America's Love Affair with Really Soft Toilet Paper Is Causing an Environmental Catastrophe

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted February 27, 2009.

Still, trees and tree quality remain a contentious issue. 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.

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.

There are solutions. As Graham Hill says in the Huffington Post, “Shouldn't we take a hint from Islamic culture and ask ourselves, ‘If there's **it anywhere on our body would we prefer to wipe it away with paper or wash it off with water?'”

And if that route won't work. Hill has another idea -- government action.

Instead of waiting decades for carbon-soaking forests to stop being decimated by our need for t.p., this is an area where the government should step in. Someone needs to step up and tell us that next year or in two years or three, all toilet tissue will be 20 percent recycled fibers (for example).

Yes, Kimberly-Clark will scream and cry, and yes, it seems like a somewhat trivial matter. Yet enforced cultural change is hard. We keep buying the soft stuff that strips the forests because it's there on the shelf. So this might not be the place where we can afford to wait for every last human consumer to decide that recycled t.p. is okay. We need the forests and their CO2 absorption now.

So instead of letting demand drive forest decimation, let's get Euro and demand manufacturers put increasing amounts of recycled fiber into their squares. If we did I'll just bet they'll find another technique to eventually give us soft and recycled. In the meantime we all suffer the relative indignity of the new rough and tough toilet paper era together.

It's all a matter of perspective really. Sure, soft toilet paper may be a sweet luxury you don't want to part with, but I'll take an old-growth forest any day and the possibility that rising seas might not actually wipe out my coastal abode.

See more stories tagged with: greenpeace, toilet paper

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

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