The toilet paper industry is one of Canada’s biggest climate offenders, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Photo: Anna Shvets/Pexels
What do you think about when you decide what toilet paper to buy? Price, roll size, measly one-ply or luxurious three-ply? Climate change may not be on your list of considerations, but it should be.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the toilet paper industry is one of Canada’s worst climate offenders.
In its latest toilet paper report, NRDC rated the environmental friendliness of 44 toilet paper brands, giving each product a grade from A+ to F. Among them, Who Gives a Crap, 100% Recycled, and Green Forest took first place, and occupied by Angel Soft and Charmin. Came out from behind with extremely low scores.
“Companies with the largest market share have the potential to make significant changes to the future of the world’s forests,” the authors write. “Instead, they are largely sticking to decades-old organizational recipes, with devastating consequences for forests.”
Charmin’s bad reviews were especially infuriating. Although Procter & Gamble (the maker of Charmin) shareholders decided in 2020 to determine how to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain, the company actually increased its consumption of Canadian forest fiber last year.
And it’s not just Canadian fiber: P&G uses climate-sensitive forests like Canada’s boreal forest to make its products.
Canada’s boreal forests are considered an important global carbon sink, accounting for 25% of the Earth’s remaining intact forests. It contains twice as much carbon as the world’s oil reserves.
However, over-logging and other human interference have led to the continued depletion of this precious resource, so much so that these forests now release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they absorb.
The logging industry alone is responsible for emitting 5 tons of carbon dioxide per year for every Canadian—twice what all our cars and trucks emit.
Much of the demand for this recording fiber comes from the tissue paper industry. According to the NRDC, the average American household uses three rolls of toilet paper per week or 100 pounds of toilet paper per year.
Canadian boreal wood is the primary source of northern bleached softwood kraft (NBSK), the preferred softwood pulp in the United States for tissue products.
“As the climate crisis worsens, it is even more untenable that the toilet paper industry continues to rely on the destructive tree-to-toilet pipeline,” said Shelley Vinyard, NRDC’s Northern Corporate Campaigns Manager. “Major companies like P&G must begin to respond to the pressure and acknowledge their larger role in the climate emergency.”
As with cars, straws and disposable shopping bags, the responsibility and cost of making environmentally friendly choices falls primarily on the consumer.
The report highlights alternatives to wood-to-toilet pipes such as bamboo and recycled products. There are plenty of options if you’re willing to look.
“Finally, companies large and small are providing toilet paper that doesn’t wash our forests down the drain,” Vinyerd said. “Now is the time for lagging companies like P&G to catch up with rapidly changing market trends.”
Thank you for this informative article. I usually buy recycled toilet paper, but since the pandemic started I haven’t been able to find any. Why? I also used bamboo toilet paper. But now I have to buy regular non-recyclable materials.
If you’ve been to the East, and perhaps other parts of the world, you may have come across an alternative that can significantly reduce your toilet paper consumption: a device of many names designed for washing rather than wiping, in the article “Known as ” shattaf, toilet shower or bidet spray,” or more simply, “butt gun,” was reported several times on CBC in the early days of the pandemic: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.55 10629
We’ve been to Nepal many times – we were slow to accept, but now we have stray guns in all our toilets. Sprayers cost around $40–$100; they’re a lot cheaper than fancy bidets, and no, short bursts of cold water seem less temperature sensitive! Once dry, a minimal amount of TP can be used, which will save a lot of trees. Try it – you’ll wonder why you waited so long!
Guys, this may seem radical, but toilet paper is not a necessity. This is a relatively new thing. The fabric works great and can be rinsed/washed with hand washing. Again, this works well without paper towels or paper towels. Imagine. . .
In fact, if a person eats wisely, he does not need much TP. In Middle Eastern cultures, toilet paper is used to dry and then clean with water from a can (such as a plastic houseplant watering can with a shorter spout). When I was growing up, many families used old newspapers, magazines and mail-order catalogs for this purpose. They take longer to decompose, making it more difficult to avoid strong foul odors. Large families replaced toilets by adding lye to part of the building and lime to the “hole”. But TP consists of very short fibers, so it breaks easily. This is a natural fit for parts of wood that can’t be used for wood, or for terrible, toxic, constantly off-gassing particleboard/”wood products”.
“According to NRDC, the average American household uses three rolls of toilet paper per week, or 100 pounds of toilet paper per year.”
So which one is it? 3 rolls a week is 100 pounds. One year? Because the numbers don’t add up. 3 volumes per week, that is, 156 volumes per year. I recently purchased an unopened pack of 30 rolls and weighed it: 6 lbs or 0.2 lbs per roll. 3 rolls per week is 31.2 pounds. TP/rev. Please note that this is a Canadian made TP.
I grew up in a “wood town.” Once trees are cut down, they are “knocked down”…trimmed to a manageable length. Then they were loaded onto trucks and rolled into ponds, where they were then pushed one by one onto a conveyor belt using gang saws, which cut them into huge longitudinal slices the diameter of a tree, like a loaf of sandwich bread. . They are then folded to dry or placed in the oven, then trimmed and planed: the surface is relatively smooth, and the dimensions are familiar to us all. The remaining waste and planed edges go into the shredder and are used to produce wood pulp. Debris that is too small is removed and ends up in the burner, which was once common in small northern towns. The factory keeps combustion volumes to a minimum because everything that goes into the plant is already included. Toilet paper is made from fragments of short fibers: little things. Best quality wood chips, larger wood chips (still should be fine enough) for good quality paper. Layer on the outside of the nacho box. I expect the average family to buy far more trees for cornflakes and kraft paper dinners than for wiping asses. (The ends of the roll face out: this makes it easier to use. Exception: when there are small children in the house, the roll goes in the opposite direction.)
This was before all the small operators were forced out of logging operations allocated by the government to large foreign companies. Before this, trees in the bushes were felled by pairs of lumberjacks, men with chainsaws, and there was no talk of cutting down every growing tree. Why are they doing that? They are paid to cut down trees that produce good quality lumber. Not a half-grown tree.
If the problem is the destruction of boreal forests as carbon sinks, then the solution is not convincing toilet paper manufacturers to become more efficient. The solution is for the government to stop issuing licenses to logging companies. As supplies of raw materials become tighter and more expensive, tissue manufacturers will be forced to become more efficient.
Post time: May-31-2024