Now, home furniture from recycled paper!

Chennai: ‘Recycle’ is the buzz word now-a-days. When the City Corporation is going full throttle to reuse waste plastics for constructing roads, here is a company that has come out with a unique way of using waste paper – for home furniture.

City-based Honicel India is planning precisely that with its honeycomb products. The company's Rs 60-crore, 9,000-tonne factory went on stream on Tuesday.

"In the packaging industry, our product will be used for making pallets, container packing, pharma, food and automobile industries. In the construction sector, our product will go as an in-fill material for doors, furniture and others," T E Giridhar Raj, director of the firm told reporters here, adding, "This fiscal, we hope to do a turnover of Rs.300 crore. Sixty percent of our business will be from the packaging industry and balance from construction and furniture sector."

The 25,000 sq.ft. facility in Chennai to produce the Honicel core material, along with an adjacent 28,000 sq.ft. facility to assemble packaging material, and two other packaging assembly units in Bangalore and Hyderabad, have all been set up at an investment of Rs. 60 crore for the first year, said Raj.

Honicel India is a 60:40 joint venture between the Netherlands-based Honicel group and Ethiraj Timbers.

Raj said the pallets made of Honicel sheets are eco-friendly replacement for plywood, medium density fibre boards, particle boards, solid woods and corrugated boards, an IANS report said.

“The product is recyclable as well as biodegradable. Our product is made of recycled paper. The source of raw material for the Indian plant will be a mix of local as well as importe Honiceld recycled paper,” Henk Krabben, president and CEO of Honicel Worldwide, said.

He said doors, tables and other furniture items could be made with his product as in-fill material without compromising on the strength and durability.

Raj said a door manufacturer can reduce his cost by 35 percent using our material between two outer sheets and the savings could be passed on to the end customer.

Honicel is world-market leader in the production and application of Honicel paper-honeycomb. The market range covers from the Scandinavian countries up to South-Africa and from America up to Australia, New-Zealand and the Far East.