We want to assure all of our customers that we only use bamboo to make Naked Sprout bamboo products, and share this statement from our founder Leila:
"Myself & the team are incredibly disappointed to see the recent article in Which?, suggesting our amazing Naked Sprout bamboo toilet paper isn’t bamboo.
At Naked Sprout we go to significant lengths to ensure what we tell you and what we sell you is the very best – especially in terms of sustainability.
We’re aware the test done by Which? suggests that our bamboo toilet roll doesn’t contain any bamboo. So we wanted to take this opportunity to share a little about the test. And a lot about our methods to ensure our bamboo supply chain is robust.
So let’s start with the test.
There’s no perfect way right now of testing unbleached bamboo toilet paper. We’ve been looking for a test that’s accurate, reliable and implementable within our supply chain for a long time.
The problem is, unbleached bamboo can show very similar properties to softwood and hardwood. This makes visual recognition by the laboratory particularly difficult. Especially when, like us, you don’t bleach your toilet roll.
On the question around the validity and reliability of the test. Some of our competitors are calling it a “cop out” to challenge the results. But even the people that accredit the test admit that it has limitations and say ‘considerable variation in the precision is to be expected’ (source).
We have been reassured to see TAPPI’s recent statement that they would be open to developing a bamboo-specific fibre test and we've contacted their team to start the process of creating a specific peer-reviewed test method to add to their catalogue.
We understand that just because the test is unreliable we shouldn’t expect you to believe us when we say our toilet roll is bamboo.
We know that trust requires evidence.
Therefore, we are moving to a policy of radical transparency. So every one of our customers can see our Forest Stewardship Council (FSCC007915) independently verified, full supply chain data.
This means that you’ll be able to see exactly where our bamboo is grown, exactly how it comes to our factory, and exactly what goes into our products to produce your toilet paper. This will make us the first toilet roll brand to do so.
Over the next few weeks we will make our supply chain data easy to access and easy to understand. But in the meantime, here’s the raw data. We have it, so you should have it too.
We have a full lifecycle analysis of the carbon footprints of our products, in line with ISO14067. You can view this here. We would love for other companies to publish their lifecycle analysis to help consumers make informed choices.
Our factory is a B Corp. As well as ISO50001 compliant so you can trust us when we talk about our energy use. We have rigorous environmental management systems in place in line with ISO14001 and you can see proof of that too.
We strive to ensure independent verification in everything we do. From being a B Corp ourselves, to our supply chain and our production at a B Corp certified factory. At every stage, we at Naked Sprout aim to ensure everything we do is provable.
We will continue to ensure absolute transparency around our green claims & with our customers."
You can read our full response to the Which? article here.
Radical Transparency
Naked Sprout has committed to radical transparency. What is this approach to ethical business, and what will it look like for Naked Sprout?
In business, radical transparency is an open approach to corporate information. Traditionally, businesses have kept their processes carefully guarded in an attempt to gain an advantage over competitors. In contrast, a radically transparent approach assumes that openness, in itself, builds resilience in a company and brings value to its customers and the wider community.
If we were a software developer we'd be publishing our code, if we were a drinks manufacturer we'd be sharing our recipe. At Naked Sprout, we make environmentally friendly toilet rolls, so we're providing the details of the specific forests and recycling depots that our raw materials come from, the way that these raw materials travel, and the CO2e cost of every part of our operations.
In a way, it's what we'd already been doing. The detail that we provided in our Life Cycle Assessment, and the CO2e figures we're using to label our packaging have depended on an ethic of openness and accuracy in our reporting. Now the documentation and information we share with B Corp, the FSC, the Science-Based Targets Initiative and the scientists who carry out our Life Cycle Assessments will be shared with you, as well.
Is there a better raw material we could be using? Is there a different way of transportation? Are there other glues or packing materials we should be aware of? We want to hear it all, and we want our customers and peers in the sustainable business community to be able to have meaningful input. The only way you can judge how well we are doing, and how we can do better, is if you can see everything.
We would love to see other brands in our industry make the same shift, so we can learn from one another's processes, and continue to drive change in our sector.
For now, thank you for hearing us out. If you have any feedback about Naked Sprout, or any questions at all, you can reach us at hello@nakedsprout.uk
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Toilet paper is a staple household item in about 30% of the world. If we think about the objects we use most often in our everyday lives, they’re up there with toothbrushes and phones. And sadly, those soft little rolls can have a significant environmental footprint.
In recent years, various companies have started to sell more environmentally friendly toilet rolls, drawing on unconventional materials and methods to minimise the impact from this everyday item. At Naked Sprout we use sustainable materials to make our rolls and we manufacture them without fossil fuels, massively reducing the environmental damage that comes with them.
Regular readers of our blog will know that, when it comes to sustainability, we like to get really detailed. But today we thought we’d give an overview - five great reasons to switch to sustainable and eco-friendly toilet paper.
The Impact on Forests
We need to protect our forests. The images of trees and woods that you see on the packaging of sustainable products aren’t just there because people like pictures of nature - forests really are incredibly important, providing the oxygen we breathe and the habitats for countless species of flora and fauna.
So it’s maddening to think that most toilet paper is still made by cutting down trees, that we are destroying resources and habitats that are of such critical value for all life on earth, for the sake of such a small convenience.
The softer the roll, the more likely it’s made from virgin timber. Plush quilted rolls need virgin fibres to produce that thick, pillowy texture. Even in cases where toilet rolls are produced using trees that are being commercially farmed, that is still a lot of area that must be given over, over a long period of time, to grow those trees.
Eco-friendly toilet paper is often made from recycled materials or sustainable sources such as bamboo, like we use at Naked Sprout, which grows faster and uses less water than trees used for conventional paper. And for top marks you can of course go recycled!
Water and Energy
It’s not just raw materials that go into making toilet paper. Each roll comes with an invisible price tag in water and energy.
The process of turning wood into toilet paper requires large amounts of water for pulping and bleaching - it’s been estimated as much as 140 litres per roll. Pulping can be done mostly mechanically, but bleaching is a more intensive chemical process, and the production and use of bleach, even chlorine-free bleach, has an impact on the environment.
It also takes a lot of energy to make tissue. Once you’ve finished pulping and bleaching, you have huge sheets that have to be dried, and all that heat has to come from somewhere. For traditional toilet roll manufacturers, and most eco manufacturers as well, the heat comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel, which is burned in huge quantities in their furnaces. This, not transport or raw materials, is the single biggest contributor to the climate footprint of toilet rolls.
So to make a truly sustainable toilet roll you need to get your use of water and energy in order. At Naked Sprout we don’t bleach our rolls, and we don’t use fossil fuels in our furnaces - we use biofuel that comes from the area around our factory. As a result, the water we use can be returned to the river it comes from, and our emissions are far lower than the norm, even the norm for other eco toilet rolls.
Biodegradability and Septic Safety
That’s the impact on the planet dealt with, now what about the impact on your plumbing?
Our customers are a nature-loving bunch, and we often receive questions from people who are looking for a toilet roll that will work well in their campervan or composting toilet. And about 1.5 million houses have septic tanks, which also need a bit more care than toilets plumbed into central sewers.
Eco-friendly toilet rolls can work really well for septic tanks and nonstandard loos because they’re usually designed to be rapidly biodegradable, reducing the risk of plumbing issues, particularly when you compare them with the plush, quilted toilet rolls we’ve discussed above. And if you’re using an unbleached toilet roll that doesn’t contain harsh chemicals, like Naked Sprout, you’re avoiding adding anything that could disrupt the chemical balance of your system.
Health
As we’ve mentioned above, bleach is completely standard in conventional toilet rolls. It’s so normalised you might not even notice it. But none of the raw materials that you can use to make toilet rolls will produce a pure white tissue without help, so if you’re looking at a white roll, you’re looking at one that’s been bleached. We’ve already said that bleach isn’t great for the health of rivers, and it’s not great for our bodies either.
At Naked Sprout we make unbleached toilet rolls, and we often hear from customers with skin sensitivity, who have found that unbleached tissue is less irritating to their skin than the standard bleached rolls. Recent studies have also suggested links between the bleach used in toilet rolls and a range of minor and much more serious health complaints.
The most sustainable and environmentally friendly toilet rolls will therefore be made without bleach, and they’ll be better for your health as well. Luckily, more and more eco toilet roll companies are providing this option, and Naked Sprout we’ve never used bleach in any of our products.
The Bigger Picture
Aside from all the benefits to our environment and health, it’s good to think about the big picture. Choosing environmentally friendly toilet rolls sends the message to manufacturers that people are growing more aware of the impact of their daily lives, and they want to see change from the industries producing the goods they use every day.
The bottom line is, the large manufacturers are motivated by money, and if they see enough people moving to products that might be less conventional but are just as good for the task at hand, they will start to move in that direction themselves.
Conclusion
Your choice of toilet roll might not seem like the most dire problem facing our planet right now, and in the grand scale of things, it isn’t. But it does represent an everyday opportunity to shift the needle towards meaningful change.
With the average person in the UK using 127 rolls per year, the benefits mount up. From conserving forests and water, to reducing CO2e emissions, and safeguarding our health. And overall, perhaps the most compelling reason is to send a message. We want industries to do better, and we want the future to be as bright as possible for ourselves, for the ones we love, and everyone who comes after us. We’re not going to save the planet from the bathroom, but it’s a place to start!
Want to make the change?
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Toilet rolls shouldn’t cost the earth. The soft sheets of tissue that hang in our bathrooms start on a roll, end up in the sewers, and have a very basic job to do in-between!
Despite this, many large manufacturers are still using virgin timber to manufacture toilet rolls. At Naked Sprout we have joined other eco-manufacturers making toilet rolls out of bamboo, which is a much more sustainable raw material.
But bamboo toilet paper is a recent innovation. The old sustainable alternative is recycled toilet rolls. So how are recycled rolls actually made?
In 2023 we added recycled rolls to our range, and we’ve gone the extra mile to make our rolls a modern sustainable marvel.
So here’s a roundup of the way recycled toilet rolls are normally made, and the Naked Sprout difference!
Raw Materials
Companies making recycled paper and tissue products have a veritable smorgasbord to choose from. Paper is one of the most readily and widely recycled consumer materials, and nearly all of it - newspapers, office papers, magazines, and cardboard boxes can theoretically be recycled.
Obviously it doesn’t all get turned into toilet rolls, and the paper makers of different industries have different forms of material that they prefer. For years, the industry standard for recycled toilet rolls has been to use office paper, the kind that would have been used to print out reports, memos, and minutes. This is collected by recycling companies who sort the paper and then sell to manufacturers.
There’s a problem here. The trend for more remote working was massively accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this, combined with the unceasing rise of digital technologies, means there is less office printer paper around.
As a result, manufacturers need to go further and further afield to secure the amounts of paper that they need, and the emissions associated with the collection of this material are climbing.
Bleaching
The collected waste paper is pulped with water, turning it into a very fine mix or slurry.
At this stage the manufacturers using office paper have a problem. If you take white paper, print on it with mostly black ink, and then break it down, you end up with a pulp that is an unappealing shade of grey. There are methods that can be used to remove some of the ink, but the most common way of whitening tissue pulp is bleaching it.
We’ve written about the damage bleach does to our environment in other posts. These days, most ecologically-minded companies will use a chlorine-free bleaching method to whiten their rolls. This is less damaging to the environment than chlorine bleach, but bleach doesn’t grow on trees. It has to be produced, packaged, and transported, with all the extra road miles, packaging, and energy this entails.
All for the sake of the cosmetic appearance of something you’re going to use to wipe your bum.
Drying
Once the raw material has been refined into pulp, and bleached, it is sprayed on a huge continuous mesh sheet, where water is drained away. It is then pressed between huge rollers, and dried.
We’ll take a minute to highlight the drying part of the process, because this is where the biggest chunk of carbon emissions comes in.
To make this huge damp sheet of tissue strong enough to wind, you have to dry it. For the vast majority of manufacturers, this means blasting the rolls with air that has been heated in a furnace fired by natural gas. Continuously blasting hot air on damp tissue pulp requires a lot of heat, and making a lot of heat requires a lot of gas, meaning a lot of climate-changing CO2 emissions.
The Parent Roll Trap
At the end of the drying stage you have a huge, dried roll of tissue, called a “Parent Roll”. We’ve included a picture of one above, so you can get an idea of the size we’re talking about.
