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Cleaner, Better, Faster (without laying waste to our forests.)
I was standing in line at Costco a few days ago and noticed that of the 8 carts in front of me in the checkout line, 4 had the same 12 pack of paper towels that I had in my cart. Looking at the other lines, the pattern was less pronounced but there wasn’t a single line without at least one cart loaded with paper towels. Most of us have been conditioned that nice, white paper towels are an essential cleaning supply and will head off to the store before we get down to the last few rolls. We like our paper towels, maybe too much. We pull them off the roll by the handful to clean up spills or wipe the counter without giving it much thought.

Perhaps it’s time to consider the environmental implications. The National Resources Defense Council’s report, Paper Industry Laying Waste to North American Forests tells a sobering story about the impact of our decision to buy disposable paper products made from virgin fiber and bleached with chlorine. According to this report: * “Kimberly-Clark — one of the largest tissue paper producers in the world, with offices, factories and mills in 37 countries — uses more than 1.1 million cubic meters of trees from Canada’s boreal forests each year to produce some 465,000 metric tons (equal to 512,575 tons) of pulp.” * “Kimberly-Clark relies on recycled sources for only 19 percent of the pulp it uses in North America to make toilet paper, facial tissue, napkins and paper towels for home use.” This has a lot in common with the Triclosan story. Consumers buy massive quantities of a product to clean ourselves and/or our homes and unconsciously participate in an environmental disaster somewhere else. As we blissfully wipe our counters with Bounty, Scott, or Viva paper towels, few of us consider that Kimberly Clark is cutting down entire boreal forests and destroying ancient ecosystems to harvest the virgin pulp in these brands. Correspondingly, we cannot point a finger at Kimberly Cark as long as we are buying and using their products. It is dreadfully simple – if tomorrow we all stopped buying the brands of paper towels made from virgin pulp, we would slow the destruction of these ancient ecosystems. It’s time that we vote where we shop.

If every household in the US replaced just one roll of virgin fiber paper towels with 100% recycled ones, we could save 544,000 trees.

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