A rub over toilet paper

ELMWOOD PARK, N.J. -- —  There is a battle for America’s behinds.

It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for “soft” (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three ply and three adjective).

It’s a menace, environmental groups say -- and a dark-comedy example of American excess.

The reason, they say, is that plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old. Environmentalists want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods.

It has been slow going. Big toilet-paper makers say that they’ve taken steps to become more Earth-friendly but that their customers still want the soft stuff, so they’re selling it.

This summer, two of the best-known combatants in this fight signed a truce, with a big tissue maker promising to do better. But the larger battle goes on -- the ultimate test of how green Americans will be when nobody’s watching.

“At what price softness?” said Tim Spring, chief executive of Marcal Manufacturing, a New Jersey paper maker that is trying to persuade customers to try 100% recycled paper. “Should I contribute to clear-cutting and deforestation because the big [marketing] machine has told me that softness is important?”

He added: “You’re not giving up the world here.”

Toilet paper is far from being the biggest threat to the world’s forests: Together with facial tissue, it accounts for 5% of the U.S. forest-products industry, according to industry figures. Paper and cardboard packaging make up 26% of the industry, although more than half is made from recycled products. Newspapers account for 3%.

But environmentalists say 5% is still too much.

Felling these trees removes a valuable scrubber of carbon dioxide, they say. If the trees come from “farms” in places such as Brazil, Indonesia or the southeastern United States, natural forests are being displaced. If they come from Canada’s forested north -- a major source of imported wood pulp -- ecosystems valuable to bears, caribou and migratory birds are being damaged.

And, activists say, there’s just the foolish idea of the thing: old trees cut down for the briefest and most undignified of ends.

“It’s like the Hummer product for the paper industry,” said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We don’t need old-growth forests . . . to wipe our behinds.”

The reason for this fight lies in toilet-paper engineering. Each sheet is a web of wood fibers, and fibers from old trees are longer, which produces a smoother and more supple web. Fibers made from recycled paper -- in this case magazines, newspapers or computer printouts -- are shorter. The web often is rougher.

So, when toilet paper is made for the “away from home” market, the bathrooms in restaurants, offices and schools, manufacturers use recycled fiber about 75% of the time.

But for the “at home” market, the paper that customers buy for themselves, 5% at most is fully recycled. The rest is mostly or totally virgin fiber, taken from newly cut trees, according to market analysis firm RISI Inc.

Big tissue makers say they’ve tried to make their products as green as possible, including by buying more wood pulp from forest operations certified as sustainable.

But despite environmentalists’ concerns, they say customers are unwavering in their desire for the softest paper possible.

“That’s a segment [of consumers] that is quite demanding of products that are soft,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia-Pacific.

Sales figures seem to make that clear: Quilted Northern Ultra Plush, the three-ply stuff, sold 24 million packages in the last year, bringing in more than $144 million, according to market research firm Information Resources Inc.

Last month, Greenpeace announced an agreement that it said would change this industry from the inside.

The environmental group had spent 4 1/2 years attacking Kimberly-Clark Corp., the maker of Kleenex and Cottonelle toilet paper, for getting wood from old-growth forests in Canada. But the group said it was calling off the “Kleercut” campaign: Kimberly-Clark had agreed to make its practices greener.

By 2011, the company said, 40% of the fiber in all its tissue products will come from recycled paper or sustainable forests.

“We could have campaigned forever,” said Lindsey Allen, a senior forest campaigner with Greenpeace. But this was enough, she said, because Kimberly-Clark’s changes could alter the entire wood-pulp supply chain: “They have a policy that . . . will shift the entire way that tissue companies work.”

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Fahrenthold writes for the Washington Post.