In theory, the next stage in the life of a parent roll is to be wound into narrow logs, which are then perforated and cut down further into the short rolls we use at home. But in practice, parent rolls often have a journey ahead of them.
Many companies selling recycled toilet rolls don't actually completing any of the previous stages themselves. Instead, they buy parent rolls produced overseas, and import them to their UK-based “converting facilities” where they cut them down and package them in their branded boxes.
It’s perfectly legal to describe this final stage as “making” for the purposes of saying your products are “made in the UK,” but we think it’s a bit misleading. For companies operating converting facilities, the stages of manufacture that are most intensive in terms of labour, fuel, and chemicals have already been completed. Most of the rest of the process can be done automatically by machines.
We should point out that some manufacturers (particularly the large supermarkets) will be in a position to manufacture their own parent rolls, so if you’re not sure what a company means by their toilet rolls being “made in the UK” it’s worth asking if they are importing parent rolls or actually making them themselves.
The Naked Sprout Way
When we decided to make our own recycled rolls we started from the ground up, removing or massively reducing the environmental impact of raw materials, bleach, drying and transport.
According to our thorough, detailed Life Cycle Assessment, our rolls produce one third of the CO2e emissions of standard UK-made recycled rolls. How did we get so low?
Raw Materials
We’ve covered the problem facing the companies who use office paper for their recycled rolls, these days there’s just less office paper going around.
So why use office paper at all? Why not try using something else?
That’s exactly what we’ve done, developing toilet rolls made from recycled packaging materials; waste cardboard boxes and brown paper. Not only are these materials already being collected in large loads by recycling companies, they are actually growing as a source, thanks to the rise in home deliveries.
We collect some of this from kerbside “recycling box” collections, and some from supermarkets in the area around our factory. So the emissions for this collection are low, particularly compared to increasingly stretched supplies of office paper.
Bleach
Using cardboard boxes instead of office paper solves another pollution problem - we don’t have to bleach it. While the pulp you get from office printer paper turns a rather sad grey, our cardboard pulp is a warm pinkish brown, a lovely shade all on its own with no cosmetic enhancements needed!
We started Naked Sprout with the firm decision that we wouldn’t use bleach to whiten toilet rolls, and the cardboard means we don’t need to. The water we use to make our rolls is so clean at the end of our processes that it can be returned to the nearby river, the Fluvia, in the same condition as it was taken.
Drying
With our cardboard pulped keeping its natural colour, we’re ready to form and dry the rolls. So this is the big part - how are we avoiding the sky-high emissions that come from using natural gas in our furnaces?
We’re not using natural gas in our furnaces. Instead we’re using biofuel. This comes in the form of twigs and bark that’s collected from the forest floors in the area around our factory, and methane gas collected from local sheep farms!
All of this is completely renewable and a by-product of farming and forest maintenance processes that were already being carried out in the area around our factory. Although burning this material does result in some minor CO2e emissions, these are very low compared to the amount that would be produced by natural gas.
Parent Rolls
Once we’ve collected and pulped our cardboard, not bleached it, and dried it with the help of some gassy sheep, how do we transport our parent rolls to the facility where they’re going to be converted?
They’re already there. Our B Corp certified factory in Spain completes every stage of manufacture, from the moment our raw materials reach them to the individual finished rolls, ready to be transported by electrified rail to the UK.
We’re incredibly proud to be making our products, from the pulp to the finished boxes, under strict B Corp standards, with a living wage for everyone working at our factory.
Conclusion
That’s it - the whole process of making our Naked Sprout recycled toilet rolls.
By cutting out office paper, bleach, natural gas and separate conversion facilities we have made the most sustainable recycled rolls we can. And as ever, there’s no harsh chemicals and no plastic in our products.
Want to try the most innovative recycled roll around?
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Naked Sprout started with a pink roll. Actually, it started with two of them - our founders Tom and Leila were travelling through France, and noticed bright pink toilet rolls in two separate bed and breakfasts, miles apart. It was like they were being followed!
The coincidence made them laugh and got them thinking about how white, bleached rolls aren’t actually more natural than pink ones. Much testing and development later we have Naked Sprout - the UK’s most sustainable tissue products made without a drop of bleach or dye.
But this isn’t the normal way of doing things. Most other companies bleach their rolls and many wrap them in brightly coloured, dyed paper. We think this is a waste, for products that are going to be flushed down the loo. We’ve already covered bleach on our blog, and today we’re tracking all the way back to those pink rolls.
Where do the dyes used in products and packaging come from, and is dye bad for the environment? Let's find out.
Dyes in History
Humans are drawn to decoration. Dye has been used to decorate skin, fabric, wood, and pottery since at least the late stone age, and we have ample evidence of extensive uses of dyes in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, and Minoa.
Early dyes were derived from natural sources such as plants, minerals, and insects. The dyes that were the easiest to make were used the most. A great example is woad - a plant originally native to the Mediterranean region that grows so plentifully and easily it’s often classified as a weed. Woad produces a deep blue dye that was used in pottery, weaving, and tattoos around the ancient world. Red was also easy to produce as it could be derived from the plant madder, which grows all over Asia, Europe, and Africa.
So red and blue and red dyes were popular because they were easy to make from plant sources that grew abundantly. Their popularity was enhanced by the fact that, once applied, they stayed relatively fade free. If you’ve ever wondered why so many flags have colours of red, white, and blue, this is why!
The invention of synthetic dyes in the 19th century revolutionised the way we colour our world, allowing for a wider range of pigments and greater ease of production. Chemists like William Perkin, who accidentally discovered the first synthetic dye, mauveine while working on a treatment for malaria, opened the door to a new era of dye production. Synthetic dyes could be made cheaply and fixed well without fading, so they quickly became popular for colouring fabrics and ceramics, and in the production of paint.
Sourcing and Manufacturing of Dyes
In the modern world, we’ve got a lot more options than woad and madder. Most of the dyes that surround us today are made in factories using chemical processes. So what is the environmental impact of all this colour?
When it comes to the pollution associated with dyes and pigments, one important thing to understand is that not all colours are equal. Although dyes are made in laboratories now, they rely on organic compounds derived from nature. So reds and blues, even today, take less processing to produce and to apply than complex colours rarely found in nature.
Black dyes are at the other end of the pollution spectrum. To make black you have to mix many different pigments together and chemically fix them in place, a level of complexity that multiplies the pollution. Gold is another shade to watch out for - gold does of course occur in nature, in the precious metal of the same name. But few companies are using actual gold to colour their products, and if they were you’d know about it from the price tag! So metallic paints will incorporate tiny particles of chapter metals such as bronze or copper, or the mineral mica, to reflect the light, and an intensive chemical process is required to bind and fix these elements.
Once dye has been produced, it must be applied. Industrial dyeing methods often involve large volumes of water, energy, and chemicals, leading to wastewater pollution and high greenhouse gas emissions. Dyeing processes can also contribute to air pollution through the release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), that can cause a range of minor and much more serious health problems.
And when dyed and painted products reach the end of their lives they often end up in landfill, further damaging the environment. Synthetic dyes can persist in the environment for years, leaching into soil and water and harming ecosystems and wildlife.
As manufacturers and consumers become more aware of the damaging impact of dyes and pigments, efforts have been made to develop more environmentally friendly processes. Techniques have been developed for dying without water, for example, and there’s a growing market for more eco-friendly dyes derived from natural sources.
But these alternatives often come with their own set of challenges; they often cost more than mass-produced synthetic equivalents, and the range of colours you can make is limited. And even when you are making the most natural, easily produced colours, there is an environmental cost to using them on an industrial scale.
The Pink Roll Example
Let’s go back to the pink toilet rolls. We haven’t been able to find out the exact dye used for the “pinking” process but most pink dye used today comes from the cochineal insect and it’s relatively cheap to produce. Blue would be another option for a cheap dye, or we could also bleach our rolls, maybe using the Total Chlorine Free method favoured by more environmentally-minded brands.
But whatever we are using to colour the rolls, the synthetic dye or bleach has to be produced using energy, most likely fossil fuels. Then it must be packaged in single use containers (probably plastic) and transported to the tissue factory. Once it’s at the factory the stage of dying or bleaching the pulp will require yet more energy, as well as huge amounts of water, and any other chemical agents needed to fix the dye or process the bleach.
If this was a company who were also wrapping our rolls the wrapping would also be dyed. If they were using unnatural colours in their wrapping like black or gold the environmental harm would really start piling up.
The result of all of this is packaging pollution, road miles, CO2e emissions, and chemical pollution that is simply not necessary for a product that is going to be flushed away.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully this has been an eye-opener! We think it’s really worth taking a moment to look at the colours in the environment around you. Which are natural, which have been applied commercially, and where are the colours rare in nature that are most likely to be polluting?
At Naked Sprout we believe the colours of nature can stand on their own, particularly when it comes to a disposable product. So we don’t bleach or dye our toilet rolls, tissues, or kitchen rolls, and we keep the printing on our cardboard boxes as minimal as possible, using inks derived from soy.
We know that this might hamper our efforts at marketing - bright colours and attractive wrapping have become a central to the identity of many other rolls, and make for eye-catching adverts on billboards and social media. But nature is a riot of colour, and if we want to do everything we can to protect it.
Want to try tissue products with a naturally neutral palette?
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We’re back with another piece delving into the buzzwords, hype, and distractions that surround corporate claims of sustainability. Today we’re looking at a strange shadow side of greenwashing, green hushing.
In a world where green products are increasingly in demand, why do some companies seem to tiptoe around their environmental targets and credentials, instead of shouting them from the rooftops?
Well, as a sustainable business, we can think of a few reasons. Let’s take a peek behind the curtain.
The Green Dilemma: To Shout or to Shush?
Picture this: You're a company making a product, let’s say eco toilet rolls. You've invested time, money, and resources into making your operations more sustainable, from reducing carbon emissions in your fuel supply to switching your raw materials to more environmentally friendly equivalents.
So it stands to reason you’d do everything you could to publicise the details of these policies, and bask in the glow of environmental adoration. Right?
Well it's not always that simple. As sustainability comes to the fore of public consciousness, some companies are nervous about the scrutiny it can bring.
Enter green hushing.
The Big Green Hush
We’ll start with the examples of big business. The biggest companies on the planet are some of the biggest polluters. The packaging used by the big food and drinks manufacturers accounts for 36% of all plastics produced, oil and gas companies are responsible for around 15% of total global emissions from energy.
As we would expect, companies like this are keen to clean up their image, and so we see the standard greenwashing - big bold claims of reducing plastic and investing in clean energy, even as standard ways of doing business continue, empty bottles fill the oceans, and the emissions from fossil fuels wreck havoc on the global climate.
But what about green hushing? That’s rather more subtle, and often taking place at the same time. Because it’s not entirely true that larger companies are doing nothing to improve their impact. Whether for better PR or simply because supplies of fossil-fuels and raw materials are becoming stretched, it’s obvious to everyone that the future is going to have to be more sustainable.
So many of the world's biggest companies are setting targets, even setting Science Based Targets, to bring down their climate footprint. But, the puzzling thing is, a sizable chunk aren’t talking about them. In fact South Pole, an organisation that develops and implements emission reduction projects, surveyed 1200 global companies and found that, while many of them are seeking to implement net-zero targets, one in four of them don’t plan to publicise them.
South Pole describes the phenomenon as “going green and then going dark.”
Why would you do this, and why is it a problem?
1. Facing Scrutiny
Let's start with the big one: fear of scrutiny. In today's hyper-connected world outrage spreads like wildfire. Companies are walking a tightrope between genuine efforts and potential criticism. Imagine investing in a new eco-friendly initiative, only to face a barrage of criticism pointing out the areas where it falls short.
And this isn’t just a few bloggers or posts on Facebook - in 2024, scrutiny has teeth. Bodies like the EU and UK’s Advertising Standards Association are putting into place regulation that means green claims need to be backed up, citizen activism groups like Greenpeace have battalions of fact-finders and volunteers, more sustainable competitors are motivated to look into your claims.
It's enough to make any green-minded CEO break out in a cold sweat. But if you don’t make the details of the claims public, you can’t be called out on them.
2. Competitive Edge
There’s also the competitive edge to consider. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, where every company is vying for consumers' attention and wallet, sustainability has become the new battleground. But revealing too much about your environmental efforts could also mean revealing your hand to competitors. If you’ve figured out one weird tip to bring down the emissions from your transport (like we have recently!) maybe you’d want to keep that to yourself.
