Soft Paper and Environment
The soft toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old.
From The Washington Post
Photo by Galina Toktalieva
Old trees cut down for the briefest and most undignified of ends. It’s a menace, environmental groups say. They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper. Big toilet-paper makers say that they’ve taken steps to become more Earth-friendly but that their customers still want the soft stuff, so they’re still selling it. This summer, two of the best-known combatants in this fight signed a surprising truce, with a big tissue maker promising to do better. Should we contribute to clear-cutting and deforestation because the big marketing machine has told me that softness is important? Toilet paper is far from being the biggest threat to the world’s forests: together with facial tissue, it accounts for 5 percent of the U.S. forest-products industry, according to industry figures. Paper and cardboard packaging makes up 26 percent of the industry, although more than half is made from recycled products. Newspapers account for 3 percent. But environmentalists say 5 percent is still too much.
Felling these trees removes a valuable scrubber of carbon dioxide, they say. If the trees come from “farms” in places such as Brazil, Indonesia or the south of United States, natural forests are being displaced. If they come from Canada’s forested north – a major source of imported wood pulp – ecosystems valuable to bears, caribou and migratory birds are being damaged.
The reason for this fight lies in toilet-paper engineering. Each sheet is a web of wood fibers, and fibers from old trees are longer, which produces a smoother and more supple web. Fibers made from recycled paper — in this case magazines, newspapers or computer printouts – are shorter.
So, when toilet paper is made for the “away from home” market, the no-choice bathrooms in restaurants, offices and schools, manufacturers use recycled fiber about 75 percent of the time.
But for the “at home” market, the paper customers buy for themselves, 5 percent at most is fully recycled. The rest is mostly or totally “virgin” fiber, taken from newly cut trees.
Big tissue makers say they’ve tried to make their products as green as possible, including by buying more wood pulp from forest operations certified as sustainable.
But despite environmentalists’ concerns, they say customers are unwavering in their desire for the softest paper possible.
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