Forget bamboo. This startup wants the next toilet paper to be made from rice straw

Over the past decade, bamboo toilet paper started to go mainstream as an alternative to turning trees into something we flush down the drain. A startup called Paddy Paper now wants to use a more unusual alternative material: rice straw, a byproduct of rice farming. The project started on a trip to Bangkok in 2022, when cofounder Matt Dye was struck by the high levels of air pollution. He learned that the problem wasn’t coming only from traffic exhaust or factories, but from farms outside the...