A premium-priced toilet roll made from waste milk will be hitting Italian supermarket shelves amid the Christmas paraphernalia this winter.
Carezza di Latte – which translates as “milk caress” – is a collaboration between German fabric innovators Qmilk and Italian company Lucart, one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of paper and tissue products.
Qmilk made a name for itself a few years ago after developing hypoallergenic cloth woven from fibres that are made from a protein extracted from soured milk. Now the company has taken the original technology and adapted it to produce non-woven materials, making it possible to make loo roll.
“It’s dermatologically very good,” says Anke Domaske, a microbiologist and Qmilk’s founder. “It should be okay for people with allergies, even lactose intolerance, because even though you can technically eat it there’s no lactose inside it.”
The idea for Qmilk came about after Domaske’s stepfather was diagnosed with cancer. In the search for non-chemically treated clothing to support her stepfather’s weakened immune system – the global textiles industry is renowned for its use of potentially toxic chemicals, including hormone disruptors and heavy metals – Domaske found an unexpected solution in the form of sour milk.
“When milk turns sour, you have whey at the bottom and a solid at the top. Remove the whey and you have cottage cheese, which we dry to a protein powder. Then we put this in a sort of noodle machine, add water and make a sort of cookie dough. Then we work it through to produce fine fibres.”
Domaske estimates that Germany alone disposes of about 2m tonnes of milk per year. This isn’t excess milk that has gone off but milk that cannot be sold to start with, for example because a cow has been unwell or because it has been treated with an antibiotic that has a withdrawal period.
The Qmilk business model is based on repurposing some of this waste milk. The company currently uses 1,000 tonnes of waste milk per year sourced from half a dozen farms local to Qmilk’s factory, and pays about four cents a litre for the waste milk.
“It’s not as much as for regular milk, but still good for farmers because they don’t have to throw their product away,” says Domaske. At present, Qmilk does not foresee any issues upscaling its model because waste milk is abundant globally.
From a design perspective, the notion of extracting value from a waste product is an exciting one, says Andrew Walters, director of research at design consultancy PDR on behalf of the organisation’s Ecodesign Group.
“However,” adds Walters, “there is a danger that if this took off more milk production could be directed this way, which would be worse for the environment than a well managed forest.”
While Qmilk manufactures the milk waste fibres, it is Qmilk’s customers, such as Lucart, that turn those fibres into fabrics, yarn or paper. Around the world, about 270,000 trees a day are flushed down the drain or end up as waste in the form of chemically-treated toilet paper, according to WWF.
For Domaske, the ability to create products such as loo roll is just the start now that the company has perfected its non-woven technology. It’s the difference between having seven production steps or one, says Domaske. With that in mind, the company is now exploring many other uses for Qmilk’s fibres. Milk waste shoes anyone?
Don’t cry over spilt milk, make loo roll out of it
