By Lynn Moore, Postmedia News October 11, 2011

North America's first strawpaper book is to be unveiled Tuesday in an initiative that some hope will see agricultural chaff replace trees as fodder for the publishing industry.

About 500 copies of Margaret Atwood's new book have been printed on paper made from wheat straw, flax straw and pulp from recycled paper.

"This is an elegant solution to a pressing problem," Atwood wrote in the foreword of the special edition version of In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination.

"Human beings need oxygen, and forests produce it; printed books require paper, but paper need not be made from virgin forests."

The fibre used in the McClelland & Stewart special edition is taken exclusively from straw left after harvest or used as animal bedding and the like, according to the Vancouver-based advocacy group Canopy.

The paper, produced by Quebec-based Cascades Inc., has half the ecological footprint of convention paper, said Nicole Rycroft, Canopy's executive director.

It is part of a broader Canopy campaign to diversify the North American paper fibre basket to reduce the demands on boreal forests by kick-starting commercial scale development of strawbased papers.

"There is enough leftover straw in North America to keep up to 800 million trees standing every year and Canopy has already identified customer demand to keep four pulp mills running full time," Rycroft said.

"Shifting paper production from our endangered forests to our fields would yield a new resource sector with benefits to farming communities, our economy, and forest ecosystems around the world."

Although the flax straw used in the paper comes from Alberta, the wheat straw pulp travelled from China because there is no commercial-scale facility in North America with equipment to deal with wheat straw.

It would cost between $50 million and $200 million to upgrade existing pulp facilities to handle wheat straw, Rycroft said. One option being considered by potential investors involves building a new pulp facility close to Canada's wheat fields and rail lines.

"From a business perspective it makes a lot of sense," said Rycroft.