It's the simple choices that we make by instinct or habit that have the most subtle repercussions. How do you like your toilet paper (I refuse to call this stuff toilet tissue)? Extra soft? Right Very fluffy? Of course. Made from recycled materials? Chances are that if you use Charmin or Quilted Northern or Cottonelle that you'd be forced to answer no.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has done some number crunching and the results are startling:
If every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber toilet paper (500 sheets) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 423,900 trees.
And why stop at toilet paper?
If every household in the United States replaced just one box of virgin fiber facial tissues (175 sheets) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 163,000 trees.
If every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber paper towels (70 sheets) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 544,000 trees.
If every household in the United States replaced just one package of virgin fiber napkins (250 count) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 1 million trees.
You can find some more information here:
Natural Resources Defense Council
And you can download a little information sheet here.
In addition to the NRDC, Greenpeace also has an informational guide to purchasing not only toilet paper but also other kinds of paper products like napkins and paper towels and tissues.
Greenpeace
You can download another little information sheet here.
The ranking criteria for these lists are pretty tame, but, of course, all of the biggie companies have fallen through the cracks here. It's not much to ask that your paper products be:
1 -- made of 100% recycled content
2 -- made of at least 50% post-consumer recycled content, and
3 -- blcached without the use of toxic chlorine compounds
The New York Times had a front page article up this morning and Detroit Mark has more on that in a diary here.
"In the United States, which is the largest market worldwide for toilet paper, tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands. Most manufacturers use a combination of trees to make their products. According to RISI, an independent market analysis firm in Bedford, Mass., the pulp from one eucalyptus tree, a commonly used tree, produces as many as 1,000 rolls of toilet tissue. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year."
2%? Come on, I think we can do better than that. It's good that we focus on power generation plants and vehicle emissions when we're talking about climate change issues, but there are these little things we can all do to attenuate the problem just a bit here and there.
"In Europe and Latin America, products with recycled content make up about on average 20 percent of the at-home market, according to experts at the Kimberly Clark Corporation."
Yikes, we suck. I'm sure I can find a way to blame president Bush here but I'll also accept a good helping of the blame too.
“No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council.
That's a nice sentiment and, dare I say, the right one. Why should I wipe my butt with the essence of a thousand year old tree? Well, I shouldn't, but that's exactly what I'm doing now, and maybe you are doing it too. Let's stop together.
"Environmentalists are focusing on tissue products for reasons besides the loss of trees. Turning a tree to paper requires more water than turning paper back into fiber, and many brands that use tree pulp use polluting chlorine-based bleach for greater whiteness. In addition, tissue made from recycled paper produces less waste tonnage — almost equaling its weight — that would otherwise go to a landfill."
And...
"Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say."
I swear, this will be our legacy to our kids. We've deforested our forests so that people can wipe their asses. And what is virgin paper? Well it comes from a virgin forest, otherwise known as an old growth forest.
Like this one:
or this one:
There are some useful definitions here for the kind of time it takes for a forest to become an "old growth forest." Think of it as a case gestalt in nature where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And just look at the effects of deforestation over time:
Not too much virgin forest left in this country, eh? Of course some re-growth has taken place but how do you replace thousand year old forests in a century? Well, you don't. And neither do you replace the lost diversity nor the lost ecosystems in each of these unique forests.
"Greenpeace, the international conservation organization, contends that Kimberly Clark, the maker of two popular brands, Cottonelle and Scott, has gotten as much as 22 percent of its pulp from producers who cut trees in Canadian boreal forests where some trees are 200 years old.
But Dave Dickson, a spokesman for Kimberly Clark, said that only 14 percent of the wood pulp used by the company came from the boreal forest and that the company contracted only with suppliers who used “certified sustainable forestry practices.”"
Oi. 14% or 22% -- isn't that still a bunch of pulp either way? When I worked in a university laboratory, we used a bunch of Kimberly Clark products like Kimwipes. You have no idea how much a research lab goes through in a year but it's a bunch. I'll do something to change this, but what can scientists do when their stockrooms only carry such products. We need a wholesale change in even the simplest things we buy for home and for work.
By the way, if you use Kimberly Clark products and want to express your concerns to them, Greenpeace has a nifty link for you:
Ask them not to blow away ancient forests on Kleenex. And to:
- Stop purchasing fiber from endangered forests;
- Drastically increase the amount of recycled fiber they use for all of their tissue products, including Kleenex brand toilet paper, facial tissue and napkins; and
- Buy all non-recycled fiber from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified forests to ensure it is produced in a responsible manner.