But there’s a real downside to this kind of self-protection, it limits the sharing of knowledge. If you’re in the toilet roll industry, for example, it’s likely that other tissue manufacturers would be able to implement at least some of your solutions for more sustainable manufacturing if they wanted to. And at the end of the day, it’s better for the planet if they do.
We all remember the feeling from school of not wanting others to crib off our homework (only us? okay). But we’re not at school, we’re heading towards a climate emergency, and the best thing is if everyone can see what everyone else is doing to prevent it.
3. Complexity Overload
And finally, it’s worth bearing in mind the sheer complexity of the issue.
Navigating the ever-changing labyrinth of environmental regulations, certifications, and practices that go into making products more sustainably can feel like trying to untangle a ball of wool in a storm. For smaller companies who are doing their best to be sustainable, it's all too easy to get bogged down in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. Sometimes, it's just simpler to keep things under wraps than to try and explain the nuances to consumers.
But this gives the impression that these things are simply too hard to contemplate, and they’re not.
Any established company should be able to provide the details of their raw materials, energy supply, and transport. If they’re big enough to have slick branding advertising their sustainability, they are big enough to back up the claims they are making. If they don’t, it’s probably because they don’t want to. We have a team of seven people at Naked Sprout, and we’re managing it.
And when it comes to smaller companies, just ask! You can ask us anything you like at hello@nakedsprout.uk. If we haven’t heard the question before we will have a think and answer honestly.
Conclusion - a Call for Transparency
So that’s green hushing, and why some companies are doing it.
It’s not that mysterious when it comes down to it, it’s a bid to avoid scrutiny, navigate increasingly competitive markets, and manage complexity.
We understand it, but we don’t believe in it. At Naked Sprout we will always pursue the most environmentally-friendly policies and practices we can. We offer full transparency and even climate labelling.
It definitely isn’t the easiest path to huge profits, but we’re certain it’s the best course of action for ourselves as a company, and for our planet.
Want tissue products from a company that’s not shy about their green credentials?
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Here on our blog we talk about eco tissue products. We do our best to marshall all of our facts and figures so we can provide informative discussion and analysis of our uniquely sustainable methods.
Well, that’s not what you’re getting today. Today we’re heading out of our comfort zone, and talking style.
That’s right, over the last few years we’ve received a few pics from wonderful customers of our rolls in all holders of all shapes and sizes. We thought it was time to share them with the world. So here, in no particular order, are the swankiest, sturdiest, most fashion-forward toilet roll holders money can buy.
1. The Box
First things first, let’s hope there’s no men in the household because that box is in a dangerous position for a stand-up pee.
Location aside though, this has got to be a contender for the most practical solution to the eternal problem of where to store your toilet roll. And while the holder is basic, we applaud the extra effort that’s gone into the presentation. Our toilet rolls come neatly packed in rows inside the box, so the owner here has arranged them in a more organic, haphazard pile - making individual rolls easier to grab and introducing a playful joie-de-vivre.
2. The Shepherd’s Friend
Did you know Naked Sprout is actually partly made with sheep droppings? You do now. Farmers that raise sheep in the fields near our factory collect their droppings in slurry tanks, and the gas that forms at the top of these tanks helps power the furnaces in our factory.
So this woolly roll keeper, which comes courtesy of our lovely customer Tania, is extremely appropriate. We particularly appreciate the way the fleece is created using the natural curves of the toilet roll, and the curious sideways glance of the woolly chap.
3. Neptune’s Bounty
Ahoy there!
Nautical motifs are a favourite for bathrooms, so we’re delighted to have this example of ocean-themed holdery from Emma (who also sent in a pic of some rolls with her unbelievably gorgeous dog, not pictured). Octopuses are famously intelligent, with the largest brain-to-body ratio of any invertebrate, and great problem-solving skills. And this particular octopus has snagged a rare bounty in the form of our soft, unbleached toilet paper. But are the rolls being offered, or stolen? Only the octopus knows.
4. Toilet Rolls in the Mist
Human beings are the only animals that use toilet rolls, but that doesn’t mean you can’t impress our fellow apes with your lavatorial setup. Gorrillas spend most of their days eating and looking for food, so it’s good to see this one taking some time for contemplation, and holding up a toilet roll in the bargain. With a peaceful expression and relaxed posture, the gorilla provides blessings on every flush, and a reminder not to use toilet rolls that harm habitats! Many thanks to our wonderful customer Julie for sending this one in.
5. Dragon’s Delight
A holder fit for the bathrooms of Middle Earth. As you can see from the bright white colour of the roll in the picture above, it isn’t one of ours. But prospective customer Janice got in touch before purchasing Naked Sprout to check if our rolls would fit her holder. And with such a magnificent beast, who can blame her? There’s a few die-hard nerds among the Naked Sprout team, and we’d pay good money to read an epic series featuring this chap, surely one of the wisest of dragon kind. The value of gold is subject to change, after all. A dragon with a hoard of toilet roll is really thinking ahead.
(Just watch out for hobbits!)
6. The Free-Stander
A fascinating contender courtesy of stylish Celine, this holder eschews excessive decoration in favour of structure. The solid, substantial base says it all - this is a holder that can stand on its own two feet. Or one foot. Regardless, it’s standing tall, without the wall. We love to see a strong, independent loo roll holder (and we think it’s a very good solution for those with awkward shaped bathrooms!)
7. The Antiquarian
Finally, the showstopper. This is one of our own pictures and whenever we feature it on social media everybody stops talking about sustainable toilet roll and starts talking about this holder. It’s enough to make us a bit jealous, but we get the excitement. This one has it all; It’s elegant, it’s convenient, and it’s a bridge to history.
The original design was produced in 1884 by the “Sanitary Paper Co.” of Bury Street, London. The design featured in an ironmonger periodical that year, which is why we can still get such wonderful reproductions. The toilet paper this would have been designed for was much more like today’s writing paper - crisp and unperforated. With such a spectacular unit we’d be willing to compromise on comfort, but luckily we no longer have to. Our lovely soft bamboo or recycled rolls have all the unbleached elegance of early toilet paper, without the eek factor.
In Conclusion
So that was something completely different!
We hope you enjoyed this round-up of the weird and wonderful holders that house our toilet rolls. And if you have one at home you’re particularly happy with, please send us a pic!
Want to dress your holder in sustainable chic?
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At Naked Sprout we like to say that sustainability drives everything we do.
But what actually drives everything we do? How do our raw materials get from one place to another? Well it’s our logistics network, the boats, trucks, and courier vans that bring our raw materials to our factory, and bring our rolls to your home.
In the race between planes, trains, and automobiles (or lorries) trains are the most energy-efficient, and from March 2024 they’re a key part of our network.
So in this post we’re getting into some light train-spotting. What’s so good about railway transport, and why is it a great choice for sustainable freight?
All aboard!
The Evolution of the Railway
The railway has played an integral role in the development of modern industry. The advent of steam-powered locomotives in the early 19th century revolutionised transportation, connecting distant towns, cities, and countries, and facilitating the movement of goods on an unprecedented scale.
But this game-changing technology came at a huge cost to the environment. Steam trains were powered by coal, and the growth of the British railway network through the 1800s led to a huge rise in demand for this fossil fuel. To get a sense of the scale of Victorian appetite for coal; in 1700 the UK mined just 2.5 million tonnes of coal, by 1900, the figure had grown nearly to 224 million tonnes. The burning of coal to power the Victorian railway network and the industry the network supported had a terrible impact on air quality, leading to the thick smogs and respiratory diseases that plagued many cities during that era.
Fortunately, trains have evolved since those early years, transitioning from steam to diesel, and now to electric power. As a result they have become faster, safer, and far cleaner. In fact, shipping goods by electric rail today is now one of the most environmentally-friendly options around, second only to shipping by sea!
So what makes modern trains so sustainable?
A few different factors combine to make modern railway networks one of the most sustainable methods for moving goods long distances.
Rail Resistance: Once you have a railway network set up, the energy that it takes to move a train along a track is much lower than the energy to move vehicles on a road. Steel wheels running on steel tracks encounter less friction than rubber tyres on tarmac roads, so the same amount of energy will carry you further by rail.
Electrified Rails: Trains are converting from fossil fuels to electrical energy much faster than their counterparts on the road. Modern railway tracks are electrified, so train carriages and containers are moved along the track by the energy in the rails themselves, and don't have to be pulled from the front by a diesel engine. This is how our rolls will be travelling at Naked Sprout!
Less Congestion: Using trains to transport freight helps to alleviate congestion by taking goods off motorways and onto rail lines. This not only reduces traffic but also lowers the wear and tear on road infrastructure, leading to fewer maintenance requirements and costs. Network Rail estimates that every freight train takes up to 76 heavy goods vehicles off the roads, greatly reducing congestion and air pollution.
Naked Sprout on Rails
There’s some great reasons to switch to trains for freight wherever possible, and we are incredibly proud to be able to bring them into our logistics network.
Naked Sprout tissue products are made in the World’s only B Corp tissue factory, in Northern Spain, coming from there to our warehouse in the UK for delivery by courier. Starting from 2024 the European leg of the journey, all the way from Northern Spain to Northern France, will be made by electrified rail.
As a team, we’re thrilled. We love a long train journey almost as much as we love finding new processes that will bring down our climate footprint.
And there’s something in the story of trains that really appeals to us. The journey they’ve taken, from belching soot across the countryside to becoming one of the most sustainable ways to transport goods, is testament to how things can change. With technological advancement and the will to improve we can refine processes that once seemed set in stone and do better for our environment.
Conclusion
The railway has been part of the story of modern manufacturing for two hundred years, and improvements to fuel sources and efficiency make trains a fantastic choice for sustainable freight today.
We hope this whistle-stop tour of one aspect of our logistics makes you look again at the products you purchase every day and how they reach you. A company that trades on its green credentials should be able to tell you the details of their transport, and the reasoning behind the logistics network they have in place.
We couldn’t be happier that our unbleached tissue products will be rolling on rails to you. For now, that’s the end of the history lesson! All change please, all change!
Want to meet the UK’s most sustainable tissue products at the end of their journey?
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The average person uses a lot of toilet paper. In the UK it’s estimated we’re each getting through about 127 rolls per year! As we’re constantly saying - the environmental impact can't be ignored.
We talk a lot about how toilet rolls and their packaging are made and delivered. But today we want to focus on the other side of the story, how products are disposed of. And since it’s Spring time as we’re writing this, today we’re thinking about the most natural and green form of disposal around, composting. Can you compost toilet rolls and the packaging they come in? Let’s dig in.
Understanding the Basics:
First up, some ground rules. Toilet paper is primarily made from wood (or bamboo!) pulp, or if they’re recycled they’re made from paper or card that was itself made from timber pulp. This means that toilet paper is a biodegradable material, and it can decompose naturally under the right conditions.
However, compostability takes things a step further. For something to be compostable it needs to not only break down naturally, but to break down with the help of microorganisms that will transform it into a nutrient-rich, organic material that can be repurposed as fertiliser.
To properly answer the question of whether toilet rolls can be composted, we need to understand where we’re doing our composting - a compost heap like you’d have in your garden, or a composting toilet?
A Compost Heap or bin
We’ll go to the compost heap or compost bin first, because we find this is a slightly more common question. Can toilet rolls, and their cardboard tubes and packaging, join the carrot peels, apple cores, and coffee grounds in your compost?
Anything you add to your compost heap needs to break down rapidly without leaving harmful residues or attracting unwanted pests. Unbleached cardboard, like most toilet rolls use for their inner tubes, passes the test, so in they go, but what about boxes?
If the box is plain cardboard without any glossy finishes or plastic inserts, it’s a green light for composting. Cardboard boxes can actually be great additions to a compost heap, because they’re carbon-rich, and break down gradually, providing a feast for worms in the process. Just be sure to remove any tape, staples, or labels before tossing them in. At Naked Sprout we use unbleached cardboard free of chemical glues, tape, staples, or dyes for our boxes, making them fully compostable.
But what about the actual toilet tissue itself? There are two main factors to consider here.
Firstly, has it been used? When it comes to your compost heap, only unused toilet paper is suitable. Adding used toilet roll risks introducing pathogens and attracting pests. Secondly, what colour is the tissue itself? Most companies bleach their toilet paper, and this bleach may present a problem to your compost heap, so we’d recommend only adding unused toilet tissue that hasn’t been bleached. The same goes for our unbleached facial tissues, and unbleached kitchen rolls. They should be fine to put in your compost as long as they have not been used.
