Just like other cities Ljubljana is also faced with significant Japanese knotweed overgrowth, a plant on the list of hundred most invasive non-native species worldwide. With the aim of preventing excessive overgrowth of the plant and reusing it for beneficial purposes the City of Ljubljana teamed up with the Re-generacija collective, the University Botanic Gardens Ljubljana, the Pulp and Paper Institute and the public waste management company Snaga. In voluntary Japanese knotweed removal campaigns the dry stems of the plant were harvested, ground and processed into paper from which final products were made.

And so Ljubljana is among the first in the world to produce paper out of Japanese knotweed at a semi-industrial level. By doing so we tackled the problem of invasive non-native species in an innovative way aligned with the principle of circular economy. The paper was used for the production of paper bags and notebooks, and the public company Snaga printed the English version of its magazine Snagazin on it.