If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that Britons love loo roll: judging by shelf shortages, it was hard to tell what panicked us more – catching Covid-19 or having nothing soft to wipe our bums with. But if we don’t start changing our consumer habits pronto, and become more mindful, we’ll be facing something worse than toilet roll shortages.
According to the eco loo roll brand Who Gives A Crap, 700m trees are felled annually to help us keep our bottoms clean, releasing gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere and destroying the natural habitats of millions of species. As part of a drive to counter the destruction, the EU has introduced legislation to ban the sale of products linked to deforestation, such as wood, coffee, palm oil and soya.
Toilet roll, which has been the death of so many trees, is an urgent target for C02 reduction.
Here in the UK, there are simple actions we can take today, not least switching to a more sustainable and ethical toilet roll. The Toilet Paper Sustainability Report (pdf) commissioned by Who Gives A Crap, points out that more than 700m healthy trees are felled annually to produce toilet paper – that’s more than 1.9m a day.
With logging and land conversion continuing at an alarming rate, you probably don’t need a one-to-one with Greta Thunberg to understand the devastating impact such trends will have if left unchecked. Deforestation not only releases vast amounts of carbon into the air, it wrecks the habitats of species essential to the planet’s biodiversity.
Currently, there are two alternatives to toilet paper made from virgin wood pulp: recycled toilet paper and bamboo.
If the words “recycled toilet paper” are making your stomach turn a bit, don’t worry, it’s not literally recycled from previously used flushed loo roll. It’s made from material that would otherwise be considered waste – such as office paper and old books – which is sanitised, bleached and made into paper stock. This production process halves the hazardous air pollutants (pdf) and uses half the water of virgin pulp. However, when the Ethical Consumer website surveyed the most-used toilet paper brands, only five offered a recycled range.
On first glance, producing toilet paper from bamboo might seem no different to any other virgin source. However, unlike trees – which take many years to grow back – bamboo is a type of grass, and one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It is so versatile and flexible it’s now used to make an ever-expanding number of products, which prize softness as a sales component, such as sheets, bath robes and towels.
The research (pdf) conducted for Who Gives A Crap suggests that if for just one day only every Brit switched over to bamboo or recycled toilet paper, that could save 33,330 trees from being cut down (that’s about 10 times the number of trees in London’s Hyde Park).
It’s important not to ignore the real-world consequences of what may seem like minor purchasing decisions. Just as anyone who switched to buying free-range eggs after learning about the conditions in which battery hens must live, it’s worth Googling the “Canadian Boreal Forest” when contemplating a switch to recycled loo paper. It currently remains the largest intact forest in the world, home to 600 Indigenous communities and billions of migratory birds but worryingly, many major US toilet roll brands are sourcing virgin pulp from precisely this source.
“We’re flushing one of our most precious resources down the toilet,” says Simon Griffiths, who co-founded Who Gives A Crap in 2012 after learning that more than 2 billion people in the world don’t use loo roll at all because they have no access to a toilet. This has a devastating impact on human beings: one child dies every two minutes from diarrhoea-related diseases caused by poor water and sanitation. (Who Gives A Crap now donates 50% of its profits to help communities in the developing world.)
“Even some of the most dedicated eco-warriors massively underestimate the impact traditional toilet paper production has on our forests … These statistics are pretty depressing but we all have the power to change them,” says Griffiths.
Britons are more than capable of changing their purchasing habits when it comes to bottom-wiping materials. According to the Wellcome Collection, the British used to be so addicted to hard, scratchy toilet paper, that as late as 1970 the civil service considered soft modern-style tissue an “American craze” and so flimsy and likely to tear that it posed a risk to public health. (This is why toilet paper in school bathrooms was like tracing paper until comparatively recently.) It was ordinary British consumers – rather than government policy – who converted British habits to a luxury, three-ply experience.
And seeing as we like to feel something cushiony on our bums, what does recycled and bamboo toilet paper actually feel like? Well if you have an incredibly discerning bum you might notice it feels a tad different from regular loo roll, but it’s fair to say they all feel pretty much the same, although the bamboo sheets are softer than the 100% recycled ones.
We may not lead the world in much these days, but we’re still a top nation when it comes to flushing bog roll down the crapper – the average Brit uses 127 rolls a year, falling behind only to Americans (141 rolls), Portuguese (137) and Germans (134). Ultimately, if there’s any lesson to be learned from the British love of loo roll, it’s surely this: we need to think more about the precious resources we’re flushing away if we’re to make the world a better place.
Shop for Who Gives A Crap’s 100% recycled or bamboo toilet paper today