We don’t really think anyone is buying toilet roll to chuck, unused, into the compost - so this probably disqualifies your everyday rolls from the compost heap! But that doesn’t mean toilet rolls cannot be composted full stop. There are some toilets that are specifically designed to take advantage of the biomechanical process of composting, and these are a different story altogether.
A Composting Toilet
A composting toilet is a specialised unit that breaks down waste in a controlled environment, with the right balance of moisture, temperature, and air flow. They’re becoming more common in eco-conscious facilities, particularly where plumbing is difficult to install. Many of our customers use them in eco-retreats, event spaces, and glamping huts, and some have them at home!
Composting toilets don’t flush waste away, instead they use microorganisms (mostly bacteria and funghi) to convert human waste into a compost that can be safely returned to the soil.
To keep working, the balance of moisture, temperature, and air flow in these units has to be maintained, and it’s really important not to add anything that might disrupt the biological processes taking place. So when it comes to toilet roll, look for "compostable" or "biodegradable" labels, and try to avoid dyed rolls and anything quilted or scented, as these will often contain harsh chemicals.
As always, we’d recommend you go the whole hog and avoid bleach as well. Our 2 ply, unbleached, Naked Sprout toilet rolls are ideally suited for composting toilets. We keep our processes so clean that our rolls have been certified “food safe”. There’s no bleach, no harsh chemicals, and the glue that binds our plys is made from pine sap. So there’s nothing in them that could upset those precious microorganisms!
The Verdict: To Compost or Not to Compost?
So the final verdict on composting toilet rolls and their boxes? It depends on your setup.
If you're composting in a traditional compost heap or bin in your garden, you might want to think twice about adding toilet paper directly to the mix. While unused toilet paper is technically compostable, it would probably be better to use it! On the other hand, plain cardboard boxes and the inner tubes of toilet rolls are composting champs.
If you’re using a composting composting toilet, opt for undyed, unquilted toilet paper and look out for labels that indicate the product is “biodegradable.” And for the happiest microorganisms of all, try an unbleached roll!
Fancy feeding your compost with the most sustainable rolls around?
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Spring is well and truly on the way here in the UK and many of us are clearing plots, pots, and patches to make room for new growth.
So we thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight one of the less obvious ways toilet rolls can help out around the home, providing a good start for little seedlings! It’s not one of the more common uses of our products, but it’s one we always enjoy hearing about when our green-fingered customers get in touch. So let's dive into the world of gardening and explore how you can give these cardboard tubes a new lease on life as seedling starters, and more!
The Seedling Situation: Why Toilet Roll Tubes?
Most of the emails we receive to our support team are about our tissue, the sheets that go on our rolls and in our boxes. But every year, around this time of year, we also receive a few queries from customers who are planning to use our toilet roll tubes to start seedlings, and want to check if there’s any reason why they shouldn’t.
The theory is simple, you fill a toilet roll tube with soil and plant the seeds inside them, you can then keep them inside, or in a greenhouse, at relatively stable temperature until they’ve sturdy enough to withstand the changing weather and temperatures outside. After a few weeks your seedlings can be planted directly into the soil, roll and all, ready to grow to their full potential.
So that’s the theory! Before we get into the practice, let's chat about why toilet roll tubes work so well for planting.
As we take pains to point out, most toilet roll tubes are biodegradable, which means they naturally break down in the soil, enriching it as they decompose. This feature is a massive plus for your precious green seedlings as it reduces transplant shock. You know that sulk plants sometimes have when moved to a new home? By using toilet roll tubes, you're giving your seedlings a familiar space to start their outdoor life, making the transition to the garden smoother and happier.
DIY Seedling Starters: A Step-by-Step Guide
Okay so we know why we’re doing this, let’s get to it! Here's a simple guide to turn your toilet roll tubes into seedling starters:
Step 1: Check your tubes
Most unbleached cardboard inner tubes of the type used for toilet rolls are fine to plant in your garden. But if your inner tubes are of the more fancy variety, and have wording or patterns printed on them, it’s worth checking that the ink is soy-based or another environmentally-friendly alternative.
This picture was taken by one of our lovely customers, back when we used to print our name on our inner tubes with soy ink. We’ve cut that step out now as part of our drive to eliminate all unnecessary decoration and packaging, but if you still have some of these vintage Naked Sprout rolls lying around you can be assured that the soy-based dye we used to use won’t harm your seedlings or your soil.
Step 2: Tube gathering
All good? Okay time to hoard some toilet roll tubes! The average person in the UK uses about 127 rolls per year, so it shouldn’t take too long to get a decent pile together. At this stage we should apologise to our own customers - Naked Sprout rolls are twice the length of many toilet rolls out there, so it might take a bit longer in your case.
Step 3: Make the Base
Cut four half-inch slits at one end of each toilet roll tube, evenly spaced around the circumference. Fold these inwards to make a sturdy bottom for your little tube. This base will hold your soil and seedling in place.
Step 4: Fill 'em Up
You’ll need a compost mix to get your seedlings started. Your local garden centre will have bags for this specific purpose, and if you’ve got the right materials to hand you can make your own.
When you have your mix scoop some into each tube, gently pressing down to ensure it's snug and secure.
Step 5: Plant Your Seeds
Follow the planting instructions for your specific seeds. Typically, this involves placing 2-3 seeds in each tube and lightly covering them with a bit more soil, then watering to moisten the soil.
Step 6: Water and Wait
Place them on a sunny windowsill and keep an eye out, before too long they’ll start to sprout! In this early phase it’s a good idea to check in with your seedlings from time to time just to keep an eye out for mould. During this time the soil should be kept moist, but resist the temptation to overwater!
Step 7: Transition Time
The packet your seeds came in will let you know when the seedlings are good to plant out. The great thing about using toilet rolls is that, when the time comes, you can plant them directly in the ground, tube and all. Make sure the cardboard tube is completely buried to avoid drying out. It will typically take about two months to decompose, providing a lovely snack for worms and other garden helpers as it does, further enriching the soil!
In Conclusion
After all that we hope you’re feeling ready to get your hands dirty! Toilet roll tubes, often overlooked on their journey between our bathrooms and our recycling bins, are ready and waiting to be repurposed in the garden. So, the next time you're removing an empty tube from your toilet roll holder, remember its potential. Your seedlings, and the worms, will appreciate it. Happy gardening, and may your green thumb be ever greener!
Want to get your hands on some eco-friendly inner tubes surrounded by the most sustainable toilet tissue in the UK?
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It’s no secret that costs are rising. Those of us in the UK are facing a sharp rise in the cost of living, and we’re not alone in feeling the pinch. All over the world, everyday items are getting more expensive.
It doesn’t get more everyday than toilet rolls, and many of them are climbing in price as well. At Naked Sprout we’ve been able to keep our prices the same per sheet since launching in 2020, so we wanted to take some time to take a deep dive on the kind of pressures that are leading to other manufacturers putting their prices up and why we aren’t doing the same.
COVID-19 Disruptions:
When it comes to the cost of goods, disruption is often bad news for stability. It doesn’t get much more disruptive than the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic wreaked havoc on global supply chains, and the paper industry was no exception. While many workers started to work from home, industries such as factories, transport, and distribution centres - the places where physical goods come in and out - can’t make this kind of shift.
So across manufacturing, distribution, and logistics networks there was a piecemeal mosaic of factory shut-downs, social distancing measures and workforce shortages. The process of getting things to the right place at the right time became much less certain. Essential components, particularly paper pulp, became harder to get hold of.
Added to this, the pandemic disrupted typical patterns of demand. Lots of people stuck at home meant lots of home improvements, and soaring demand for timber as people decided to finally fix up the living room shelves and get round to putting in vegetable beds. The demand for timber meant there was less of the raw material for paper pulp, and less pulp meant…
A Rise in Pulp Prices:
To make toilet rolls and tissue products you need pulp, the raw material derived from wood fibres. Whether the source is virgin wood or bamboo, you cannot do without it.
What about recycled rolls? We hear you ask? Yes, even recycled rolls. Recycling paper is brilliant, but you cannot endlessly reuse it - you have to add 30% new material each time to keep the mix strong enough so it doesn’t break down. So we’re back to the price of pulp.
In the last few years the pulp market has been experiencing significant turbulence, driving pulp prices to unprecedented levels. The soaring demand for timber that came during the pandemic coincided with a growing demand for packaging materials, particularly for e-commerce and delivery services, as people ordered more and more goods to be delivered at home. The result is a classic case of supply and demand imbalance, and pulp prices reaching record highs.
Even those recycled rolls aren’t faring loads better. More and more people working from home means less and less waste office printer paper, and that is the most commonly-used material for recycled tissue. So the waste paper needed to make recycled tissue has to be shipped from further afield, meaning, you guessed it, higher costs.
So manufacturers of tissue products, regardless of whether they make their products with recycled material or virgin pulp, find themselves grappling with skyrocketing production costs. In most cases they are passing at least some of these costs on to customers in the form of price rises.
Why hasn’t this happened at Naked Sprout? Bamboo has been a bit more reliable to get hold of than more standard tree timber, because it hasn’t been in the same demand as a building material. And the fact that we bring our bamboo from China in the form of pulp rather than finished rolls reduces the price to ship it.
And when it comes to our recycled rolls we’ve done something we think is a bit special - instead of using office printer paper we’ve gone for a massively underutilised source. Those same cardboard delivery boxes and packaging materials that are fueling a demand for paper pulp, and causing a headache for many tissue manufacturers? We’re using them to make our recycled rolls!
Conclusion
So there it is laid out. If you’ve noticed standard toilet rolls getting smaller and costlier there are some very simple economic factors at work. From demand for pulp to rising energy bills, the standard way of doing things is being disrupted - and disruption means higher prices.
But we’re all about positive disruption at Naked Sprout, and a better way of doing things than the standard. Our products are priced competitively because we’re not seeking sky-high profits, instead focusing on the changes we can make to bring down our footprint. Luckily for us, putting the legwork into securing renewable energy sources and more sustainable materials has also meant lower costs, as traditional manufacturing processes come under pressure. And everyone who makes our rolls is paid a living wage, so nobody is being shortchanged.
We all hope to see a return to more normal prices in our shops and, and lower bills at home, in the near future. And at Naked Sprout we’ll keep doing things the same way, manufacturing simply, sustainably, and with no hidden costs to our planet.
Want sustainable toilet rolls with stable prices?
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We have a big announcement.
We founded Naked Sprout in 2020 because we believed everyday tissue products should be made simply and sustainably. As we enter our fourth year we are more convinced than ever.
Every roll of Naked Sprout bamboo toilet roll saves 360g of CO2e, enough to drive nearly a whole mile, compared with buying UK-made recycled toilet paper. If we compare with standard supermarket rolls, and bamboo rolls made in China, the savings are even bigger.
Add to that the excess bleach, plastic, and harsh chemicals that go hand in hand with making toilet rolls the traditional way. We’re constantly aware of the unnecessary waste.
So, we want to expand. We often receive queries from people outside the UK who have heard about what we are doing, and want to make the switch. We’d love to be able to welcome them aboard. To support our plans to grow into Europe, we’re launching a new crowdfunding campaign through Seedrs.
This is your opportunity to join our journey at an incredibly exciting time by investing in Naked Sprout, for as little as £20.
What is crowdfunding, and what does it mean to invest with us? Read on…
What is Crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding provides a way for businesses to secure funding, and for individuals to support the work of teams they believe in. Instead of going to a single or small set of investors, crowdfunding allows companies to bring their vision to their whole community, using a specialised crowdfunding website such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or, in our case Seedrs.
To start a crowdfunding campaign a company sets a financial goal and a deadline. Supporters then visit the funding website and if they connect with the idea, they pledge money towards it. If the campaign reaches or surpasses its financial target within the set timeframe, the project gets the green light. The funds are used to bring the idea to life, and backers get to see the impact of their contribution.
So what do individual supporters get in return? This can vary depending on the approach that the company is taking. We are raising on Seedrs for a specific reason; if you back our campaign, you are investing in us. For as little as £20, you can buy shares in Naked Sprout.
Seedrs is built for equity crowdfunding. We wanted a platform that values transparency, security, and community – and that’s exactly what Seedrs provides. They’ve got a stellar track record, a user-friendly platform, and they’re regulated by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), ensuring that all operations are conducted with integrity and transparency.