Kimberly Clark tried to get ahead of the curve here by issuing a new fiber policy. It's, how shall we say, impotent as it has:
- No safeguards for endangered forests, including the North American Boreal;
- No agreements to increase the use of recycled paper in Kleenex brand products; and
- No measurable commitment to Forest Stewardship Council certified fiber.
And what about the harmful chemicals in some of the name-brand products? Well, products bleached with chlorine compounds (including ECF-rated products) create super toxic chemicals known to cause cancer -- chloroform and dioxins, for example. Processed Chlorine-Free (PCF) or Totally Chlorine-Free (TCF) products don't produce these harmful by-products.
Paper in the ECF category has been bleached with a chlorine derivative (usually chlorine dioxide) but not with chlorine, whereas paper in the PCF or TCF categories has not been exposed to chlorine or its derivatives and has not been bleached. Chlorine (in the gaseous state) and its derivatives (for example, chlorine dioxide) are the most prevalent bleaching agents used in the paper industry today. Chlorine makes paper white. And when paper begins to yellow, chlorine can remove lignin -- the wood fiber that turns paper yellow when it is exposed to sunlight. Think of your newspaper here.
Chlorine derivatives can produce some pretty nasty chemicals, like chloroform, a known carcinogen. Chloroform gets released as a by-product in the bleaching process. Also, dioxins are formed in the bleaching of paper (also from burning PVC products and from volcanoes and forest fires). These are carcinogens too.
After referring to all these other toilet paper companies that do not stand up to the environmentally-friendly test, it's about time I plug a few companies that do stand up well.
Green Forest
I like their slogan:
Soft on Nature, Soft on You!
Whole Foods 365
The NRDC has suggests three things that you can do to help save forests
1 -- Buy paper products with recycled content -- especially post-consumer fibers.
Look for products that have a high recycled content, including high post-consumer content. Post-consumer fibers are recovered from paper that was previously used by consumers and would otherwise have been dumped into a landfill or an incinerator.
2 -- Buy paper products made with clean, safe processes.
Paper products are bleached to make them whiter and brighter, but chlorine used in many bleaching processes contributes to the formation of harmful chemicals that wind up in our air and water and are highly toxic to people and fish. Look for products labeled totally chlorine-free (TCF) or processed chlorine-free (PCF). In some cases, elemental chlorine-free (ECF) may be acceptable.
3 -- Tell tissue manufacturers to stop using virgin wood for throwaway products.
If a brand you buy for your home doesn't have any recycled content, contact the manufacturer (click here to send a message to paper giant Kimberly-Clark). Tell the company to use more recycled fibers, to avoid sourcing from ecologically valuable forests such as those in the Cumberland Plateau and Canadian boreal, and to ensure any virgin fibers used are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Saving forests also helps reduce global warming pollution.
Hey, I think I can do all that. How about you?
And, in the interests of full disclosure -- I work for neither Greenpeace nor the NRDC. I don't work for Green Forest nor do I work for Whole Foods (365 products). I do, however, love soft, fluffy toilet paper (admitted with the guiltiest look you can imagine).
Update:
tristan57 makes a good point here:
Here in north Florida, there is a tremendous cultivated pulp pine industry that has been devestated by cheap imports from South America. If one researches, after the depression, there were virtually no more virgin forests in north Florida because people weree operating at a subsistence level and wood = heat. Additionally, pine tress do not become 100 year old trees.
As for reforestation and stewardship of the natural resources, the north Fla pulp industry considers their pines an agricultural resource and replant all acreage harvested, often in conjunction with university researchers. Furthermore, cultivated pine forests contain 80% more trees than natural growth. There is a place for responsible logging.
Sure, there were reasons why large swaths of forest land were logged. And there is something to be said about responsible logging, in terms of decreasing wild fires and removing dead trees. And I'm not wholly against the cultivated pulp industry, especially now that some companies have stopped using chlorine chemicals in their processing.
My diary isn't so much an anti-logging statement as it is a statement about how we can start or continue to purchase recycled paper products in our daily lives, and how you can find more information about this little action we can all take to decrease the amount of pulp we actually need by using more recycled materials.