It’s incredible, really, that something as innocuous as toilet paper can cause such destruction to our planet. Aside from installing bidets into every single home and ditching loo roll altogether (which, let’s face it, ain’t going to happen) what can we do to prevent humanity flushing the world’s forests down the toilet? Because, good luck surviving in a world without trees.

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The issue with tissue

In the US alone, the annual spend on toilet paper is US$6 billion. The environmental cost is equally eye-watering. To feed the demand, it takes 1.7 trillion litres of water, 250,000 tonnes of bleach and 15 million trees. Add the rest of the world’s TP consumption into the equation, and we’re looking at even scarier figures. Once you’ve digested the numbers, it’s perhaps not quite as astonishing to learn that 15 per cent of global deforestation is due to toilet paper.

And it barely needs stating that forests are essential to our survival; not only do they provide the air we breathe and a home to millions of species, but they also store vast amounts of carbon. In a nutshell, they protect us from the worst impacts of climate change.

The forests are paying the price

Three main regions across the globe provide the raw materials (i.e. trees) for the toilet paper industry:

The rainforests of Sumatra

It’s happening on our doorstep. In 2012, a WWF report focusing on the Indonesian island of Sumatra revealed the devastating consequences of APP (the fifth largest producer of toilet paper in 2008). It states: “Since 1985, Sumatra has lost more than half of its forest cover, leaving less than 31 million acres. With only about 400 Sumatran tigers and fewer than 2,800 Sumatran elephants left in the wild, this last remaining habitat is critical to the survival of these species.” It continues that APP is “responsible for more forest destruction in Sumatra than any other single company”.

It seems we are choosing toilet paper over tigers.

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The Boreal forest of Canada

Spanning over a billion acres, the Boreal forest holds around 12 per cent of the world’s carbon stores (more than any other forest biome on the planet). According to a 2019 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Stand.earth, industrial logging fuelled by TP companies is making light work of destroying it. In one nine-year period (from 1996 to 2015), over 28 million acres were cleared, disrupting indigenous communities, destroying the natural habitats of myriad wildlife species, and leaving vast swathes of land barren. Due to the nature in which the area has been logged – by clear-cutting, a method that removes all trees from an area – estimates suggest it will take at least 100 years for regions of the Boreal to return to its pre-logged condition. Yikes.

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Great Northern Forest, Sweden

According to this 2017 Greenpeace report, “around 68 per cent of Sweden’s land area is classified by the government as forest land”. However, since the introduction of industrial logging in the 1950s, much of this “old-growth forest” has been replaced with industrial timber plantations. Now, over 60 per cent of all forest in Sweden is less than 60 years old (which isn’t mature enough to harvest).

Thanks to the TP industry’s increasing demand for virgin pulp, large parts of Sweden’s Great Northern Forest are at risk, and only 7.5 per cent of the forest is officially protected. The clear-cutting has also led to a decline in hundreds of forest species, including plants, animals, fungi and lichen. All so we can continue to wipe with virgin pulp, quilted toilet paper. Seems crazy, right?

So what can we do about it?

The thing is, we don’t need to rely on virgin tree pulp to create toilet paper. There’s a 100 per cent biodegradable, 100 per cent sustainable, and 100 per cent renewable alternative that’s available now (and feels exactly the same as a wood product): bamboo. In recent years, we’ve seen organisations like NooTrees emerge as forerunners in the battle against deforestation. It uses bamboo across its entire product range (including toilet paper, wet wipes, and facial tissues).

Why? It takes 30 years to grow a tree, while bamboo only needs three years to reach maturity. Meaning it can produce five to six times more raw material than trees during the same time frame. It also doesn’t need perfect arable land on which to grow. Instead, it can work its magic in even the most degraded soil.

Switching your toilet paper from virgin tree pulp to a bamboo product is a #LittleGreenStep we can all take. And for the sake of saving our forests and hundreds of endangered species, it’s a small price to pay #MakeTheSwitch.

This article originally appeared on Green is the New Black.

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