Date: 2008-10-31

Toilet Roll is generally a product that gets thrown into the shopping trolley alongside bread, milk and the daily paper. It rarely offers pause for thought. But with environmentalists hot on the toilet roll trail, there could be more to this household necessity than meets the eye.

Greenpeace www.greenpeace.co.uk has compiled a ‘tissue product guide’ differentiating the good loo roll, from the not-too-bads, to the downright disgraceful. The information table has been put together after the environmental action group wrote to major retailers and manufacturers asking the source of its tissue paper, and whether it contains any recycled paper or paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Most obliged with the necessary information, enabling the facts to be passed on to savvy shoppers.

Alongside the product guide which includes toilet roll, kitchen roll and tissues, there is a supermarket and manufacturer league table. This gives an at-a-glance-guide to your supermarket of choice. It immediately becomes obvious that certain chains, such as Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer, have made a concerted effort to make their tissue products as green and ethical as possible. At the more dismal end of the scale, Boots and Somerfield are seemingly in deforestation denial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation with the latter listed as ‘Terrible! No plans to be forest friendly’.

Not many years ago, it was a minority of companies choosing paper derived from well-managed forests. In the UK, much of the paper used in tissue products has traditionally been sourced from Canada, Finland or Russia where the commercial gains of logging override any environmental, ethical and social conscience. Such practices, environmentalists would argue, are today inexcusable and supermarkets scoring poorly on the Greenpeace guide should perhaps take a more pro-active approach to protecting the environment.