Art and green-building innovation rolled into one

Photo by Thomas Hawk

For at least a decade now, we’ve been told that our civilization is going paperless. Most of us have heard that prophesy, looked around at the stacks of Kleenex and 8-by-11-inch printer sheets we go through, and had ourselves a good snicker.

Even if newspapers, magazines and books do at last end up entirely on our glowing screens, we’re still going to have an awful lot of  waste paper lying around from the previous few centuries of reading, writing, sneezing and wrapping. Fortunately, Ratko Maltar has a creative idea for what to do with it. 

Maltar, a native Croatian now living in the Northeast Ohio area of the United States, has figured out  a process for rolling used sheets of  paper such as magazine pages into small, sturdy “beams” that can be formed into panels or blocks for building materials or used to create artistic shapes and images. He  calls the process “Irogami” (color folding) and has developed eight different ways of rolling the sheets. Depending on what kinds of paper he uses, the beams can be plain or brightly patterned.  

This could keep a lot of  TIMEs and Tiger Beats out of our landfills. Maltar’s plan to develop a  computer program allowing designers to experiment virtually with Irogami constructions, images and holograms may even bring help us consider our promised “paperless society” with somewhat straighter faces.

Maltar came to the U.S. 13 years ago and started out working for Lincoln Electric in the Cleveland area, he said.  ”It was my dream to come here and I had to sacrifice [for years] to come here” to America,  Maltar said. 

Eventually, with experience in fields he lists as operations analysis, quality control, marketing analysis and new-product development for electronics and machinery manufacturers (“I like numbers”), Maltar took the next step and became an inventor and entrepreneur, putting his expertise to good use on Irogami. 

He hopes to find public and private partners to help him develop the technology for all of his Irogami applications, because he sees his invention having a positive social impact as well as an economic one: helping the environment as a green building material, providing an inexpensive and versatile art and design tool for students and professionals alike, and providing everyone – from  children to prisoners -with an agreeable, therapeutic craft.

Said Maltar, “You get calm, you have busy fingers, you start to think in prudent way.”