Saturday, March 14, 2009

Still Choosing Soft or Recycled Toilet Paper? - Get Over It!

Beautiful sunny day but the brown horizon is back.


There's been a lot of hoopla lately about soft versus recycled toilet paper in the press since the release of a toilet paper guide from Greenpeace. Big fellas like the New York Times and the Guardian (London) reported on it adding their own stats on forest destruction for tissue paper and their "own take" on this dirty subject.

The statistics from Greenpeace are overwhelming with regard to the use of virgin wood for ... toilet paper. It's mind boggling to me really that it is being done at all. To avoid lots of high lighting and exclamation marks, I won't repeat all the stats to you here. (Besides, I want to remain as low key as I can for the rest of the day.) All the articles are excellent and I urge you to later click through for more detailed information, mind boggling stats and all.

I don't get this obsession for softness. I've tried most of the recycled toilet papers and there are some pretty good ones out there. My favorite is Green Forest and it is a very good price. Marcel is soft too but higher priced. What I find amusing is, the softness of these 2 products is probably as soft or softer than the softest toilet paper of 20 years ago. And if you go back 30 or 40 years ago, these products would have been the cream of the crop and totally acceptable. Am I showing my age here? hmm.

Doesn't anyone remember the days in school when you pulled on the little sheets of paper and out came a thin sheet that I swear was covered with wax? Forget softness and absorbency there. Any one been outside of this country? If you have, and presumably long enough to use a toilet, then returning to any U.S. toilet paper is a joy. I'm not for one minute suggesting we go back to those days of small waxed sheets, because we don't have to. We have perfectly good and soft, highly recycled, priced right toilet paper available now on the market.

Even Fox News couldn't push the "softer is better" because their own Fox "Bill", in a blind feel test, chose the recycled paper for the softer of the two. Oops.

So are we really whining over a small degree of softness, a level of softness that was perfectly acceptable just 20 years ago (I'm being generous, maybe only 10) at the expense of cutting down, yes, cutting down trees when we have all this recycled paper at our disposal? I'm sorry, I just can't wrap my head around this one. Before you call me names, before you call this snarky, before you press the comment, I urge you to read all the articles above.

And after all that, if you still need to squeeze the Charmin, all I can say is "Get Over It!"

3 comments:

shredding San Antonio said...

Whether you choose the soft or the recycled kind, the important thing that you should think about is that you should use it sparingly. Do not pull too much if you only need to wipe a small surface. Paper products like that of tissue may be thought to be easily manufactured and abundant but that does not mean that we should waste it. We should also dispose them properly to be able to contribute to waste reduction.

Real Green Girl Activist said...

Definitely! Great point.

And then there are those who use small reusable real cloth wipes for the number one vent and just throw them in the laundry with everything else.
Thanks for writing.

shredding Dallas said...

I prefer the recycled toilet tissue over the newly manufactured, soft one. I only use tissue in the kitchen and the bathroom and they still serve their purpose even if they are not as soft as the expensive kind. In addition to that, patronizing recycled products especially paper can do good to our natural resources.