Toilet paper has come a long way since it was first used by Chinese Emperors in the 14th C when the sheets measured two feet by three feet.
Today arse-wipe is the third most widely consumed non-food commodity. The average person uses 57 individual sheets per day, 20,805 per year. (The Pentagon uses, on average, 666 rolls per day... weird.)
Kimberly-Clark, of Scott Tissue and Kleenex notoriety, is the world's largest manufacturer of 'disposable' paper products. Less than 19 percent of the pulp Kimberly-Clark uses for its disposable tissue products comes from recycled sources. Kleenex tissues contain 0 per cent recycled content.
In order to fulfill the market demand for soft, high quality bum scrub and snot rags, Kimberly-Clark uses virgin forest tree fiber.
The forests that Kimberly-Clark are disposing of are Canada's own ancient boreal forests.
The company uses more than 1.1 million cubic meters of trees from Canada's boreal forests each year.
These forests that have taken 10,000 years to evolve, run across the northern part of the country where there are no major urban centres. There is, however, 80 per cent of Canada's Aboriginal population who live in forest regions. And an entire ecosystem that acts as a filter for pollution and, oh yeah, it produces air.
Greenpeace started the Kleercut campaign in order to address these issues. They have been 'asking' for a meeting with Kimberly-Clark executives for three years now but have constantly been denied.
Kimberly-Clark claims to have an environmentally friendly policy to replant the trees it cuts down. But in order to replace a 180 year old tree it will take, well 180 years. Besides, the very idea of replanting an entire forest post-clearcutting is ridiculous. Maybe we can just ask the wolves, bears, and caribou to check into the local motel until their habitat is regrown.
In conclusion, buying recycled TP is not that much more costly. I would argue, in fact, that it's far less costly.
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1 comment:
A few things for your consideration:
1) You can replace a 180 year old tree with 180 year old trees. And by the time those 180 year old trees are two year old trees you will have the equivilent of 360 trees. Twice as many as you cut down. By year three you have three times as many trees, and so on. So really, Kim-Clar loves trees and sees to their bountiful replenishment. Meanwhile the Greenpeace cranks actually hate trees and veil their hatred in pro-tree protests as a means to infiltrate the tree hugging circles so they can cut more trees, as every lumberjack knows, the optimum positioning for tree chopage is hugging distance.
2) Urbanization is not only a major trends in human populations, but also animal populations. As more and more red hooded little girls and honey factories relocate to the cities as do the animals whose sole purpose is to torment their respective humanoids.
3)Lastly, but certainly not leastly, using recycled toilet paper is disgusting!
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