A brand new report revealed by the New York-based environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council revealed that the heavy use of toilet paper within the US is harming Canadian forests.
According the examine, known as ‘The Issue with Tissue’, the largest US producers of toilet paper and tissue merchandise, comparable to Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific use virgin wooden pulp from Canadian boreal forests, which implies that they don’t use recycled materials. As a outcome, hundreds of hectares of Canadian woods are minimize down yearly by industrial logging.
The report additionally says that a median American consumes three rolls of toilet paper a week, whereas the refusal of the largest manufacturers “to create more sustainable products makes consumers unwittingly complicit in flushing forests down the toilet.”
The worst offenders are the manufacturers of Charmin Ultra Soft, Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Kirkland Signature and Up&Up Soft & Strong toilet tissues, in response to the report, ready in cooperation with Canadian grassroots environmental group Stand.earth.
In phrases of revenues, the US is the world’s second largest tissue market with estimated earnings of about $31 billion yearly. US residents that make up simply 4 p.c of world inhabitants account for greater than 20 p.c of world tissue consumption.
“Canada’s boreal forest also stores nearly two times as much carbon as is in all the world’s recoverable oil reserves combined,” the examine says. “Toilet paper and tissue manufacturers continue to rely on forests even though they have the resources and means to create and deliver products with recycled and responsibly sourced content that are better for the planet.”
According to the examine, Canadian boreal is an enormous panorama of coniferous, birch and aspen bushes, and the nation incorporates a number of the final of the world’s remaining intact forests. At the identical time, there are greater than 600 indigenous species inhabiting the forests, together with boreal caribou, pine marten, and billions of songbirds.
“Instead of relying on virgin fiber from ancient forests, tissue companies can use recycled content or sustainably sourced alternative fibers. Use of these materials to create tissue can dramatically reduce our destructive impact on the boreal and other forests in North America and around the world,” the report reads.