Luxury loo paper can damage environment
February 23rd 2009
Green campaigners, reports The Guardian, are pointing the finger at Americans who insist on using extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom. The campaigners claim that luxury products are even more detrimental than cars, fast food or huge houses.
"This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council. "Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution."
Producing toilet paper has a significant impact because of the chemicals used in pulp manufacture and the need to cut down forests. More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, according to Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper is from recycled products. In February Greenpeace launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.
"We have this myth in the US that recycled is just so low quality, it's like cardboard and is impossible to use," says Lindsey Allen, the forestry campaigner of Greenpeace.
The campaigning group says it produced the guide to counter an aggressive marketing push by the big paper product makers in which celebrities talk about the comforts of luxury brands of toilet paper and tissue. It's claimed brands which put quilting and pockets of air between several layers of paper, are especially damaging to the environment.
Paper manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark have identified luxury brands such as three-ply tissues or tissues infused with hand lotion as the fastest-growing market share in a highly competitive industry. The New York Times reported a 40% rise in sales of luxury brands of toilet paper in 2008. Paper companies are anxious to keep those percentages up, even as the recession bites. And Reuters reported that Kimberly-Clark spent $25m in its third quarter on advertising to persuade Americans against trusting their bottoms to cheaper brands.
But Kimberly-Clark, which touts its green credentials on its website, rejects the idea that it is pushing destructive products on an unwitting American public. Dave Dixon, a company spokesman, says recycled tissue products had been on the market for years, and if Americans wanted to buy them, they could. "For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides," Dixon says. "It's the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect." Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue. Dixon said the company used products from sustainably farmed forests in Canada.
"I really do think it is overwhelmingly an American phenomenom," says Hershkowitz. "People just don't understand that softness equals ecological destruction." More articles from Cleaning Matters: | 
