Paper is everyone’s necessity, be it school-going student or an office-going adult. So for manufacturing paper, imagine the demand for it, number of trees being cut, and the amount of water being consumed!
Hence, trending in the latest startup news is a startup from Japan comes with an invention. Japanese entrepreneur, Nobuyoshi Yamasaki leads the startup.
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His venture, TBM Co. makes paper out of limestone, a rock it proclaims as “almost inexhaustible.” They say that 100 tons of water are required to make a ton of regular paper, while its Limex paper is made without water. Instead of 20 trees, it uses less than a ton of limestone, as well as 200 kilograms of polyolefin. Hence, water and trees both are saved with Yamasaki’s invention, TBM. It’s time to know where he got the idea from.
Yamasaki got inspiration from European Architecture, during one of his vacations, because it stood for hundreds of years. So, he started looking out for projects that would similarly enable him to leave behind a legacy. In 2008, he came across paper made from stone in Taiwan. He then decided to create his own take on the technology.
Witnessing richness in paper’s quality, more than 400 sushi restaurants across Japan run by Sushiro Global Holdings Ltd. signed a deal with TBM to make menu cards for them. TBM also raised additional 1 billion yen ($9.1 million) recently from an existing backer. And they aim to list their shares by 2020.
TBM has a staff of 80 employees at present, targeting 1 billion yen in sales this year. And their next step is a Japan plant with an annual 30,000-ton capacity by 2020. Yamasaki aims to transform TBM into enterprise generating 1 trillion yen in revenue through the mid-2030s. For this, they’ve planned to sell or operate hundred or more TBM plants worldwide in limestone-rich, water-poor regions such as Morocco and California. But the road ahead is long.
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