To TP or not to TP

Recently I've heard a number of people discussing the issue of toilet paper in both serious and commedic ways, and I thought I would weigh in on the issue. Toilet paper is an interesting topic because it is something that goes right to the core of what we mean by sustainability. As an aside, when I studied abroad in Beijing, I got to experience something I'd never seen before: a sewage system that couldn't handle toilet paper. While this may seem strange to Americans, in much of the rest of the world sewage systems are older and narrower, meaning the pipes clog easily. Everyone simply has a waste basket next to the toilet. When you've finished, you drop the paper into the waste basket (it has a lid) and go on your merry way. If you're like the average American, you are cringing in horror right now, but them's the breaks for most of the rest of the world. We should be thinking about what it means that we flush paper on a daily basis, and if being green means doing the french thing and installing bidet style toilet seats (These things are actually kind of nifty, although I still don't know if I'm comfortable with the idea), then frog me up, its time to change behavior.

That said, because we live in America, we have a sewage system that is built around handling large quantities of paper being flushed. If we want to continue using toilet paper, we need to be taking into consideration where our toilet paper comes from. The most popular brands of toilet paper sell extremely fluffy, soft paper for the bathroom. As it turns out, to get this consistency you generally have to use large, old trees to create your paper pulp, because the fibers in young trees are too short to get enough fluffiness. That means that most toilet paper comes from old trees, often specifically from old growth Canandian forrests which are being clear cut at an alarming rate. Our bottoms' sensitivity, it turns out, has a serious carbon impact. These forrests aren't being replenished, and what we are essentially doing is taking a large carbon storage system (a tree) and turning it into other materials (paper, wood products, firewood, etc). Because the tree is gone, it has ceased absorbing carbon. Because the trees that are clearcut aren't replenished, all that carbon is gradually making its way back into the environment as the products created out of the tree decompose or are burned. Toilet paper (and magazines and calogues and numerous other products people use on a daily basis) is really a product of severely underregulated deforrestation in Canada.

As a result of this problem it is importan to find toilet papers that use sustainable resources to produce their paper. One of the most reliable ways to ensure your toilet paper (which you are about to throw away moments after using) is less harmful is to purchase a toilet paper made of recycled paper. Recycled paper is often less bouncy and soft than the clear cut old growth tree brands, but I find a few moments of comfort aren't worth the toll being placed on our environment by the other option. Greenpeace did a wonderful job of collecting information on the sourcing for a large number of toilet paper companies and managed to compile a list of papers that are best for the environment.

This does bring one issue up that I'd like to address: the impact of recycling. Recycling products is often a messy process, and in the case of paper recycling, there are carbon emissions, water pollution, air pollution, and in the end, a lower quality product. People often point to this problem, then reference the fact that the United States largely requires all logging operations to be self sustaining, and indicate that paper recycling has no place in the current system. This couldnt be further from the truth. While ideally a system where all paper was produced sustainably through responsible forestry would work well, we are stuck in an environment where a substantial quantity of our paper products are imported from places with no such policing of forrests. Because of this, we should be recycling as much of our domestic paper supply as possible while simultaneously importing as little paper as possible. Paper that can't be recycled (or even some of the paper that can, depending on demand) should be composted to avoid filling up pointless landfills.

All of this is important, because even little thigns can have a major impact on the world around you, and it may be that pampering yourself is doing irreperable harm to the world and to the Canadian boreal forrests as a whole.