Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Jeff Golman and Woody Harrelson appear in this undated handout photo. Harrelson is the front man for a plan to convert agricultural crop waste into paper in Canada. He says making paper from trees is barbaric and he believes using waste from wheat and flax converted into paper could revolutionize the paper industry. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO - Chris Freeman Henderson

Actor Woody Harrelson has played every character from a gullible bartender to an irascible porn publisher to the drunken hero in The Hunger Games, but in real life he wants to be a paper industry revolutionary who saves forests from chainsaws.

Harrelson, on the phone from Atlanta, Ga., where he's filming the sequel to The Hunger Games and reprising his role as the heavy drinking Haymitch Abernathy, says his support of Manitoba-based Prairie Pulp and Paper Inc., is not an act.

Prairie Pulp and Paper Inc., produces paper made from waste wheat straw and Harrelson said he wants to get in on the movement that will see North America's first non-wood pulp-and-paper mill set up in Manitoba.

"When we build a plant there in Manitoba, it's going to be 100-per-cent wood free. . . really from agricultural waste," said Harrelson, a two-time Academy Award nominee. "I'd like to see a revolution in the paper industry and I think this is an important part of that process."

Prairie Pulp and Paper has commissioned an environmental study that concludes the company's recently launched Step Forward wheat-based paper has the least amount of environmental impact among North American copy papers, including 100-per-cent recycled paper.

Step Forward paper, currently made in India with 80 per cent waste wheat straw and 20 per cent wood fibres, has been available at more than 330 Staples stores across Canada since last summer.

Of the seven categories studied, Step Forward was found to have the lowest environmental impacts with regards to non-renewable energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater volume and aquatic acidification.

Vancouver-based Offsetters was commissioned by Prairie Pulp and Paper Inc. to conduct the environmental study.

James Tansey, president of Offsetters, said straw-based copy paper is an innovative product that uses waste wheat straw from the agriculture industry and transforms it for use in papermaking.