According to The Myth of the Paperless Office, a company has an average 40% increase in paper consumption every year. The demand for white paper is puts a huge strain on world’s forests. It is forcing the environmental movement to consider the alternatives.

Turning the wood pulp into a paper is both a boon and a bane. It just takes a couple of minutes to scrape and use the paper, but it takes a lifetime for a tree to grow. Recycling paper is one solution, but these methods are not enough.

Spriha Chokhani, a Jaipur-based product designer and entrepreneur, is the founder of Pulp Factory, a design studio founded in 2017 that makes products using waste paper.

Spriha had the idea of turning waste paper into furniture about ten years back when she was a student at a design school. As a part of the project assigned to them, they had to either work under someone or carry out independent work. She spoke to Better India as follows.

“We were supposed to work with materials and I started noticing that a lot of people were working bamboo or cane. While this helped in developing more products, materials like papier-mache were heavily ignored. Other than a few souvenirs from Bihar and Kashmir, this material was hardly ever explored. This is what got me really curious,” says the 32-year-old.

She came up with a range of papier-mache furniture, which is 100 per cent compostable. The six different styles of furniture that they have can withstand the weight upto 80-100 kg. Moreover, these are water-resistant and made using natural materials. Today she sells the same, along with pouches, totes, and box bags made using paper textiles, under her label – Pulp Factory.