Bagasse is the fibre left after the sugar juice has been squeezed out of sugarcane and it is usually used to fire the sugar mill boilers and that makes the sugar industry greenhouse gas neutral.

Elephant grass is a perennial cane-like grass that dies back with the onset of cold weather. At that time the plant draws down nutrients from the leaf and stores them in underground rhizomes ready for the next season’s growth. The dead leaves are then harvested and the plant has a relatively low fertiliser requirement.

Bamboo has a productive life of more than 100 years, that depending on variety and location, can be harvested on a one to three years rotation, and it too has a low requirement for fertiliser.

The BioIndustry report stated the pulp produced from the bagasse, bamboo and elephant grass was likely to be “significantly more climate friendly” than pulp from either plantation or natural forests.

Regarding the quality of the paper the report stated its brightness was good for paper from annual fibre sources and the long fibres contributed to higher than usual burst and tear factors. And the bagasse based paper was softer than paper derived from timber pulp.

One company selling the Green Dolphin toilet paper and hand towels is Mackay based North Queensland Cleaning and Paints, whose manager John Farrington has advertised them on TV. The toilet rolls are 10cm X 11cm X 400 sheets X 2ply and Mr Farrington said the response from the general public had been good, even though the toilet paper comes in boxes containing 48 rolls.

However the Green Dolphin toilet paper has been caught up in an Australian Customs anti-dumping ruling, brought about by an appeal by the two multinational companies that supply by far the majority of the Australian market, Kimberley-Clark (Kleenex) and SCAare (Sorbent), albeit made from timber pulp sourced locally or from New Zealand.

As they were likely to lose market share they objected to Woolworths and Safeway stores cheap generic brands, supplied by local company Paper Force, sourced from Indonesia, India and China.

Just before Christmas Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus endorsed the findings of a year-long customs investigation which upheld the multination’s allegations that the paper was being imported at prices up to 40 percent below ‘normal’.

The result is penalties or import duties of from 8-40 percent could be placed on the imports.

As the Green Dolphin toilet paper comes from China it was included, which Mr Farrington said would make their operation unviable if the import duties were applied.

The importers have until the end of this month to appeal the ruling and a spokesman for Paper Force said the group would "vigorously defend" its position, arguing the customs service breached its own and World Trade Organisation anti-dumping rules and local paper makers were not being significantly injured by the imports.

It may not seem a big issue until you realise how much money is at stake. In Australia we currently spend $728 million a year buying 120,000 tonnes of toilet paper and the market is growing at five percent a year.

But getting back to the local sugar industry and its bagasse. In the mid 1990s research was carried out in the Tully district to find out whether bamboo could be grown on marginal cane land.

The idea being for the bamboo to be used to strengthen bagasse fibre to make Medium Density Fibre-board (MDF), which is the material used to build most cupboards.

The bamboo could be harvested in the slack using cane harvesters and sent to the mill on the cane railway system, so no additional farm machinery would be needed and the mill would be able to get more use from its infrastructure provided it built an MDF factory. The study found bamboo did well in the wet tropics and could be harvested every three years. Obviously paper could be added to the list of products and if the anti-dumping appeal fails, there would be an established market for clean-green-sustainable-toilet paper, but as yet the bamboo research hasn’t been taken up by the sugar industry.