Going Soft: Yet Another Post about Toilet Paper

We don't care and we wish you hadn't bothered

 We refuse on principle to buy toilet paper that isn't recycled. We also refuse to buy toilet paper that is "extra soft", "angel soft" "ultra soft", "luxury soft", quilted, decorated or in any other way perverted, evil and unnecessary. Trying to find unbleached toilet paper in Britain is like looking for the Loch Ness monster in your bath tub: futile. But recycled toilet paper, though never, alas, unbleached, is at least usually free of the frantic "softness" labelling. Until Nouvelle went and printed a nauseating "How did we get it so soft?" slogan on its packaging. We find ourselves asking once again: Where does this obsession with soft bog roll come from? Think about it: what do you use it for? Toilet paper does not need to be bleached, quilted or have little flowers printed on it!
At least Nouvelle isn't quilted any more.

"Well the most important thing is we select high quality recycled paper as only the best will do." Why? It's being made into toilet paper for god's sake!

Having a look at the consumer guides online, however, Nouvelle, though recycled and for the moment unquilted, isn't necessarily that good anyway. Here is what Ethiscore has to say:

"It might be surprising to see a recycled toilet tissue brand in the top three [on the list of products to boycott], but its parent, Georgia-Pacific, came out worst in a WWF report on sustainability in the tissue sector. Its parent company, Koch Industries, has been part of a team advising Bush on developing a conservative 'environmentalism for the 21st century'. This favoured deregulation and included Bush statements that logging was good for forests and that dams were good for salmon." (http://www.ethiscore.org/info.aspx?info=campaign_climate, accessed 1 June 2011)

The Ecologist quotes the same WWF survey and tells you what's what.

Picture from http://blog.sustainablog.org/eco-libris-trees-of-soft-toilet-paper-what-do-you-choose/

The Guardian, always adept at giving you a bad conscience (in this case, of course, rightly so), offers a delectable little article which begins with the fantastic words, "The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners".

The WWF have published a very helpful guide on their website, and also offer information on the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) label.

For more information and the kind of unbiased factual analysis that regular Privy Counsel readers have come to know and love, see our previous posts Toilet Paper: A Pain in the Arse?, Toilet Paper: Puppy Love and, for something only slightly relevant, Immediate Action: Soldiers Use Toilet Paper, Too.