Celebrating an agreement last week on virgin-pulp use are (from left) Scott Paul of Greenpeace US, Kimberly-Clark's Suhas Apte, and Richard Brooks of Greenpeace Canada. Critics are underwhelmed: Reductions don't begin until the end of 2011.
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GreenSpace: Back side of the tissue issue
Industry leader's vow to cut virgin pulp in toilet paper isn't the whole story.
Buying toilet paper lately has been a real pain in the . . . well, you fill it in.
I decided to switch to an eco brand made of recycled content after learning that most major brands use virgin pulp - they kill trees - for tissue products.
Supposedly, virgin pulp makes a softer paper, and Americans are big into soft.
For me, the eco brands are plenty soft. The problem is that they're scarce. (Understandably, since they make up only about 2 percent of the market.)
Sometimes, I have to make a special stop at a particular store to stock up. What sense does that make?
Toilet paper and other paper products are a good place to start greening. These products are used by every household in America, by everybody in the household, every day. At least we hope so.
Through wise choices, we could save millions of trees.
So I had high hopes last week when I learned there would be a big announcement in TP world.
Greenpeace, which for five years has battled global tissue giant Kimberly-Clark, finally flushed its "Kleercut" campaign - a trash-talking reference to Kleenex.
Greenpeace targeted the company mainly for its use of virgin fiber from Canada's Boreal Forest, an ancient woodland that stores vast quantities of carbon dioxide and is a nesting area for about three billion North American birds, according to the nonprofit Boreal Songbird Initiative.
Now, the company has promised that by the end of 2011, 40 percent of its North American fiber for paper products will be made either of recycled content or pulp from trees certified as sustainably logged by the Forest Stewardship Council, which sets forestry-management standards.
Greenpeace took down much of the vitriol on its Web site, replacing it with a YouTube clip, "Making Up is Hard to Do." A guy stares into a mirror, practicing a conversation with what one might think was his girlfriend. He concludes, "Kimberly-Clark, I love you."
After using a few paper products to quell my retching - I love you? - I pondered what a switch it was from the signature Greenpeace guerrilla tactics. Activists had blockaded mills, chained themselves to toilet bowls outside Kimberly-Clark offices, and erected "forest crime scenes" behind yellow tape.
The announcement was enough to silence the lions at Penn State. Nearly two dozen other colleges and universities had banned Kimberly-Clark from their bathrooms, and for the past year and a half, eco-minded students in Happy Valley had been badgering the purchasing department to switch to a greener paper.
Now, says Tina Robinson, a senior from West Chester majoring in environmental economics, they're recommending that the university stick with the TP from K-C.
She praised the company's progress and hoped it would inspire others to do likewise.
But others did not share the joy.
The flip side of a related K-C promise - not to use any noncertified fiber from the Boreal after 2011 - means that until then, the company will.
Even with planned reductions, by their own calculations K-C will take up to 320,000 metric tons in 2010 and 2011.
Tim Spring was underwhelmed. As chief executive officer of North Jersey's Marcal, he's biased, of course. But he has standing when it comes to sitting.
Marcal makes its tissue - which was redubbed Small Steps last Earth Day - from 100 percent recycled fiber. Indeed, it built its factory near New York City so it could take advantage of the mother lode of paper from the nation's largest city.
"I'm obviously pleased they're going to stop killing 200-year-old trees in the next couple years," Spring noted dryly. "That doesn't make killing 30- to 40-year-old trees correct. Trees do not need to be killed."
Critics found more "buts" in the plan.
Within hours, Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council, another veteran of the tissue wars, blogged that Kimberly-Clark cleverly left itself a choice between certified and recycled - and could stick with trees for its household products.
"Consumers should not be led to believe that Cottonelle or Kleenex are ecologically preferable," he said. "They are not."
Glen Barry of Ecological Internet, an online sustainability portal, was even more pointed. He said the "atrociously weak target" would legitimize destruction of Canada's ancient forest ecosystems for decades.
He called on all who care about forests "to stop using virgin toilet paper, no matter how sensitive their behinds."
GreenSpace: Buying Better Paper
Environmentalists say the greenest paper is the stuff with the highest content of recycled material. But not all recycled material is equal. The trick is to look for "post-consumer" material, which is all the paper that people and offices have already used and then recycled. "Post- industrial" material includes paper left over from industrial processes.
Both Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council have paper-buying guides, listing the content of most major brands and whether they use chlorine in the bleaching process. You can find them here:
www.greenpeace.org/usa/ campaigns/forests/tissueguide
www.nrdc.org/land/forests/ gtissue.asp
Contact staff writer Sandy Bauers at 215-854-5147 or sbauers@phillynews.
com. To post a comment, visit her blog at http://go.philly.com/greenspace.
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