If you work from home, have a home office, or just get a lot of junk mail and credit card offers that you want to make sure don’t fall into the wrong hands, odds are you have a paper shredder at home.  I have one, and it’s one of the most fabulous inventions that’s ever been introduced into the modern home.  No more tearing unwanted junk mail in half and tossing it away; just feed it into the machine and condense a month’s worth of mail into a sandwich baggie-sized pile of confetti!  However, what if there was a way to turn that refuse into something useful?

Well, the Japanese company Oriental Co. Ltd. has introduced a machine they call the White Goat.  Basically, it takes your scraps of old paper and turns them into fresh, usable toilet paper.  It only takes 40 sheets of standard A4 paper to make one roll of TP, which is about what I get in junk mail, bank statements, and miscellanea every week.  Just think about it; you’re recycling and making a social statement about where credit card companies can stick their unwanted applications at the same time!

Granted, the machine costs about $100,000, which is a little steep for the average home office’s budget.  Plus at 6 feet tall and 1300 pounds, it’s not exactly something you can wheel into the spare bedroom.  Still, if you choose to make the investment, it’ll pay for itself after about 200,000 rolls of toilet paper, or 16,000 recycled reams of paper, not counting the water needed for the paper pulping process.