In this morning's GreenSpace column, I’m writing about toilet paper – and, by extension, the other personal paper products most people use, including napkins, facial tissues and paper towels.

Most major brands are made with tree pulp. Environmentalists think we should be buying the brands that are made from recycled paper – preferably from “post consumer” materials, which basically means everything that has already had one use in our homes or offices, the stuff we put out at the curb.  Regular "recycled" can include materials left over from industrial processes.

 Want to know more about which brands environmental groups think you should buy?

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a consumer guide that rates household tissue paper products by category.

Greenpeace has something similar. 

Meanwhile, the American Forest & Paper Association website has interesting information from their perspective.

On its website, Kimberly-Clark gives an overview of its sustainability efforts, including a two-page report on its fiber practices. K-C says that its  percentage of fiber “certified” to have come from suppliers that practice sustainable forestry has increased from 36 percent in 2003 to 89 percent in 2006.

Jeff Wells – the ornithologist – was in Philly to give a talk at the Academy of Natural Sciences related to his recently-published “Birder’s Conservation Handbook: 100 North American Birds at Risk.”  He describes the birds and the challenges they face, then gives advice, including things that birders can do at home. Including buying recycled paper products.

He worries that birders aren’t making the connection, that the same people who are avid birdwatchers and who care enough to feed birds during the winter are, at the same time, wiping the kitchen counter with paper towels made from trees where birds would nest.

For more information, see web sites about the Boreal birds and the International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

Talking with the NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz was interesting. He has shoved satellite images of forest clear-cutting under paper executive’s noses, apparently, and has trailed logging trucks to see what they’re carrying and where they’re going. He helped "green" the paper products at this year's Oscars awards ceremony.

Frustrated with the slow pace of the paper revolution, he one built his own paper mill in the South Bronx. It eventually failed, but you can read about it in two books, “Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings and the Corporate Squeeze,” by Lis Harris, and Hershkowitz’s own “Bronx Ecology: Blueprint for a New Environmentalism.”

Of course, the ultimate step people can take if they’re worried about paper products is to  not use them at all.

 Several friends have stopped using paper towels, although I’m still not sure how that works. What do they squash stink bugs with? What do they use to wipe up car vomit? I've got to learn more about this.

I’ve subbed out paper napkins with cloth, and that’s been working fine. We keep them at our places at the table, and whenever they get funky, we toss them in with the rest of the wash.

As for facial tissues, I wonder if handkerchiefs will stage a comeback. (On its website, Greenpeace sells a brownish “forest friendly cloth hankette,” 3 for $10, urging “blow on this!”)

But TP? That could be tough. It makes me think of the year I lived on a boat, sailing in the Bahamas. Conservation was crucial, although not for altruism or economy.

The longer our supplies held out, the longer we could stay in remote areas, away from towns. Ant the same time, the less room we took up with toilet paper and the like, the more room we had for beer. A tricky balance.

Talk sometimes turned to such matters at beach gatherings. With mixed results.  I remember  the night one woman noted she had pared her usage of toilet paper down to something appallingly small, like two squares.

We eyed her potluck offering dubiously. Perhaps she could have kept that little achievement to herself.

And what about the rest of our paper? How are we handling the influx of junk mail and catalogs? I’ll blog about that later.