For some time (decades, actually) the toilet paper we’ve bought has been from 100% recycled paper, typically at least partially “post-consumer.”
It’s not all that easy to find (some stores don’t carry it), it’s nowhere near as nice as most of the name-brand TP, and it’s not any less expensive. But we’ve always been of the opinion that a successful recycling program consists not only of recycling household (and other) waste, but also of creating markets for recycled goods.
Now that China is not taking recycled products for the US, I guess the question may be more important.
So – does buying products made from recycled goods (in general, and TP in particular) actually do much good?
The answer is very nuanced for paper. First the consumer (origination point of recycling) has to be very very diligent about not contaminating the paper.
The Chinese got fed up with recycling contaminated paper and the like because much of the contaminated paper gets burnt or land filled creating water contamination issues.
In the US bales of recycled paper is sitting around creating fire hazards especially in states like California with wild fire problems. Then there is the carbon footprint of transporting all the paper.
Trees used for paper can be very sustainable.
If you’d ask me - I would say incineration of paper to make power or provide heat will be the best solution (coupled with the control of dioxins and the likes ). A total carbon capture with incineration will be the best.
Consider the full lifecycle of the product too. While toilet paper can be made of recycled paper, it can’t be recycled itself because it’s being flushed down the toilet. The paper that gets pulled out at the treatment plant (I think the bulk of it doesn’t get broken down because it’s not in the system long enough) is dried and landfilled or burned along with other contaminated solid waste.
Toilet paper is a product that wants to be strong and soft for use, but after it’s flushed, is it better if it breaks down quicker? Small broken down fibers pass further through the treatment process, but I don’t know if they break down completely or simply get filtered out further down the line. It sounds like a good thing to me to have less clumping solid waste, but I’m not a sewage engineer. If you want the paper to break down on the way to, or inside, the treatment plant, then toilet paper made from recycled paper would seem to be better. The fibers are shorter and easier to break apart after it’s been recycled once. However, it’s also possible that they added certain chemicals or other treatment processes to make the recycled toilet paper softer and less scratchy, as well as to hold together. That might be counterproductive to the decomposition process. It’s hard to say for sure.
Ever since it occurred to me that dumping paper in a landfill is a form of carbon sequestration, I haven’t worried too much about using paper. Most of the paper in the US comes from farmed wood, and tree farms, while not super habitat, are better wildlife habitat than a lot of other uses of land.
I don’t avoid recycled paper, but I don’t work very hard to seek it out, either.
And it’s not like the US is going to run out of landfill space any time soon. Things like the Wandering Garbage Barge are due to purely political problems, not practical ones.
Landfills do emit greenhouse gases, and effort has to be made to capture them. A tree that is left in the woods to rot, or more importantly, allowed to grow until it dies seems the better method of sequestration. In addition, that tree doesn’t need to be transported from South America or Canada, like a lot of trees used for paper in the US are.
Also, if you believe that the all the ur-forest replaced by the plantations would have disappeared without demand for wood, you are kidding yourself.
I get that, but it’s also possible that items which break down more, but don’t break down completely, could simply shift the problem from the sewers to somewhere in the treatment plant. Most non-microscopic debris gets combed out at the inlets to the treatment plant by large screens and screeds, but smaller stuff goes through the plant and hopefully gets precipitated out by chemicals and/or time in settling basins, goes through aerobic or anaerobic decomposition, or gets further filtered. Some items like the microbeads used in exfoliating face cleaners make it all the way through and end up getting discharged into the environment, same for many pharmaceuticals and chemicals, so just because something is smaller or dissolved it doesn’t mean the result is better.
Young trees grow much faster than old trees. To the extent landfills are actually sequestered, I bet there is a net carbon loss, as compared to a forest. Rotting wood releases CO2, too.
I don’t know what fraction of land would be undeveloped forests without a paper industry. That is unquestionably better wildlife habitat than farmed forests. And paper mills can be very dirty. But wood farming is relatively low on the list of “stuff we do to destroy the environment”.
While a rotting tree releases mostly CO2, landfilled paper and landfills in general release more methane than CO2. If that is captured, I concede the net effect might be less warming.
I think it is a safe bet to assume that almost all the rain forest removed for paper production would still be standing without demand. It’s not like there is intense competition for use of forest area.
Rain forests removed for paper production? They’re removed to create farmland (bad farmland unfortunately, since the soil is crap). I don’t think there’s any good trees for making paper in rain forests.
If you want to sequester carbon using plants, then the best you could do would be to take something fast-growing, harvest it as soon as its growth rate slows down, and then permanently put the resulting biomass in an environment where it will decompose as slowly as possible. Modern paper usage fits that almost exactly. If it’s still not significant sequestration, that just means that we’re not using (and throwing away) enough paper.
But you need to NOT throw it away. True, landfills don’t degrade as fast as they could, but they still do, and that releases the carbon. Paper doesn’t generally hang around very long before it’s discarded, unless perhaps you’re printing books. Lumber seems like a much better sequestration method, whether for building houses, cabinets, or furniture since those aren’t meant to be thrown away after long, if ever.
You haven’t heard of hundred-year-old newspapers being dug out of landfills, and still being readable? That’s usually cited as a point against landfills, but when it comes to sequestration, it’s a feature, not a bug.
And yeah, lumber probably lasts even longer yet, but the trees used for lumber are much more slowly growing than those used for paper.
I suppose that the ideal would be to grow the same trees used for paper, and then to chop them down, cut them up enough that they’ll pack tight, and then just throw them straight into a hole without most of the processing that’s used for paper. But nobody’s going to do that, because there’s no financial incentive to do that, because there’s no benefit whatsoever other than the carbon sequestration itself.
I have (hot dogs too), but I also know that landfills need to have pretty extensive methane capture systems because of everything that is breaking down. I assume it’s a matter of scale more than anything.
I’m pretty sure most of the toilet paper used in the US comes from trees grown in the US and Canada, and not from land that is or could be rain forests. It could be old-growth northern forests, of course. But a lot of the land in the northern band of the US is basically formed for timber, and some of it (the parts owned by the US government) is barely managed, and is pretty “natural” until it’s cut down.
My understanding is that rain forests are being cut down for food crops and cattle, mostly. I read about Asian palm plantations and Brazilian cattle and soy, for instance. And to some extent rain forests are cut for timber, since valuable timber grows in some of them.
I guess we have temperate rain forests in Oregon, et al, but I think that land is used for crops that are more valuable than lumber. I haven’t checked, though.
I agree with you and say again that there are nuances to this too. Particularly two :
Toilet paper requires hardwood pulp (50 to 79%) to get the soft feeling. So they use wood from the old forests.
Although farmed trees are good for carbon sequestration, I am not sure about the overall environmental costs. Farmed forests need more water, insecticides and sometimes fertilizers. They typically destroy the natural fauna too.
The wood from farmed forest is typically 60 + % moisture and all this stuff needs transportation fuel for going to the landfill. Also only the main trunk is used leaving behind all the branches and leaves to biodegrade and make methane.
The fuel to haul the scrub trees to the landfill wouldn’t be very much at all compared to the carbon sequestered, especially if the tree farm and the landfill were close to each other. And there’s no reason they wouldn’t be, since both would be located where land is cheap.