While investing is never a sure thing, and returns are never guaranteed, Seedrs does a brilliant job of ensuring that all projects meet stringent criteria before they’re open for investment.
Our Plans
We used Seedrs to raise funds in 2022 and we were overwhelmed by the support of our community. We didn’t waste a single penny. With help from the funds from our 2022 campaign we have been able to expand our manufacturing base and storage capacity at our marvellous B Corp factory in Spain and triple our customer base in 18 months.
Our business is simple and scalable and, with the seeds of our last investment, we’ve proven how fast we can grow. Now we have a much bigger community, and even more ambition.
Our neighbours in Europe spend £16 billion annually on toilet roll. If we were to gain just 0.4% of this market, Naked Sprout would be 10 times the size it is now, making huge savings in the CO2e, bleach, and plastic that are being produced with every conventional roll.
For a quick sense of what this could mean, we sold five million rolls in the UK in 2023. If we were to sell 50 million rolls we’d save enough carbon, even compared with UK-made recycled rolls, to drive 44 million miles, or power 3000 homes for a year.
We’re ready to do it, and we want you with us.
Ready to Roll?
When you invest with us, you’re part of our story, with equity, updates, and discounts on Naked Sprout purchases. There’s much more detail about becoming an investor through Seedrs on their website, and more information about our own plans on our campaign page. It’s live now.
If you’re feeling the excitement and ready to support our plans for the next stage of Naked Sprout, we’re more than ready to welcome you. Head over to our campaign page, read up on the details, and, if it feels right, take the leap with us.
Warm regards,
Leila, Tom, and the Naked Sprout team.
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Why Do Cats and Dogs Love to Play with Tissue Products and Cardboard Boxes?
Okay, so your furry friend has spied a toilet roll from across the room. To you, it’s one of the most mundane products imaginable. To them, it’s the new must-have toy. What on earth are they thinking?
Toilet Rolls
Toilet paper rolls seem boring to us, but maybe we’re just not looking at them the right way! We regularly receive all sorts of lovely animal pictures from our customers, showing cats and dogs (and even the odd rabbit and gerbil!) playing with our rolls. The most popular game for cats, as far as we can tell, is The Big Unravel, where a cat bats the toilet roll on its holder until all the lovely neat sheets sit unravelled on the bathroom floor. It’s a bit of a shame for our lovely customers, but the cats seem to enjoy it!
So what are they getting out of it? We think the sound and texture of the paper provide sensory stimulation and mimic the rustling of prey, satisfying their natural hunting instincts. Added to that, the cylindrical shape and light weight means they roll well, keeping furry paws and legs occupied.
Dogs also find toilet paper rolls appealing, although they don’t play in quite the same way. Some dogs enjoy chewing on the cardboard tube, while others may delight chewing through the paper itself, or chasing after the roll as it unravels.
The other part of the typical Naked Sprout order that our customers' furry friends enjoy is the cardboard box.
For cats, a nice big cardboard box can provide a sense of security and serve as a cozy hiding spot. Cats are also famously curious of course, and a cardboard box with a lid or holes in it provides plenty of opportunities for exploration. Dogs, too, enjoy the tactile experience of cardboard boxes and may use them as impromptu chew toys or retreats for relaxation.
Are Tissue Products and Cardboard Boxes Safe for Pets to Eat?
So toilet rolls (and other tissue products), along with the cardboard boxes they come in, can provide plenty of fun for our pets. But we know that lots of our customers are concerned about the safety of letting their pets play with (and, let’s face it, chew on) these products. Here’s what we know.
Tissue Paper:
Tissue paper, like the kind that makes up toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and facial tissues, is generally safe for pets to play with under supervision. However, a habit of ingesting large quantities of tissue paper may be a sign of stress, and it can lead to gastrointestinal issues such as blockages or obstructions. This is particularly true for cats, who may be prone to pica (the urge to eat non-food items) or curious kittens who explore the world through their mouths. Dogs, too, may inadvertently swallow bits of tissue paper during play, especially if they are enthusiastic chewers.
At Naked Sprout we are quite unusual in that our products aren’t bleached and don’t have any harsh chemical additives, so our toilet rolls have been certified “food safe”. Still, we don’t recommend actually eating them! Some shredded tissue here and there shouldn’t be a big deal, but if a pet seems to be swallowing you should pull them away.
Cardboard:
Cardboard isn't normally inherently toxic but it’s worth being aware of any designs printed or dyed on them, and of the adhesives that are used to glue the boxes in shape. Once again, at Naked Sprout we try to keep things as environmentally-friendly as we can, so all of our packaging is fully compostable, our adhesives are derived from pine sap, and the dye we use to print our boxes comes from soy. So no worries there!
But again, swallowing can pose more of a problem. Cardboard can be a choking hazard, or cause intestinal blockages if ingested in large amounts. Most pets will likely spit out small pieces of cardboard, but those with a penchant for chewing may be at higher risk of swallowing larger chunks.
Plastic Packaging:
At Naked Sprout we never use plastic in any form, in any of our products. But as any stroll down the supermarket aisles will show you, this isn’t the case for most toilet roll brands. Most of the toilet rolls and kitchen rolls you buy in the shops, and a lot of our tissues, will come wrapped in plastic.
Plastic wrapping, if ingested, can cause serious health issues for pets, including intestinal blockages or perforations. Signs that your pet may have ingested plastic packaging include vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, lethargy, and loss of appetite. If you suspect your pet has ingested plastic, you should get in touch with your vet right away.
The same problem that applies to pets applies to the rest of the animal kingdom, and when plastic is thrown away it often ends up in landfill, so we would really recommend our fellow animal lovers avoid single-use plastic wherever possible.
Signs of Possible Health Problems:
If you find your pet has been eating larger amounts of tissue or cardboard there are some signs of potential health problems to look out for. If you notice any of these, do get in touch with your vet as soon as possible:
These symptoms could indicate a range of issues, including gastrointestinal blockages, ingestion of toxic substances, or other medical emergencies. Your vet will be able to give you the best guidance.
Conclusion:
Tissue products and cardboard boxes can provide pets with entertainment and stimulation. It’s natural for our furry friends to seek out interesting experiences in the homes they share with us, and it’s natural for us to fret about them.
For the safest play we recommend keeping an eye on your pet while they’re playing with tissue and boxes, pulling them away if they appear to be actually eating (rather than just shredding) and always be vigilant for signs of potential health problems. And for all of our customers who regularly discover their rolls unravelled on the bathroom floor, we can only apologise. We’ve been there ourselves!
Fancy trying the rolls that are super fun and totally non-toxic, from the core to the box?
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Have you ever paused mid-sneeze and pondered the history of the piece of cloth or paper you're about to use? Probably not, and who could blame you?
But the humble handkerchief and its modern-day cousin, the facial tissue, have a past as rich and textured as the finest linen. With so many blog posts about toilet rolls, we thought it was time we took a minute to dive into the history of one of our other products, facial tissues!
How long have we had disposable tissues and when did they take over from their cloth cousins? Tissues at the ready? Let’s jump in.
The Handkerchief: A Tale of Elegance and Etiquette
It’s likely that the habit of keeping a bit of cloth on you to wipe your face goes back as far as cloth itself, and we have archaeological evidence of small personal cloths dating back thousands of years. Among the archaeological finds of the Roman Empire, are the 'sudarium,' a cloth used to wipe sweat from the face and neck during hot Mediterranean days.
It isn’t until we get to the European Middle Ages that we start to see evidence of handkerchiefs being used as all-purpose everyday accessories, particularly among members of the aristocracy. For these mediaeval carriers, handkerchiefs provided a way to show their access to rich cloth and their personal refinement, and so provided a sign of social status. It’s likely this combination of ideas of personal connection and refinement that gives rise to the classic trope of a fair maiden at a tournament passing on a glove or handkerchief to her favoured knight.
Upper-class delight in handkerchiefs continues through the Renaissance, with the fabric used and embellishments becoming increasingly fancy and elaborate. Members of the courts of King Louis the XVI of France were known to carry richly embroidered handkerchiefs of the finest silks and laces. The variety of handkerchiefs seems to have been a bit much for the ill-fated King, who eventually issued a decree that handkerchiefs, which had previously been fashioned in all sorts of shapes and sizes, should be a standard 16 inch square. Queen Elizabeth I of England was known for her elaborate collection of handkerchiefs, some of which were adorned with precious gems.
It’s hard to imagine such richly-appointed accessories ever did much heavy-lifting in terms of nose-blowing, face-wiping, and tear-mopping. But people needed to blow their noses back then same as they do now, and one 16th Century Italian writer even offered the following advice for blowing your nose and keeping it classy:
...when you have blown your nose you should not open your handkerchief and look inside as if pearls or rubies might have descended from your brain...
It's a good tip!
One final use that was well established right up to the Victorian era but is not seen much today was soaking a handkerchief with perfume to be held to the nose. This was considered an important way of preventing illness, due to the widespread belief that disease was caused by bad odours, and could provide some respite for city-dwellers as they walked through less-than-sanitary streets.
The Facial Tissue: A Modern Marvel
While handkerchiefs reigned supreme for centuries, the 20th century brought a revolution in personal hygiene: the disposable facial tissue. The global Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 had made people increasingly concerned about hygiene, and particularly aware of the problem of used handkerchiefs. Although the public was encouraged to use handkerchiefs to catch coughs and sneezes, it was also widely known that those reusable pieces of cloth were a potential health hazard, holding on to germs for days and weeks.
The solution came in the form of the disposable tissue.
Facial tissues were first introduced by the Kimberly-Clark Corporation in the 1920s under the brand name "Kleenex." They were originally marketed as a way to remove makeup and cold cream. It wasn't until the 1930s that Kleenex began to be marketed as a disposable alternative to the handkerchief for sneezing and nose-blowing, thanks to a clever marketing campaign by the company, using the slogan “keep that cold to yourself.” The campaign by Kimberly-Clark to establish their tissues as the standard in personal hygiene was so successful that the word “Kleenex” is often used in the US as a catch-all for any disposable facial tissue.
With paper tissues on the up and up, the final nail in the coffin of the cloth handkerchief probably came with World War 2, when all fabric was in desperately short supply, and needed to be diverted for the war effort. Global fabric shortages led to changes in fashion, upholstery, and, most likely, the popularity of disposable tissues.
The Handkerchief and Facial Tissue Today
Today, both handkerchiefs and facial tissues hold their place in society, though their roles have shifted with the times.
Handkerchiefs made today are likely to be decorated and colourful such as the pocket square - an added embellishment that has been included with many men’s suits since the 1920s. In Japan, beautifully patterned cotton handkerchiefs (known as 'hankachi') are a staple accessory. They're used not only for drying your hands but also for wrapping gifts, serving tea, or as a fashionable accessory.
Facial tissues are evolving as well, with manufacturers finding more and more ways to add supposed health benefits through extra softness, added perfumes and lotions, and even anti-viral coatings. These products can often be more expensive, but the evidence that they actually work to reduce the severity of air-borne illnesses or prevent their transmission is mixed at best. The best way to ensure you’re using tissues in a hygienic way is safely disposing of them after use, and washing your hands afterwards.
By now, facial tissues and handkerchiefs have been firmly split in two camps, with cloth handkerchiefs used for accessorising and decoration, and disposable tissues the firm favourite for everyday nose blowing!
Interestingly, though, the two might be coming together again; With a growing awareness of sustainability and waste reduction, many people are returning to using handkerchiefs as an eco-friendly alternative to disposable tissues. But the hygiene implications of using reusable handkerchiefs during times of illness remain, so at Naked Sprout we are very proud to offer disposable facial tissues made from ultra-sustainable bamboo, without any bleach, manufactured without fossil fuels. It’s the cleanest option for your face, and the environment!
Conclusion
From their early days in ancient civilizations to their modern incarnations, handkerchiefs and facial tissues have played a significant role in two of the most important parts of being human; looking after our bodies, and showing off our good taste!
Whether you're a fan of the traditional cloth handkerchief or you prefer the convenience of a disposable tissue, there's no denying the impact these simple items have had on our history and daily lives. So, the next time you reach for that tissue or handkerchief, remember you're not just dealing with a piece of fabric or paper; you're holding a piece of history. Happy sneezing!
Want to blow your nose with the most sustainable disposable around?
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If you spend any time reading our Facebook comments you’ll see lots of different people asking the same question:
"Where do you get your bamboo?"
