Rice straw newsprint: It's possible but costly

By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer

Published Sunday, April 27, 2003

As he turned the pages of The Sacramento Bee on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 1996, California rice farmer Joe Carrancho felt a surge of excitement.

"If there was a Cloud Nine, I was on it," recalled Carrancho, who farms in Colusa County.

What drove his enthusiasm was not something in the news, but what the news was printed on: rice straw.

Like most major dailies, The Bee is published on large rolls of newsprint made from two primary sources: wood and recycled newspaper.

By adding rice straw to the mix, farmers and newspaper executives were striving for a symbiosis: finding an alternative to the sooty fall burning of Valley rice fields while also slowing their consumption of Canadian and U.S. trees.

"We've always been concerned about making sure we try to preserve the environment," said Ray Steele Jr., director of operations for The Bee at the time. "It's sort of like doing on the business side what we advocate on the editorial side."

Steele - now publisher of the Fresno Bee - said the rice straw paper ran well on the presses and the reproduction quality "was as good as or better than any other type of pulp."

The Bee, though, never used it again. Nor, for that matter, did the six other California newspapers - including the Los Angeles Times - that joined the 1996 trial. Today, the paper is not even available.

One reason is cost. The rice paper cost more than $830 a ton, compared with about $600 a ton for regular newsprint at the time of the trial. (It currently sells for between $450 and $500 a ton.)

Logistics were a hassle, too. Traditional newsprint is manufactured year-round and rice straw only becomes available in the fall.

The spark for the experiment was a state Air Resources Board law requiring farmers to reduce their open burning. Carrancho - then president of the Rice Producers of California - turned to Al Wong, a British Columbia chemist known for his ability to spin agricultural waste into paper.

Wong's special kind of alchemy is actually an ancient art. The very first paper, in fact, was made in China 19 centuries ago from tree bark, hemp, rags and fish nets.

The first success in California for Wong came in 1994 when Patagonia - an ecologically minded clothing manufacturer - needed paper for its annual report. Wong's choice: a wheat straw/recycled paper mix.

For the newsprint test, farmers baled up 54 tons of rice straw from fields in the Sacramento Valley and trucked them to a mill in Canada, where Wong had them ground into a fiber-rich mash known as pulp.

Later, the rice pulp was shipped to a paper mill in Oregon, where it was blended with recycled paper and trees to make 150 tons of newsprint. The ratio was 20 percent rice and other straw, 70 percent recycled paper and 10 percent trees.

Despite glowing reviews, the experiment was a bust.

Carrancho said it failed because "everything depends on the farmers to do it and we just do not have the money." Farmers, for example, paid the cost of shipping the rice straw to Canada, at $1,500 per truck.

"The enthusiasm is here," Carrancho said. "But unless we can get some government money, we'll never make this go."

Government money almost came through in 1998 when the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to give Wong $150,000 to study the feasibility of building a $10 million rice straw pulp and paper mill in the Sacramento Valley that would consume 10 percent of the region's rice straw per year.

But Wong, a Canadian citizen who lives in Vancouver, ran into work permission trouble with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was not resolved for a year and a half. By then, the federal grant money was gone.

Wong's saga did not quite end there. Rice farmers have kept in touch, congressmen have shown interest and two years ago, Wong was featured on The Osgood File, the national CBS television and radio show.

"This is no glorified lab experiment," Charles Osgood said on the program. "Wong has 10 years of successful experience turning agricultural straw ... into high-quality paper."

Still, nothing happened, and even for the driven Wong that's discouraging.

"After 10 years of the California Air Resources Board saying they are going to phase down burning, there is no large-scale usage of rice straw in the Valley," he said. "Let's get on with it. We know how to do it. It's just a matter of will and determination."