper.
