Philobiblon

Finally – someone tackles an issue I’ve been musing on for some time – toilet paper. With the West’s squeamishness about anything to do with lavatories not an easy one to take on, but I’ve wondered for years why ANY toilet paper should be made from freshly killed trees (as most of it in Britain still is).

But Greenpeace has explained just how much worse it is in America:

More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Greenpeace this week launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.

I really wonder about the politics of this; now in Britain that we’ve finally got rid of antique light bulbs, perhaps it is time to start a campaign to legislate to have all loo paper made from recycled paper?

This would not only save trees, but help to “close the market cycle” of paper recycling (and keep it close to home).

(An extensively research article in the Guardian indicates that the state of recycling is not nearly so bad as the rightwing papers have been screaming, but it is still clear that we have to build markets for recycled products, and you couldn’t get a more basic market than that.)

And once we’ve done that, then we can start on the ludicrous waste of resources that is the flush toilet…