By Lynn Moore, Postmedia News October 11, 2011

North America's first straw-paper book is to be unveiled today 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.

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 has half the ecological footprint of conventional paper, said Nicole Rycroft, Canopy's executive director.