Reel Change

Like most paper products, traditional toilet paper and paper towels are made from wood fiber. Harvesting that wood fiber means cutting down trees—lots and lots and lots of trees. 

Traditional toilet paper production alone destroys as many as 27,000 trees per day,which equals nearly 10,000,000 trees per year. A healthy forest has around 50 trees per acre, which translates to roughly 200,000 acres of trees per year lost. That’s an area the size of New York City (Manhattan and all other boroughs combined) lost. Every. Single. Year.

While deforestation leads to a whole host of issues, we want to focus on how it contributes to climate change. Here’s the problem, in brief: 

Through photosynthesis, plants—especially trees—sequester (i.e., remove) carbon dioxide from the air, storing it inside themselves and the surrounding soil.

When trees are cut down, the carbon they’ve sequestered is released into the air—also known as carbon emissions.

Carbon emissions are concerning because carbon dioxide is what’s known as a greenhouse gas. CO2 traps heat in the lower atmosphere, raising temperatures and fundamentally changing climates worldwide.

The more trees we cut down, the less carbon they’re able to sequester—and the more carbon they’re releasing back into the atmosphere, creating a devastating double whammy effect. 

At this point, you might be wondering, “Aren’t trees a renewable resource? Can’t we just plant more?” Well, they are, and we can, but there are a couple of caveats: time and space. Once planted, it can take up to 100 years for a tree to reach maturity. For replanting to be a viable solution to deforestation, forests would have to grow at the same rate we’re consuming them—and that math just doesn’t work out. 

Even if time weren’t a factor, we’d still be up against the limits of physical space. It’s not as though we’re sitting on millions of acres of unused land that we could be planting trees on. We have a finite amount of space on this planet, and we can’t create significantly more room for trees without repurposing land that’s already serving a different function. And that problem is getting worse by the day as we continue to level forests to make room for human settlements and livestock. 

That brings us to the topic of reusability. Some things made from wood can serve a valuable purpose for years, decades, or even centuries—think buildings and furniture. Others, like printer paper, might have much shorter functional life spans—only being“used” once—but they can be recycled. Then we have what is known as single-use products—like toilet paper and paper towels.

For various reasons, toilet paper and paper towels can’t be recycled. They’re used once and then flushed down the toilet or thrown in the trash, never getting the chance to serve any other purpose. And that’s the real tragedy here; for all its hygiene and convenience benefits, traditional toilet paper is an incredibly inefficient—almost wasteful—use of a precious natural resource.

Traditional toilet paper and paper towels’ excessive use of wood isn’t the only issue to be addressed. Among other concerns, we must consider the impact that shipping and transporting such a high-volume product has on the environment (more on that later). And then there’s the packaging. 

Many of the products we purchase on an everyday basis—including traditional toilet paper and paper towels—come wrapped in clear plastic. Companies do this for several reasons: it’s cheap to produce, keeps products clean, and allows consumers to see what they’re buying. Unfortunately, while plastic can be created quickly, it takes a very long time to decompose—potentially over 500 years.

And while most plastic is technically recyclable, the transparent plastic film most toilet paper and paper towels come wrapped in isn’t accepted by most curbside recycling services; it has to be dropped off at a separate location, like a grocery store. As a result, only an estimated 2% of plastic film is recycled. Instead, it ends up in landfills—or in our oceans—where it sits for the vast majority of its very, very long life, creating a whole host of ecological problems.