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Flushing Our Planet Down The Toilet
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 07/29/2010 - 08:00
The A Lot To Say Guest Blog – Giving a voice to important issues and encouraging positive change
“Every day, about 270,000 trees are flushed down the drain or end up as garbage all over the world.”
I found this frightening statistic on the WWF website and it really made me stop and think. For obvious reasons, tissue products such as toilet paper, kitchen towels and napkins cannot be recycled after they have been used. But given this reality, what can we as consumers do to reduce the environmental impact of our purchasing decisions?
According to Greenpeace, Americans alone could save more than 400,000 trees if each family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper – just one time. Imagine the savings if you then increased that figure to include the whole of Europe, and changed the number of rolls bought from one roll to every single roll we purchased from this day forward - the impact would be ENORMOUS!
Unfortunately, at present in the United States; the largest market worldwide for toilet paper, only 2% of all sales of toilet paper for at-home use are made from 100% recycled fibers. In fact, much of the paper used for producing tissue products in the US comes from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, and from the last remaining virgin North American forests – which are irreplaceable habitats for a variety of endangered species.
This feels like such a no-brainer to me. Whilst in the past buying recycled toilet paper might have meant compromising on quality or comfort, today a number of high profile brands have adopted much greener practices, and we should be rewarding them for their efforts. There are a number of online guides that both Greenpeace and WWF have provided on tissue manufacturers to help you select the best ones, but in summary, the three key rules seem to be:
- The tissues should be made from 100% recycled content
- The tissues should be made up of at least 50% post-consumer recycled content
- The tissues should be bleached without toxic chlorine compounds*
*As a rule of thumb, try and avoid buying the whitest product, as according to WWF, these either contain higher levels of virgin fibers in the paper or have a more concentrated bleaching process – both of which are bad for the planet.
In the long-run though, we will need to turn our creativity to finding more sustainable solutions than using toilet paper; recycled or not. Whilst bidets certainly have their merits (the water used to wash being more than offset by the amount of water used in the production process for toilet paper), one Japanese company has looked for a way to turn old office paper into recycled toilet paper…in the office! Whilst radical solutions such as these might not be the most practical choices for the future (the paper doesn’t look particularly soft either!) hopefully they will inspire our thinking to come up with lasting and positive solutions that are good for people and planet.
Because the inevitable truth for all human beings is that sometimes, nature calls. Our mission then must be to find ways to ensure that nature doesn’t suffer unnecessarily when we answer…
Guest blogger: Tom Crawford is a communications strategist at Clownfish – A global sustainability communications agency
Water conservation also forms a key part of A Lot to Say’s environmental policy. By not using any water as part of their printing process, the brand is able to save millions of gallons of water every year (as well as avoiding flushing any harmful chemicals and toxins into the local water supply). To check out the brand’s latest collections, which are as stylish as they are ethically sound, visit the online shop - with at least 20% of the proceeds being donated to environmental charities.
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