It’s an obvious ask - Naked Sprout are a UK-based company making toilet rolls out of bamboo. There aren’t any bamboo forests in the UK, so where does it come from?
The basic answer is that our bamboo comes from the the Hunan Province in China, where bamboo is sustainably grown for commercial use in forests that have been cultivated for the purpose.
But we’ve heard the question enough to be able to read between the lines. People who ask this question are normally motivated by a more nuanced concern; that we don’t really know much about our bamboo before it reaches us, or worse, that we don’t care about the social or environmental cost of harvesting it, pulping it, and transporting it to our factory.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Let’s get into it.
What is “Supply Chain Monitoring?”
As a sustainable business we have a responsibility to understand how our products are made - from raw materials to the point they’re sold, and beyond. It might not be a legal requirement, but we consider it to be an ethical one. If we want to sell our products as a genuinely sustainable alternative to traditional tissue products we need to know every detail of our supply chain.
In the case of the bamboo in our tissue products, there are some key stages to be aware of. Bamboo is grown, it is harvested, it is pulped, and then it is transported to our factory.
We keep our supply chain small, with only four suppliers and one manufacturer, so we can fully trace our rolls back to the pulp supplier. This is unusual in our industry; many other factories purchase tissue ready-made as large “parent” rolls ready to be cut down to smaller rolls, and have no say in how, or where, their raw materials are sourced.
This small team of suppliers means we can easily monitor what is happening at every stage. Our chain is monitored twice - by ourselves and by the Forest Stewardship Council - in a belt and braces approach.
We’ll go first.
Our Checks
Our bamboo arrives at our factory in the form of pulp that has been mechanically mashed by our suppliers. Bamboo pulp is a brown, fibrous mass that doesn’t take up too much space in shipping, but it doesn’t look much like the tall green poles we all recognise as bamboo.
Our bamboo suppliers are based at the heart of the huge bamboo forests in Hunan Province. One of the forests where our bamboo comes from has one billion acres of bamboo! How do we know we’re getting the right pulp, from the right forests?
Our FSC-certified bamboo pulp is sold by weight. When our suppliers at the heart of the bamboo forest have pulped our bamboo they weigh it, and then issue an invoice for that exact amount. This isn’t a simple round figure, bamboo is an organic product and the season and growing conditions will make a difference to how much of an area of bamboo forest equals how much weight of the final pulp.
So the weight of the raw bamboo pulp is the basis of our trade with the supplier, and we pay a fair price. The raw material weight is recorded on the invoice. When we receive the pulp back at the factory we weigh the material again to confirm that both weights match up. Once the weight is verified it’s recorded using specialist software against every batch of bamboo toilet roll we make. The result is that we can trace every pallet, box, and roll of Naked Sprout back to the batch of pulp used to create it, and the FSC-certified forest where it grew.
This system means we know exactly where the pulp has been produced, and the route that it has taken to the factory, and we can be sure of the climate footprint of that route by road and sea, between the forest in South-West China, and the factory in North-West Spain.
FSC Checks
So that’s our raw materials verified, but what about the sustainability credentials of the forest itself? For enhanced monitoring, our bamboo suppliers are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).
The FSC is an international organisation that provides the most respected and widely used certification system for responsible forestry.
Their checks take into account the management of the forest. They know where our bamboo is grown, and they have carried out their own independent auditing of these commercial forestry projects, taking into account sustainable farming of timber stock, fair employment of workers, and the land rights of local communities. All suppliers with FSC certification are obliged to undertake annual auditing.
The FSC audits and certifies our suppliers for their forest management, and they audit and certify Naked Sprout according to their chain of custody requirements as well. All FSC-certified suppliers verify their raw materials by weight, and keep records of the weight of products going in and out so that they can prove no raw materials that have not been certified have been introduced into their supply chain. They also monitor supply levels of finished products, so that they know the amount of products sold matches their records of what has been produced.
So our whole process, from growing the raw bamboo to producing the final rolls in our factory is fully compliant with FSC certification, and all materials are fully traceable from raw material grown in responsibly-managed bamboo forests, to the final tissue products produced in our factory.
What it means
These checks mean that we know where our bamboo comes from, we know the conditions there meet the best, internationally-recognised standards for responsible forestry, and we know how the product gets to us.
We put this knowledge to use. We display our FSC certification on our boxes, so that our customers can be assured we are meeting the best standards of responsible timber certification. And a further benefit of this painstaking approach to supply chain monitoring is the transparency we can offer our customers. Our calculations of our CO2e footprint take into account the full detail of our supply chain on the ground and the actual distance that the bamboo has to travel to reach our factory. In 2023 we completed two independent life cycle assessments that calculated the footprint of our entire supply chain, and from 2024 we’re printing our numbers on our boxes too.
So if you wondered where our bamboo comes from, now you know. It’s grown, harvested, and pulped in bamboo forests that are monitored by the FSC, and when we make our rolls we can trace them right back to their roots.
We have more information about our FSC certification here, and if you’re interested in more of the details of our production processes you can read our series of blogs about our life cycle assessment.
Interested to try toilet rolls that are fully traceable from root to loo?
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A typical Tuesday: you get up, brush your teeth, wash your hair, and grab your morning coffee on the way to work. Lunch is a meal deal, with a sandwich, drink, and snack. You pop into a shop on the way home to grab a few bits for dinner and some toilet rolls, because you’ve run out.
It's the standard routine for many of us. But all of it - the toothpaste, the meal-deal, the bits on the way home, often come courtesy of single-use plastic, destined for the bin.
In this blog post, we'll look at some examples of single-use plastics, why they’re wreaking havoc on our environment, and how planet-loving shoppers can give it the heave-ho.
What is Single-Use Plastic?
Single-use plastics are disposable items designed for a single, short-term use before being discarded. Examples include plastic bags, plastic cutlery, and the transparent plastic wrapping that covers most supermarket loo rolls.
These items offer more convenience to the shops that sell products, and arguably to customers as well, but all this convenience comes at a huge cost to our environment.
What harm can a little plastic wrapper do? Here’s a quick run-down of the damage of single-use plastics:
Pollution and Litter: One of the most obvious consequences of single-use plastics is pollution. Crisp packets, drinks bottles, and plastic bags frequently end up littering streets, parks, rivers, and oceans, harming the environment and wildlife. Marine life, in particular, is in peril as plastic waste contaminates our seas. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive collection of floating plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, is estimated to be three times the size of France.
Microplastics: Plastic doesn't decompose like organic materials do. Instead, it breaks down into small fragments known as microplastics, which stick around for hundreds of years. Microplastics are widely found in drinking water, plankton, and even breastmilk! Urgent research is being carried out to understand the long term effect of these tiny particles of plastic on human health and the health of wider ecosystems.
Resources: Plastics are derived from fossil fuels, whose use is a huge driver of the climate changing gases that are fuelling climate change. And turning these plastics into the disposable items we use everyday is hard on the environment as well, adding yet more CO2e to the climate debt.
How do we Break Free?
Plastic is a problem, and single-use plastic is the worst of it. Fortunately there are a few things we can do to cut the amount it features in our daily lives.
1. Re-use your shopping bags
The widespread use of reusable shopping bags made from materials like canvas, jute, or recycled plastic, are one of the big environmental successes of recent years. Campaigns to reduce single-use bags are most effective when backed up with legislation - The UK’s plastic bag charge, for instance, has led to a 98% reduction in plastic bag consumption.
2. Invest in drinks containers
Plastic drinks containers are a major contributor to single-use plastic waste. Investing in a durable, reusable water bottle made from stainless steel, glass, or BPA-free plastic will save money in the long run and reduce plastic waste. Many coffee shops offer discounts to customers who bring their own cups, making it a win-win for your wallet and the environment.
3. Minimal Packaging and non-Plastic Alternatives
When shopping for everyday items, pay attention to packaging. Opt for products with minimal or recyclable packaging. Choose loose fruits and vegetables over pre-packaged ones, and consider purchasing in larger quantities to reduce overall packaging waste.
New alternatives to plastic are being developed all the time, so it’s also worth checking to see if there’s a different option available for your everyday essentials. Naked Sprout are friends with Adios Plastic, a UK-based business who offer dog poo bags made from corn starch!
4. Beach Cleanups
Getting involved in local cleanup efforts and initiatives to reduce plastic pollution in your community can be a rewarding way to make a positive impact. We are based in Brighton, and our council offer support to local companies and organisations who would like to give back in the form of a collective beach tidy!
The Bottom Line: Corporate Responsibility
That’s the things we can do as consumers, but we would argue that the final responsibility lies with the manufacturers who are producing these materials in the first place. The companies behind the products we use every day are favouring plastic because it provides an easy, cheap, and attractive way for them to get their products to you, regardless of the environmental consequence.
There’s actually good evidence that the anti-littering campaigns were started by food industry groups in America, to distract attention from the huge amounts of plastic wrapping that they had started to produce. As always, it’s not enough for consumers to want to see change, it has to come from the manufacturers themselves.
That’s why we at Naked Sprout offer 100% plastic-free tissue products. We don’t package any of our tissues, kitchen rolls, or toilet rolls in plastic. And we are even finding hidden sources of plastic in our supply chain that most companies would never report on, and removing them as well. We hope to see much more transparency from other companies in future.
Conclusion
Single-use plastics have infiltrated every aspect of our lives, and their environmental toll is too great to ignore. Small changes in our daily habits can have a profound impact, but at the end of the day the responsibility lies with manufacturers; responsible brands will be honest about the plastic in their supply chain, and take steps to reduce it to zero.
Want your toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and tissues delivered - with no plastic in sight?
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You've seen them, probably even used them - wet wipes that promise a fresh, clean feeling with the added convenience of being flushable. Sounds ideal, doesn’t it?
Sadly, the reality doesn’t live up to the hype. Regardless of the promises on the packaging, these “flushable” wipes are causing some serious issues here in the UK. In this post we're lifting the lid on the not-so-pleasant story of what these wipes get up to after you flush.
The Misleading Misnomer: "Flushable"
First things first, let's talk about the term "flushable." You'd think it means that you can safely flush any tissue-like product down the toilet without any repercussions. But as those of us who use sanitary products will testify, this isn’t the case.
Most wipes, even those labelled as flushable, don't break down in water as quickly as toilet paper. Toilet paper typically disintegrates within seconds to a few minutes, while wet wipes can take weeks or even longer. This is because wet wipes are made of stronger fibres to keep them from falling apart when wet, which is great for cleaning, not so great for flushing.
So what can you flush down the toilet? Two members of the Naked Sprout team were lucky enough to take a sewer tour of Brighton a few years ago, and the engineer who led us on the tour was very clear on the three p’s; you can flush pee, poo, and (toilet) paper.
That’s it. No tampons, no facial tissues, and no wet wipes.
So what happens when you flush a “flushable” wipe?
1. Fatbergs
It’s an unpleasant name for an unpleasant phenomenon. Fatbergs are monstrous blockages made up of congealed fat, wet wipes, and other non-biodegradable items that have no business being in the sewers. In 2017, workers in London discovered a fatberg weighing approximately 130 tonnes (the weight of 11 double-decker buses!) and stretching over 250 meters. It took a team of workers over eight weeks to remove it.
It’s not exactly the kind of team GB record we want to be setting.
2. Pollution
It's not just our sewers that suffer, our natural environment does too. Parts of wet wipes that don't get stuck in sewers end up in rivers, seas, and on beaches. This not only poses a threat to wildlife but also contributes to the wider problem of plastic pollution. Wet wipes often contain plastic fibres, which do not break down and can be devastating for wildlife and the ecosystem. In the UK, the Marine Conservation Society found that wet wipes are among the most common pieces of litter on our beaches, with over 14 wet wipes found per 100 metres of coastline.
3. Cost
Dealing with the aftermath of flushed wet wipes is a costly affair. It's estimated that water companies in the UK spend approximately £100 million a year clearing blockages, most of which are caused by wet wipes and other sanitary products. This cost eventually trickles down to consumers, affecting your utility bills. Not to mention the tedious and downright unpleasant job sewage workers have to do to clear these blockages.
4. Plumbing
If the environmental and economic reasons aren't compelling enough, consider your own plumbing at home. Flushing wipes can cause blockages in your household plumbing, leading to costly plumber visits and repairs. It's a nuisance that's easily avoidable by just binning the wipe instead of flushing it.
