
By Patrick Rogers
In the U.S., we consume more than 15 billion pounds of tissue each year—more than 50 pounds per person. It's taking a major toll on forests like the Canadian boreal.
Few people give much thought to how their toilet paper is made. And to be fair, there's nothing particularly engaging in the backstory of this industrially produced, single-use paper product. But it's important to remember that many toilet paper products equal trees—and we flush them down the drain at an alarming rate. Each year, vast swaths of forest are logged to produce the wood pulp that gets turned into toilet paper, with the final product chemically bleached to whiten and soften.
In fact, tissue products—facial tissues, paper towels, napkins, and toilet paper—are the fastest-growing sector of the international paper industry, with production forecast to rise by 6 percent annually through 2022. In the U.S., we consume more than 15 billion pounds of tissue each year. That means we currently buy, use, and flush about 20 percent of the world's supply of tissue products, even though we account for just over 4 percent of the world's population.
To see the devastating impact of this market, U.S. consumers need only look north of the Canadian border to the great boreal forest that rings the continent in green, which is being felled at an alarming rate, in part to satisfy the global appetite for tissue. Logging crews mostly clear-cut 28 million acres of woodland between 1996 and 2015, an area roughly the size of Ohio, according to NRDC's report The Issue With Tissue: How Americans Are Flushing Our Forests Down the Toilet.
This logging destroys and degrades wildlife habitat, threatens the lands and way of life of indigenous peoples, and robs the planet of one of its most important defenses against climate change. "The boreal is a massive storehouse of carbon that has accumulated in its soils and vegetation over millennia," said the report's author, Jennifer Skene, an environmental law fellow in NRDC's International Program. "When it is released because of logging, it has devastating ramifications for global efforts to mitigate climate change."
Only by using alternatives to tissue products made with virgin wood pulp can we begin to reverse the destruction of the Canadian boreal and other forests, Skene said, who points out that "Many people are not aware of the toll tissue takes on our forests." Here's how you can be part of the solution.
Shop for Sustainability
Fortunately, there are plenty of competitively priced varieties of tissue with minimal impact on forests. The Issue With Tissue report's scorecard assigns grades to all the major brands of toilet paper, paper towels and facial tissues, as well as popular house brands at leading supermarkets and brands that have adopted more sustainable practices.
Leading the scoreboard are six products — Green Forest, 365 Everyday Value 100% Recycled, Earth First, Natural Value, Seventh Generation and Trader Joe's Bath Tissue — that are made entirely of recycled material and use a chlorine-free bleaching process that does less harm to the environment than other methods. Grades of A go to toilet papers that contain the most postconsumer recycled content; this means that most of their materials have already been processed once and therefore reduce waste. (The alternative, preconsumer recycled content, is largely scrap and excess raw material collected during the manufacturing process. While it is far preferable to virgin forest fiber, it does less to offset waste than postconsumer recycled content.) The brands that get an A "have looked into the impact of their products and are embracing alternative materials that will allow us to continue using tissue products with a fraction of the environmental cost," Skene said.
Think Twice Before Buying These Products
Brands that get an F in the scorecard — including Charmin Ultra, Angel Soft, Quilted Northern and Up & Up Soft & Strong — rely entirely on virgin forest fiber for their products. These tissue products have three times the carbon footprint of those made from recycled paper; many also use dangerous bleaching processes. You may notice that the label "FSC certified" appears on some of these brands. While the Forest Stewardship Council is the world's most creditable independent certifier of responsibly managed forests and provides an important set of standards for products that require the use of wood (like lumber), there is no reason tissue products should be made from trees in the first place, Skene said.
Give Your Household Tissue Use More Consideration
Next time you reach for a package of facial tissue at the supermarket, visualize a majestic evergreen spruce or fir in the forest. "Something that we use once and throw away should not be destroying a vital part of our earth," said Shelley Vinyard, who oversees NRDC's work encouraging corporations to establish stronger protections for Canada's boreal forest. In the bathroom, use paper tissue products with reusable materials that get the job done. Keep rags beside your sink and use them as much as possible instead of paper towels. Replace paper napkins with cloth versions, and instead of one-and-done facial tissues, rely on handkerchiefs and washcloths that can be laundered and reused indefinitely.
Demand Accountability
Despite the steady degradation of the boreal forest, the leading tissue brands stubbornly maintain a business-as-usual approach to the manufacture and marketing of paper tissue products. Charmin, Bounty, Kleenex and other brands continue to manufacture tissue using methods that have changed little since the 19th century, still relying entirely on virgin wood pulp. Meanwhile, they have vast research and development budgets that they could leverage to create soft, strong recycled tissue products. "The companies themselves have said people aren't calling for this," said Vinyard. You can help change the manufacturers' minds by letting them know your concerns about wood pulp from Canada's boreal forest—nearly 60 percent of which is shipped to the United States annually.
"It's all about where responsibility lies," said Vinyard. "Consumers can create the demand for recycled content, but really it's up to major companies with large R&D budgets to innovate and figure out how to make a product that is appealing to shoppers and doesn't destroy our forests."
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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