Saving trees or softer touch for the butt?

It seems that this is the question consumers have to ask themselves if they're considering using toilet paper made of 100% recycled paper. You can guess the answer most of us will give..

The New York Times had an interesting article today on Marcal Small Steps, a company that is selling for 60 years toilet paper that as they say is made 'from paper, not from trees'.

They have now a new marketing campaign and it seems that they're doing well - in any case, much better than the market in general. But they still have a very small market share in paper product categories ("low single digits"). The reason? Their products are not soft enough for the American consumer.

There is some trade-off here and no matter what the reason is (Darby Hoover of NRDC suggest it's "decades of advertising promoting softness"), most of the consumers will prefer to wipe their tooshie with a softer paper even if it comes on the account of trees. Trade-off has always been an obstacle in the efforts to green up consumers' behavior. It is very unfortunate, but we have to face reality and think what can be done to get more green paper products purchased.

Right now, according to NRDC, just 10% of the paper products for home contain recycled content. This is very low. Too low. Some companies look for middle ground, like Kimberly-Clark (remember their new relationship / partnership with Greenpeace?) that is selling Scott Naturals’ products, which are "only partly made of recycled content, with the toilet paper using the least at 40 percent and napkins the most at 80 percent."

Aric Melzl, senior brand manager for Scott explained on the article that “you can have a product that’s 100 percent recycled with a smaller following or you can have Scott Naturals, where you choose to deliver the quality that folks are expecting with more mass appeal and a bigger business and more impact on the environment than a business that has a smaller following."

He definitely has a point and this is a good way to convert consumers gradually to use greener products, but this is still a partial solution. The other part that I'm missing here is innovation - Can't we really find a way to make sure there won't be any trade-off at all?

I mean, in a day like this, when we are so happy to see the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners, you wonder how we know can save miners captured 2,000 feet below the ground, but have no idea how to make toilet paper from recycled paper that will be soft enough for the American tooshie? (by the way, does anyone know what toilet paper the miners used on the last 69 days?)

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Greenpeace did it! Kimberly Clark is going green!

They did it again! We barely finished reading the news about their success to move Timebrland, Nike and Adidas to cease using leather imported from cattle raised on former Amazon rainforest lands, and we got another update from Greenpeace. This time it's about Kimberly-Clark and it's even more shocking.

So here is the update we just got over the email from Greenpeace:

Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex, Scott and Cottonelle brands, today announced stronger fiber sourcing standards that will increase conservation of forests globally and will make the company a leader for sustainably produced tissue products. In turn, Greenpeace, which worked with Kimberly-Clark on its revised standards, announced that it will end its "Kleercut" campaign, which focused on the company and its brands.

Kimberly-Clark has set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the company's wood fiber for tissue products, including the Kleenex brand, from environmentally responsible sources. The revised standards will enhance the protection of Endangered Forests and increase the use of both Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified fiber and recycled fiber.

By 2011, Kimberly-Clark will ensure that 40 percent of its North American tissue fiber is either recycled or FSC certified -- a 71 percent increase from 2007 levels that represents 600,000 tones of fiber.

Also by the end of 2011, Kimberly-Clark will eliminate the purchase of any fiber from the Canadian Boreal Forest that is not FSC certified. This forest is North America's largest old growth forest, providing habitat for threatened wildlife such as woodland caribou and a sanctuary for more than one billion migratory birds. It is also the largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon on the planet, storing the equivalent of 27 years worth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Furthermore, the revised standards reinforce Kimberly-Clark's long-standing ban on use of wood fiber from illegal sources; adds a preference for post-consumer recycled fiber; and supports expansion of recycling initiatives and the identification, mapping and protection of areas that have the potential to be designated as Endangered or High Conservation Value forests.

Kudos to Greenpeace! They started Kleercut campaign in 2004 and they did a great work in educating consumers and providing the facts, as well as the alternatives as we reported last February when they released their Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide..

Congrats also to Kimberly-Clark. I know these changes are not easy, but I am positive they will find eventually how you can actually do very well by doing good and how this move will not only protect the environment in general and ancient forests specifically, but will also assist them to generate more sales and revenues.

And last but not least - I love the guys in Greenpeace not only because they know how to make missions impossible possible, but also because they have great sense of humor. Check out this video showing how they're trying to figure out their new relationship with Kimberly-Clark.



Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: promoting green printing!

Trees of soft toilet paper - what do you choose?

How green is your toilet paper? not sure? here's the guide that will give you the answers: Greenpeace has just released on Monday its latest Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide.

The report is providing customers with important information about tissue products and toilet paper using 3 criteria: usage of 100% recycled paper, at least 50% post consumer recycled paper and bleached without toxic chlorine compounds.

Each category includes ranking of brands, where products that meet 3 criteria are recommended, products that meet 2 criteria are defined as "can do better" and products that meet only one or no criteria at all are "to be avoided".

Let's focus for a minute on toilet paper, the most popular product among the ones reviewed in this report. The brand in the first place is Green Forest, which uses 100 percent recycled and 90 percent post-consumer content, as well as chlorine-free manufacturing processes. Other brands that are also recommended are: 365, Natural Value and Seventh Generation.

And who's to be avoided? well, when it comes to toilet paper you will find there few familiar names: Scott, Target, Wal-Mart, Kleenex Cottonelle, Chramin, Quilted Northern and Angel Soft. According to the report they all use zero recycled paper (and of course zero post consumer content) and are bleached with chlorine compounds [just take into consideration the follwoing comment from Greenpeace: In the few cases where companies did not respond to our request for verification of recycled content percentages and whitening processes used, we assumed 0% overall recycled, 0% post-consumer recycled and ECF bleaching.]

The report is followed by a very interesting article in the New York Times ("Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests" by Leslie Kaufman), where I learned the astonishing fact that "tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands."

Why? well, according the article the main reason that toilet paper made of recycled paper is not as soft as toilet paper that is made of trees. Actually the article explains "it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them."

In other places around the globe the situation is in some way better and in Europe and Latin America, products with recycled content make up about on average 20 percent of the at-home market.

The price for the American's love for softness is very high - the article brings another devastating fact: "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...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."

And it doesn't end with trees - there are the water and energy required in the process of turning a tree into rolls of toilet paper, and there's also the polluting chlorine-based bleach process used to achieve greater whiteness.

Who's to blame? well, Kimberly-Clark, which says it's the American consumer who "like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides". I wounder if these consumers would make the same choice if they knew that for example 14 percent of the wood pulp used by Kimberly-Clark came from the Boreal forest in Canada.

The answer unfortunately is that in this case we cannot count on the consumer nor on the companies who make huge profits out of these soft papers (An article in the Guardian states that "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.").

Even if consumers in the U.S. will become more aware of their toilet paper's footprint and choose to buy more recycled paper, my guestimation is that recycled paper usage will be no higher than in Europe (20%). And that's the optimistic scenario.

So what's the solution? in one word: regulation. We need global and local regulation that will ban first and foremost the use of ancient forests for manufacturing tissue products. We also need regulation that will put a price tag on the environmental damages made here, so when you buy toilet paper, you will pay their real price and not a price that ignores the environmental costs. Only this way a real change can be achieved. It's the same with plastic bags and with many other bad habits we have. Voluntary steps just don't do enough or do too little and we can't afford too many years of this softness obsession to keep going on. We just can't.

I'll be happy to hear more ideas and thoughts how to end American's obsession to soft toilet paper. Please add your comment!

Link to Greenpeace's guide: http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/usa/press-center/reports4/tissueguide.pdf

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris
www.ecolibris.net