Alternatives and Solutions
Those are the problems with “flushable” wipes, so what can we do to avoid them? Awareness is a great first step, and the fact that more and more of us now understand that 'flushable' wipes are not sewer-friendly is crucial. If you're looking for a more environmentally friendly alternative, consider using biodegradable wipes or, better yet, switch to washable cloths for cleaning. If you do use wet wipes, throw them in the bin!
These small everyday changes by consumers can make a big difference. But as always, we at Naked Sprout support advocate for more transparency and accountability on the business side as well.
As the issue with supposedly flushable tissue has become more apparent there’s been a call for clearer labelling on the packaging of all wet wipe products. The UK government, water companies, and environmental organisations are pushing for manufacturers to ditch the 'flushable' label on products that don't meet strict disintegration standards, encourage everyone to bin wet wipes, and to ban the inclusion of plastic in any product intended for flushing. We strongly support these measures, which would help reduce consumer confusion and ultimately, the number of wipes ending up in sewers.
The Final Flush
Flushable wipes might offer convenience, but the hidden costs and consequences are too significant to ignore. From creating monstrous fatbergs in our sewers to contributing to environmental pollution and costing millions in clean-up operations, the impact is far-reaching.
So next time you see the word 'flushable' on a packet of wet wipes, remember the journey they take after you flush, and pop them in the bin instead. Let's keep the wipes out of the pipes!'
Ready to enjoy ultra-sustainable toilet roll with guilt-free flushing?
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The word “vegan” typically brings to mind food - fruits, vegetables, and dairy alternatives. But what about the non-edible products we use daily?
Toilet paper, kitchen rolls, and facial tissues are everyday essentials for many of us, and we might not have considered their vegan status, but it’s worth considering! Today we’re unravelling some surprising facts about how animals can be involved in toilet roll production, and offering guidance on finding a cruelty-free roll.
The Basics of Veganism
To start, let's clarify what veganism entails. Veganism is a lifestyle choice that aims to exclude, as far as possible, all forms of exploitation of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.
Veganism was first coined as a term in 1944, and has deep roots in many cultures and philosophical traditions around the world. In the present day, the vegan outlook is shared by more people than ever, and initiatives such as “Veganuary” offer a positive, proactive way for consumers to try this mindful approach to consumption.
As we’ve mentioned, Veganism is most often associated with food, but the philosophy encompasses a wide range of products, including cosmetics, clothing, and everyday household items. We regularly receive emails from potential customers who would like to know if Naked Sprout toilet rolls are suitable for vegans. The answer is yes, Naked Sprout products are vegan. Not all tissue brands can say the same…
What's in Your Toilet Roll?
Toilet paper is primarily made from paper, paper primarily comes from trees, bamboo, or some kind of recycled paper or card. So far, so vegan, right?
Well, not quite. The journey from tree to toilet roll is not always a straight line. Various additives and processes come into play, some of which involve the animal products, or introduce animal welfare concerns.
This is concern number one. Gelatine is a setting agent typically derived from animal bones that is the basis of many widely used adhesives, including those used to bind the tissue and plys of some toilet rolls. For this reason, it’s always worth checking with manufacturers about their adhesives, and being wary if they can’t give you a straight answer. At Naked Sprout we use an adhesive derived from pine sap, a natural byproduct of responsible forestry!
Most toilet paper is white - but the pulp it’s made from is brown. So brands that offer white rolls have achieved that colour through bleaching, often using chlorine bleach. While not directly an animal product, the process of manufacturing bleach has a hugely damaging effect on the health of waterways and the animals and fish that live in them.
Some more eco-friendly manufacturers use chlorine-free bleach based on hydrogen peroxide to artificially whiten their rolls. This is less damaging than chlorine bleach, but still has an environmental impact. At Naked Sprout we don’t use any bleach or bleach substitute at all - we don’t think any amount of environmental damage is worth it, just for the sake of artificially lightening rolls. So our toilet rolls come in their natural shade - brown!
Plastic is not an animal product, but plastic pollution is hugely damaging and hazardous to animals, fish, and birds. If you’re considering the total impact of your daily habits on non-human lives, cutting back on plastic as much as possible is a great step. With this in mind, it’s worth taking another look at the plastic packaged packs of toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and facial tissues that line our supermarket shelves. These products could just as easily be sold in cardboard or paper containers!
Here’s another sad fact; some toilet paper brands test their products on animals. You wouldn’t think it was necessary for a product as simple as tissue, but as we’ve covered, not all brands are keeping their tissue recipes simple! Animal testing is of course a significant issue for vegans, and if you’re in any doubt at all it’s worth checking with the company to make sure. Naked Sprout toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and tissues have never been tested on animals, and never will be.
Finding Vegan-Friendly Options
Now we’ve covered some of the potential pitfalls out there, how can you ensure that your toilet roll choice aligns with vegan principles? Here are some tips:
Certifications like the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) indicate that the paper comes from responsibly managed forests, with sustainability and conservation in mind. .
Recycled paper is made with much less virgin fibre and therefore requires much less logging of forests, so it’s a good choice if you want to be sure your tissue products aren’t coming at the cost of precious habitats. You can also consider alternative products like bamboo toilet paper. Bamboo grows quickly, takes up less space and requires less water than normal trees, and doesn't need pesticides or herbicides to help it grow, lessening its impact on local species.
Some companies are explicitly committed to eco-friendly and vegan practices and will happily provide a full accounting of their processes and ingredients. If in any doubt, it’s worth checking. Naked Sprout products are entirely vegan, and we are always happy to answer any questions about our rolls and what goes into them. If we’ve missed any potential concerns from this run-down please let us know! You can always email us at hello@nakedsprout.uk
Final Thoughts
Veganism promotes a holistic understanding of how our lives are connected with the lives of all the living beings that share our planet. The question of whether toilet rolls are vegan might seem like a simple yes or no, but digging more deeply shows how simple, everyday, products can be produced in ways that damage animals directly and indirectly.
Weighing environmental harms can be complex, and perfection is always a goal rather than a reality, but we find it heartening to see more cruelty-free and ethical options becoming available for food, toiletries, and other everyday essentials. At Naked Sprout we are very proud to stand with our vegan customers, as part of the movement towards a more ethical, kinder planet.
Want to try our vegan, cruelty free products?
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Why do People Like to Read in the Toilet?
Reading in the loo; lots of us do it, few of us talk about it. But we’re not shy at Naked Sprout, so let’s fling back the bathroom door (making sure it’s unoccupied first) and see if we can scare up any reading material!
Why do people like to read in the toilet, and how long have we been doing it?
A Historical and Cultural Inter-Loo’d
Bathroom reading is not a modern phenomenon. We have extensive records of people using newspapers for toilet paper from the 1700s well into the 20th century. It’s easy to see why; this relatively soft, inexpensive material would have done double-duty for both reading and wiping! While most people now prefer toilet paper made specifically for the task, the habit of toilet reading continues to this day - a 2009 study found that 57% of adults regularly bring reading material into the toilet.
Evidence of toilet reading across cultures as well. Citizens of the Soviet Union were known to have extensive toilet libraries, with widespread newspaper and magazine subscriptions ensuring there was always plenty of reading material to hand. In Japan there is a term “Mariko Aoki phenomenon”, an urge to go to the loo when entering a book store, that some believe is a result of the widespread association of reading with going to the loo.
And the toilet isn’t just a place for reading - throughout history some have taken it on themselves to do a bit of writing there as well. Scrawling on toilet walls, properly called “latrinalia”, is common in public toilets around the world, and toilet scrawlings that are nearly 2000 years old have been found in the preserved ruins of Pompeii. As any visitor to a pub, university, or public toilet in the UK will report, the practice is still alive and well. While this kind of graffiti is often crude, and can be very unsightly, it does at least mean that most public toilets have a bit of reading material right there on the wall.
Why Do We Do it?
So that’s where and when people read on the loo, but why is this habit so widespread? The authors of the biggest study of the toilet reading suggest that it may serve to help with the… er… matter at hand, by providing some gentle distraction and a bit of light relaxation while we’re going about our business.
And relaxation is needed now more than ever. Smart phones, home working, and digital media are all helpful additions to our lives, but they are blurring the lines between public and private space more rapidly than ever before. In a world where privacy is becoming a luxury, the bathroom can serve as a makeshift retreat. As Canadian author Margaret Atwood put it: “the bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you're reading. Nobody can interrupt you.”
Unfortunately, the same technologies that are driving us to the privy for a bit of peace and quiet are often coming in there with us! A survey conducted by Verizon in 2015 found that 90% of people admitted to using their phone in the bathroom. This shift to digital media has made reading in the loo more convenient, but carries some potential health-hazards.
Why You Shouldn’t Read your Phone
So what are the risks of reading on the toilet? Prolonged sitting, especially on a toilet seat, can lead to issues like haemorrhoids. For this reason it’s best to keep reading sessions brief, and be mindful of posture.
There’s also the issue of hygiene. Toilets, especially public ones, are breeding grounds for germs and bacteria, and these can transfer onto your device if we touch our phones during or after going to the toilet. Unlike books and magazines, phones have plenty of warm crevices for bacteria to lurk and multiply. If we then take our phones into other spaces like the kitchen or bedroom (and let’s face it, we take our phones everywhere), we can transport those germs to other areas of the home. It’s important to clean your phone regularly anyway, but the best practice is to avoid using it in the toilet altogether.
And finally, what about our mental space? Catching up on news, emails and social media while on the loo is tempting, but it eats away at our downtime and encourages us to see every moment as something to be optimised. All of this is terrible for our mental health - if we want to feel a bit more peace in our everyday lives we need to look for moments to put down our phones, not sink deeper into notifications and live streams.
Our Advice
So if we want to read in the toilet without doing damage to our bodies or our health there’s three key points to bear in mind:
Interestingly, people seem to gravitate to this kind of bite-size material in their choice of reading. Comic anthologies, books of quizzes, and magazines are all popular material for toilet reading. In the UK people often read the satirical magazine Private Eye in the toilet, and during Covid19, when toilet rolls were stretched, they nodded to this practice with the Front Page Headline “48 sheets of toilet paper free with this issue!”
For the most hygienic reading, how about taking the reading out of your hands altogether, and putting it on the wall? Many people choose to hang interesting posters or framed sets of cartoons on the walls of the bathroom, some even wallpaper with newsprint, bringing us back to the Victorian practice of using up old newspaper in the bathroom!
Conclusion
So there’s a bit of light reading for you! It turns out there’s some very good reasons to read on the toilet. From newsprint to digital, Pompeii to the present day, the smallest room in the house has doubled-up as a library as well.
So, the next time you reach for that magazine on your way to the loo, know that you're part of a vast community of toilet readers, all enjoying a few minutes of peace. Happy reading, wherever you choose to do it!
Want to stock your tiny library with paper that’s soft, strong, and sustainable?
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In recent years, the conversation around sustainability has intensified, with more people seeking to adopt environmentally friendly lifestyles. We’re seeing this change play out at Naked Sprout, and we’re part of it ourselves, as our customers look for sustainable alternatives to traditional toilet rolls, tissues, and kitchen roll.
We’re always making the case for more sustainability for everyone - but a prevailing myth suggests that sustainability is a luxury, only for those with deeper pockets.
Today, we're here to explore the true cost of sustainable products.
The Cost of Sustainability
First off, let’s bust one myth. If a sustainable product is more expensive, it’s probably not because the company is profiteering.
The profits accrued by the largest brands doing the most environmental damage are far, far higher than those who are looking to reduce their impact. In manufacturing, the cheapest way is usually the standard way. And as we all know, the standard ways of making products have been doing a lot of damage. The plastic, greenhouse gases, and toxic chemicals that come from traditional manufacturing methods are all polluting our environment, and the world’s biggest manufacturers are some of the biggest culprits.
Sustainable manufacturers try to break with these norms, and so the first green products in a sector will usually have higher overheads. Ethical sourcing and transportation of raw materials, fair labour practices, and eco-friendly materials cost more than just doing business as usual.
How do Sustainable Products Get Cheaper?
The good news is that as the market for sustainable products grows it matures. As technology advances and the demand for sustainable options grows, the cost of making them drops. Here's how this happens:
1. Economies of Scale
This is the big one. As more consumers opt for sustainable products, companies are able to produce these goods in larger quantities, lowering the unit cost. Scales of production that simply weren’t feasible in, say, electric vehicles a decade ago are becoming a reality today, lowering the price for manufacturers and the price for consumers.
