How to Eat an Elephant Part 2
paper paper everywhere
Hey Broiler Heads! Welcome to the second installment of our series How To Eat An Elephant where we practice giving a fuck about climate change, one day at a time. Last week, I (Michelle) discussed single-use plastics and how to start eliminating them from your life. We got TONS of great recommendations and tips in the comments. A helpful comment section on the internet is such a rarity, so it’s worth a look to see all the great ideas from you guys.
This week we’re going to explore paper and hope.
In the late 80’s and 90’s, the modern environmental movement in North America was finding its way into the mainstream. The call to ‘save the rainforest’ echoed through the zeitgeist on shows like Captain Planet and in movies like FernGully. Even The Baby-Sitters Club had an episode about saving trees. When I was growing up, I remember lugging used paper from my dad’s work (reports and other meaningless detritus) into school so that teachers could print out handouts on sort-of recycled paper and I felt like a damn hero. Redwood Summer might have seemed like a failure at the time, but the passion and foresight of those activists imprinted on generations of kids like me. We were told paper products are bad because they cut down trees and plastic was better because we could recycle it, or so we thought. This kinda stuff was everywhere in the 90s. We recycled, reduced, and reused to close the loop.
Somewhere in the last 30 years we dropped the ball on paper products. Me included. We’ve been (rightly) focused on plastics and somehow paper got left behind. It wasn’t until everyone was scavenging for toilet tissue in 2020 that I started to consider all the paper I waste at home. Sure, I opt for paperless billing, recycle the few paper products that make their way into my home but there was a huge opportunity to do better staring me right in the…eye. Yeah, this is about toilet paper.
Most of the soft tissue products we use in our homes (toilet paper, paper towels, tissues) are all made with virgin wood pulp because it makes the soft products that consumers expect. That means that large, old growth trees are being logged and turned into pulp so that we can take off our makeup and wipe our asses on something soft and disposable. Not an ideal use of finite resources. And the biggest consumers of these products? Americans. We may be only 4% of the world’s population but we use 20% of the world’s toilet paper. Also 70% of the world’s population doesn’t even use toilet tissue. We’re out of step with the planet and it’s hurting all of us.
Over 31 million trees must be cut down each year just to keep up with the US’s addiction to toilet paper. Most of the tissue pulp shipped to the US to make these products comes from the boreal forest in Canada. Canada’s 1.4 billion acres of boreal forest is one of the largest intact forest ecosystems in the world and it stores an estimated 208 billion metric tons of carbon. When we cut down these trees to make single-use products we’re losing both one of the biggest carbon sinks we have to help slow climate change AND we’re creating more trash. These single-use products can’t be recycled so we’re literally just chopping down old growth trees to wipe our cheeks. That’s dumb as hell and now that we understand the problem we can start doing better.
Big Toilet Paper has Americans wrapped around its lil’ cardboard tube and it’s time we do something about it. Hell, even South Park has taken up the cause.
has a great breakdown of the episode and why Americans are scared to stray from toilet paper that you should check out.I’m not saying we should entirely eliminate toilet tissue but we can make small and significant changes. First, we’ve got to stop buying toilet paper made from virgin wood pulp. That’s the least we can do and making the switch is easy. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has made a handy scorecard so you can make better choices next time you head to the store. Barely any thinking required.
Lastly, we need to start using water, like in a bidet, instead of wads of paper to repeatedly clean ourselves. Reducing our dependance on toilet paper is an easy way to slow climate collapse and water is much more hygienic anyway. That’s a rare win-win. Bidets are easy to install on your existing toilet and come in a wide-range of price points and features so there’s one out there that’s perfect for you. I grabbed one at the hardware store in 2020 for around $200 and installed it myself in less than 10 minutes. It truly is life changing and I’ll never go back. Over these last 3 years I’ve drastically reduced the amount of toilet paper I purchase to the point that I’ve covered the initial cost of the bidet a few times over. And with toilet paper getting more expensive by the day, there’s just no good reason to keep yourself dependent on it. If you’re concerned about water waste, just remember that it takes 37 gallons of water to make one roll of toilet paper and a thorough rinse with a bidet takes less than 1/8th of a gallon.
The other soft tissue products in your house are even easier to switch out. I was a chronic paper towel user until a couple years ago where I tried to reduce my use as a New Year’s resolution. Swedish dish clothes, sometimes called reusable paper towels, saved me. They’re cheap, work just as well, are easy to clean, and you get plenty of use out of them before they start looking raggedy. Along with cloth napkins, these dish clothes have reduced the amount of paper towels I buy significantly and you can find them at Target just like paper towels. It was a painless conversion. I’ve never been a big tissue person but I love baby wash clothes and reusable cleansing rounds for taking off my makeup. They’re inexpensive and all you need to do is keep a little garbage can under the sink to throw the dirty ones in. Sure maybe it’s a tad more laundry but it means less old growth trees are getting cut down, so it seems like a big payoff for the littlest effort.
None of us are too old to adopt new habits, too stuck in our ways to do a little better today than we did before. Maybe you’re like me and never really considered what went into making your toilet paper but now we both know better. Every day is a new opportunity to be a better citizen of this planet and that commitment matters. Rebecca Solnit sums up the importance of this kind of belief in the introduction to her book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:
“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.”
Here’s to another week of hope and being better tomorrow than we were today.
Thanks again for joining us here in The Broiler Room. If you are liking our new series, spread the good word and share it with a friend.
Any tips for reducing paper usage at home that we missed? Leave them in the comments!
Michelle (and Matt)
BEST outfit EVER (with the best name), Who Gives a Crap! recycled paper products and half of their profit goes to building toilet facilities in underdeveloped countries. check it out: whogivesacrap.org
Bought me a Tushy bidet before the pandemic and, living solo, an 8 pack of recycled pulp toilet paper lasts me more than a year (this includes using it to clean up cat barf, since I have no other disposable paper products in my apartment).
Handkerchiefs have completely replaced Kleenexes, saving me that money and garbage.
Basically, I’ve mostly purged everything from my life which is one-and-done.