Every autumn, city crews sweep millions of pounds of fallen leaves off sidewalks and haul them away. Most get composted into municipal green waste programs, burned, or left to fill landfills.
Meanwhile, the global paper industry cuts down an estimated six million trees every year to meet demand for packaging, printing, and the unremarkable paper products that pass through our hands daily without much thought.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, the pulp and paper sector consumes between 13 and 15 percent of all wood traded globally and that wood has to come from somewhere.
Valentyn Frechka, a young inventor from Sokyrnytsia in western Ukraine, noticed both problems at once.
During a hike in the Carpathians, he began turning over a straightforward question: leaves contain cellulose, the same core ingredient found in wood… so why couldn’t they be used to make paper?
He took the question back to his high school chemistry lab.
By 2017, after months of trial and error, he had produced the first prototypes of leaf-based paper. Simple sheets, but durable enough to write on, print on, and fold.
That was the proof he needed.
The startup he eventually co-founded, Releaf Paper, now produces around three million paper bags per month. The manufacturing process begins with urban collection. Releaf sources its leaves exclusively from city streets, parks, and sidewalks… never from forests.
The company works directly with municipal governments, offering to take the collected leaf litter off their hands rather than have it trucked to a landfill or incineration facility.
Once the leaves arrive, they’re cleaned to remove debris, then run through high-pressure, high-temperature reactors that break down the leaf structure and isolate cellulose fibers without the chlorine bleaching and sulfate pulping chemicals that conventional paper mills depend on. The fibers get washed, ground into pulp, blended with natural bio-fillers, and rolled into sheets.
The resource comparison is stark. Conventional wood-based paper production consumes approximately 230 cubic meters of water per tonne. Releaf’s process uses 10 to 15, roughly fifteen times less.
It also uses three times less energy overall.
The finished paper biodegrades in 30 to 40 days in soil. Standard paper can take closer to nine months. Each tonne of Releaf paper produced spares approximately 17 trees and repurposes 2.3 tonnes of leaf material that would otherwise have been waste.
The lignin extracted during production, the structural compound that holds plant cells together, goes back to cities as a semi-fertilizer for parks and street trees. The same leaves that came off those trees return to feed them.
Nothing in the cycle is discarded.
Releaf has secured a €2.5 million grant through the European Commission’s EIC Accelerator program and currently has production capacity of up to 5,000 tonnes annually.
Clients include L’Oréal, Samsung, and Google. In 2024, the European Patent Office selected Frechka as a finalist for its Young Inventors Prize, chosen from over 550 applicants.
The paper industry has operated on the same basic logic for centuries: cut trees, pulp them, sell the sheets.
Releaf didn’t invent a new kind of paper so much as it located a feedstock the industry had been walking past every fall. Urban leaf litter is abundant, seasonal, and delivered straight to collection points by the wind. The raw material costs cities money to remove. Turning it into a product worth selling requires only the willingness to treat waste as a starting point rather than an endpoint.
That reorientation, practical, grounded, and without sentiment, is where future innovations are born.
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Your Neighbor,
Benji Faun
Sources:
- Releaf Paper, official company site: releaf-paper.com
- European Patent Office, Young Inventors Prize 2024 announcement
- World Wildlife Fund, pulp and paper industry data
- Birdsadvice.com, Releaf Paper profile (May 2025)
- ChemEurope.com, EPO finalist coverage (June 2024)
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