We are all familiar with the adorable bears in Charmin toilet paper advertisements aired on TV. Our bathrooms are filled with tushie approved products, guaranteed to feel as soft as a cloud. The demand for great toilet paper in America is overwhelming. We all want to wipe comfortably in the comfort of our own homes.
What we don’t know is the paper we chose to buy affects our ecosystems greatly. Products like Charmin, Costco Kirkland Toilet Paper and Angel Soft are destroying the planet. These brands use 100% virgin forest fiber to make the products we inevitably flush away.
According to the article “The Issue with Tissue” published by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), industrial logging is responsible for destroying millions of acres of boreal forests each year to meet the demand of America’s need for tissue products.
Boreal forests are biomes that grow higher in latitude and are full of spruce and evergreen trees, according to the International Boreal Forest Research Association. Boreal forests we are most familiar with are in Canada.
These boreal forests are harvested to make toiletry products, primarily in Canada.
Between 1996 and 2015, companies have logged more than 28 million acres of Canada’s boreal forest, according to NRDC. This not only affects wildlife and Canada’s ecosystems but it also affects indigenous communities and climate change.
Production begins in boreal forests. The trees are logged, clearcutting trees to the stump, sent to a high-polluting pulp mill and then shipped globally. Arriving to supermarkets for customers, these products end up being flushed, emitting additional carbon.
We are in big trouble if we continue to log these forests as fast as we are today. We log the equivalent of seven National Hockey League rinks each minute according, to NRDC. The affects of carbon contribution are three times as much from creating 100 % virgin fiber products than
other types of pulp according to “The Issue with Tissue” by the NRDC. If anyone is like me, this information comes as a shock. Many of us don’t know the way our paper is made nor the environmental costs. Growing up in Idaho, another evergreen rich area, I am used to seeing spruce trees wherever I go. It comes as a big shock to realize I am contributing to this big problem. I can’t imagine what my area would look like without boreal forests nor what the destruction of these forests looks like.
Luckily, we are not too late and there are better ways we can take to fix the problem. The number one way NRDC said is for companies to own up to their environmental impact and stop making toilet paper from virgin pulp. There are other sustainable fibers that we can be using to make tissue paper. Products made from recycled paper, bamboo and wheat straw pulp have a lot less of an environmental impact than 100% virgin fiber.
We can help the state of our planet by researching and being careful about the products we are supporting.
Be cautious about the products we flush down the toilet, because our Earth may be in the same state.
Emily Pearce can be reached at [email protected].