Toilet paper, Tissues and Paper Towels

Tip: with toilet paper, tissues and paper towels, only buy those with words like "80% post-consumer content" on it.

• Trader Joe’s - their generics - the best choice in my opinion.
• Gelson’s - Green Forest (which gets the highest eco ratings), Seventh Generation, Marcal’s
• Ralphs - Seventh Generation, Marcal’s
• DO NOT buy paper products that are not from recycled paper.
• If you can find brown paper products anywhere, check the label and give them a test run!

Avoid everything else - Kleenex, Bounty, Charmin, Cottonelle, Quilted Northern, Scott, Kirkwood, Vanity Fair, etc. till they make more of an effort. Kimberly-Clark, a giant in the industry, is starting to, but P&G, who make Charmin, are reluctant to give up market share before the American public change their preferences. There’s a great debate about it here.

Why? Because America’s forests are being destroyed to make them, while U.S. consumers are obsessed with pampering their bums.

Old growth trees have longer fibers which make for softer toilet paper and those trees don't grow back quickly. Of course, asking people to switch their choice of toilet paper, tissues and paper towels is about as popular as asking people to reduce their showering time. It does mean spending slightly more and it's true that some aren’t as soft. But so what?

Two good sources of information for rating paper products are Greenpeace (here) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (here). They argue manufacturers don’t have to use trees to make these products and they don’t need toxic chlorine compounds (chlorine dioxide) to bleach them. They advocate using recycled paper and at least 50% of it should be "post-consumer" (this means paper already used by consumers and then recycled). This is what really matters, not some generic claim about 100% recycled paper, which often just means the leftovers from the paper factory.

Now, Europe and Asia are more likely to use a bidet system. If you want to explore a “personal bidet,” make a field trip to Q Market on Vanowen and Louise, where you can buy a spray nozzle that attaches to the toilet water tank. You can also order these online (including Amazon) but I found most of the websites difficult to navigate. Here is one that is amusing to read – scroll down a bit for a fabulous defense of the personal bidet.

Or if you are really adventurous, you could use a bucket with a toilet seat and sawdust - this TIME story shows how to manage it!

Something else to consider: while there may be chlorine in normal toilet paper, there may be BPA (bisphenol A) in recycled toilet paper - BPA is a likely endocrine disruptor.  It appears not to be added deliberately, but because a lot of toilet paper is made from post-consumer sources that include recycled thermal printing paper (i.e. credit card and shop receipts), then it’s in there. Which is another way of saying “Be careful how you handle credit card receipts…”  See this and this.