2. Technological Advancements
Innovations in sustainable materials and production processes have significantly reduced costs. For instance, the price of solar panels has plummeted 90% over the past decade, making renewable energy more accessible than ever.
3. Incentives and Subsidies
Many governments now offer incentives for purchasing sustainable products. In the UK, for example, home owners can claim up to £7,500 to install heat pumps, a more sustainable and efficient form of central heating. Incentives like this can help bridge the price gap between conventional and sustainable options.
Long-Term Cost Savings
Sustainable products often lead to long-term savings. An LED light bulb, for example, may cost more upfront than a traditional bulb, but it uses less energy and lasts much longer, around 50,000 hours of light, compared to 750 hours for traditional incandescent bulbs! This means lower energy bills, and fewer replacements over time.
Case Studies: Sustainable Products Winning the Price War
Now that we’ve considered how sustainable products get less expensive, let’s look at some real-world examples of products that are turning the tide on cheap, polluting, and unsustainable manufacturing methods.
1. Clothing
Sustainable fashion brands initially faced criticism for high prices. However, as demand has grown the cost of sustainable fabrics, like organic cotton and hemp, is starting to drop. And greater awareness of labour conditions means that fast fashion brands, who often benefit from unjust labour practices face more pressure from customers. All of this is slowly changing the clothing industry to one where more sustainable brands can thrive.
2. Food
Organic foods were once significantly more expensive than their conventional counterparts. Today, with organic farming becoming more widespread, the price gap has narrowed considerably. In some cases, organic products are even cheaper, especially when purchased locally or in season.
3. Tissue Products
We couldn’t make this list without a nod to our own sector - eco-friendly tissue products! The first wave of environmentally conscious manufacturers started making tissue products from bamboo in the early to mid 2010’s. At Naked Sprout we have taken this baton and run even further with it, using only sustainable materials, manufacturing using 100% renewable energy, and even climate labelling our products.
Thanks to the efficiency of our operations we’ve been able to do this while matching (and in many cases going below) the prices of brands who are manufacturing the traditional way.
Conclusion:
Sustainable products are growing more popular, and more accessible, every year. With advancements in technology, economies of scale, and shifting consumer preferences, eco-friendly options are increasingly affordable. When we look at the long-term savings that come from more thoughtful manufacture, and the broader impacts of our purchases, sustainability appears less of a luxury and more of a necessary part of a future with less unnecessary waste and expense.
The future is green, and thankfully, it's within reach for more and more people every day.
Want to make a simple, sustainable (and affordable!) switch?
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If we asked you to imagine a toilet roll you’d probably picture soft sheets, cardboard tubes, and bright white tissue. The multi-coloured rolls of the past have mostly disappeared from UK shelves, but that doesn’t mean toilet rolls are a more natural colour now; the only way to make toilet tissue white is to bleach it.
So many paper products are bleached that we barely notice it’s happening, but what if we told you those sparkling white sheets might be hiding hidden dangers to our health and our environment?
Let's delve into the modern convention of bleaching toilet paper, and exploring the issues with bleached tissue.
Why Bleach in the First Place?
Bleached toilet paper has been with us since the Victorian era. The appeal is simple – bleach makes people think of cleanliness, sanitation, and hygiene. Early toilet paper manufacturers played up this association. Joseph Gayetty of New York, the first commercial manufacturer of modern toilet paper in 1857, advertised his “medicated paper for the water-closet” as a healthier alternative to the newspaper commonly used in his day.
He had a point, compared with your average ink-covered newspaper, bleached tissue is a definite improvement! But the days of newspaper hanging on a nail in the outhouse are long gone, and we now know that bleach isn’t completely harmless. Whether it’s derived from chlorine or hydrogen peroxide alternatives, bleach has an impact on our bodies and our environment.
Health Implications
The first thing to be aware of when it comes to bleach is the way it affects our bodies.
Bleach is a common culprit in contact dermatitis; at Naked Sprout we make unbleached toilet rolls, and we often hear from customers with skin sensitivity, who have found that unbleached tissue is less irritating to their skin than the standard bleached rolls. And all of us have noticed a difference using unbleached facial tissues (and, let’s be honest, the odd loo roll) to blow our noses when we have colds - our noses are less red and less sore too!
It’s not just the surface of our skin that we need to think about. Skin is porous - whatever comes into contact with it may be absorbed into our bloodstream. Recent studies suggest links between the bleach used in toilet rolls and a range of minor and much more serious health complaints. Is it really worth the risk, for something that’s just going to be flushed away?
Environmental Impact:
Beyond personal health concerns, the use of bleach in toilet rolls raises serious environmental questions. Manufacturing bleach involves the release of harmful chemicals into the environment, contributing to water pollution and wider ecological damage. Additionally, the process of bleaching tissue products generates dioxins, notorious environmental pollutants that can persist in the environment for years.
And we have to remember that all of this has a climate impact as well. The manufacturing and transport of bleach and the containers that hold it will generally be powered by fossil fuels, and so will the process of applying it to tissue pulp. All of this for a cosmetic enhancement that (we would argue) is simply not necessary in the first place.
Cleanliness and Colour
Our toilet paper today is very different to the kind used in the Victorian era, but the misconception that a bleached product is a healthy product has stuck around. While bleach is effective in killing germs, its presence in toilet paper doesn’t do anything to sanitise your loo. Giving your toilet a regular clean (ideally with natural or eco-friendly products!) is more than enough to maintain a sanitary loo without the need for bleached tissue.
While we’re encouraging you to ditch bleach, we should point out that it is important that your tissue is pale enough to show blood or changes in colour when you go to the loo. Luckily, the raw materials that are used to manufacture tissue are light enough so you can see any changes in colour perfectly well without the need for bleach. At Naked Sprout we use raw bamboo and recycled cardboard to make our rolls; both of these make a pale beige tissue that’s soft and gentle on your body as well as your plumbing!
Conclusion:
Making informed choices about the products we use in our daily lives is one way we can contribute to a healthier, more sustainable world. White toilet rolls have been the default standard on our shelves for a long time, but default doesn’t equal best - especially when you consider the potential drawbacks to your health and the health of our planet.
Ready to go bleachless with tissue products that are proudly au naturel?
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The new year provides a great opportunity to take a look at our daily routines and think about how we can set our lives up with a bit more balance and joy. One regular daily rhythm that’s easily overlooked is our trips to the loo - a shame, since the average Brit spends about 3.5 hours in the smallest room per week!
So we’ve taken inspiration from the New Year to come up with five healthy New Year's reso-loo-tions (sorry, couldn’t resist) that can upgrade your bathroom routine for 2024. Let’s get rolling…
1. Good Hydration
Take this as a cue to refresh your glasses, bottles, and mugs. Resolution number one is centred around one of the most fundamental aspects of health – hydration.
Many of us are guilty of not drinking enough water throughout the day, leaving us parched and sluggish. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere this is particularly the case in the winter. While summer heat encourages many of us to keep a glass of water on the desk and bedside table, we often neglect this habit in the colder months, and feel all the worse for it.
Going without enough water is bad for your overall health, and the bathroom is the first place you’ll notice issues. Dehydration causes constipation, an issue that affects about one in seven adults in the UK, and it’s also a leading cause of Urinary Tract Infections (UTI’s).
To foster this resolution, consider keeping a reusable water bottle handy, and aim to drink at least six to eight glasses of water a day - to a total of at least 1.2 litres. The good news for the tea addicts among us is that tea is almost as good for hydration as water, so if you’d prefer you can get your minimum daily intake with five mugs of tea!
2. Squatting for success
There’s no polite way to put this - the best posture for a number two is not sitting bolt upright. Western toilets encourage a chair-like sitting position that is familiar and comfortable, but not the most natural or efficient posture for the task at hand. If you want to ensure the most healthy and comfortable toilet experience, it’s far better to squat.
The benefits of squatting have been proven by medical research, with people who squat to go to the toilet reporting less straining, less time taken to go to the loo, and better overall mobility as a nice side effect.
Luckily for those of us in countries where raised toilets are the norm, there’s no need to totally overhaul your bathroom, (or try to balance on the seat!) to feel the benefits of squatting. There are companies that sell particular products (they’re called “squatting stools”) - but any low stool or box that you can store in the bathroom will do the job.
3. Mindful Hand Washing:
Okay, bear with us here. We generally think of a trip to the loo as an unavoidable interruption in our day. But what if we embraced these intervals of alone-time?
Mindfulness techniques are becoming part of many of our lives, encouraging us to look for the simple, repeating moments that can bring us back to ourselves. We might concentrate on our breathing for a few moments when stuck in traffic, or listen to the sounds of our neighbourhood and home while we’re having our tea in the morning.
Why not bring some of this attitude of mindful awareness to our regular trips to the loo? Washing your hands is a great opportunity; take a minute to actually feel the flow of hot water, the smell of the soap, the texture of the towel or feel of hot air when you’re drying them. Then take a few deep breaths before heading back into the world.
4. Digital Detox:
Here’s another resolution for a calmer bathroom - how about a digital detox?
In a world dominated by social media and 24-hour news feeds, we all find it harder and harder to put our phones down, and many of us will even admit to bringing it into the loo with us!
Not only is this not the most sanitary habit, it’s also not great for our eyes, or our mental health, to be glued to screens. So with a fresh new year on the books let’s re-frame our bathroom time as a regular opportunity to disconnect. Instead of scrolling through social media or checking emails, consider the classic book or magazine in the loo, or you could just hang an interesting print or poster on the wall if you want something to look at.
5. Eco-Friendly Flushing
And finally, we couldn’t write a list of ways to improve our bathroom habits without sparing a thought for our environment.
Resolution number five involves making sure your toilet is working as efficiently and sustainably as possible. Consider upgrading to a low-flow toilet or installing a dual-flush system if you haven't already. These options allow you to choose between a full and a partial flush, so you’re just using the water you need for each visit.
It’s also a good idea to be mindful of what goes down the drain. Make sure there’s a bin handy so nobody’s tempted to flush items that can harm the plumbing system or the environment, such as wet wipes, tampons, and sanitary towels. And for full marks switch over to unbleached recycled or bamboo toilet paper - like the soft, highly sustainable rolls from Naked Sprout, made with 100% onsite renewable fossil fuels, and no greenwashing.
Conclusion:
We’re guessing you didn’t have “upgrade toilet habits” at the top of your to-do list of for 2024, but we’re all about ringing the change at Naked Sprout! By adopting these small resolutions – focusing on hydration, posture, mindfulness, and our environment – we can make this regular part of life a little window of calm.
Want to roll into 2024 with the most sustainable toilet roll you can buy?
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We all want a better future for our planet, but how should we get there?
Environmental advocacy comes in many shapes and sizes, with different people and movements offering different ideas about the best way forward. One way of describing the difference between these approaches is by taking the spectrum of ideas and making it a spectrum of colour!
So what are light green, dark green, and bright green environmentalism, and what shade are you? Read on to find out…
Light Green
Light green environmentalists believe in the collective impact of personal responsibility. Advocates of light green environmentalism stress the importance of the choices we make every day. If we all make enough small changes to the way we shop, travel, eat, and entertain ourselves we can prevent and reverse environmental damage.
The rapid rise in popularity of plant-based milk alternatives is light green environmentalism at work. In the last few years “milks” made from oats, soy, rice, and nuts have become commonplace. Many of us now prefer them in our hot drinks, cereals, and smoothies. The CO2e emissions associated with dairy are at least three times higher than alternatives, so this simple switch has a massive impact. Especially in a nation of tea-drinkers!
Light green environmentalists also believe in the importance of raising awareness about everyday habits that are damaging our environment, to nudge people towards better choices. Most UK shops no longer offer disposable plastic bags, with sturdier re-useable bags now in favour, and this has had a knock-on effect of encouraging people to look again at the single-use plastic in their shopping baskets, and seek out alternatives.
All of these little changes make a difference, but are they enough? Maybe not, according to the next category.
Dark Green
Dark green environmentalists take a more radical stance. They argue that prioritising the environment means looking away from what individuals are doing, and making bigger, collective changes.
If you are more dark green, you don’t think problems of sustainability can be sufficiently addressed by changes to shopping habits. In fact, you’re probably concerned that shopping is part of the problem - excessive consumerism and the drive for profits are causing the manufacture, distribution, and disposal of a huge amount of things that nobody really needs.
Dark Green environmentalists look beyond what we can do as individuals to what we can do as in a group. They organise as communities to change legislation and seek local solutions for global problems.
Most of the Naked Sprout team are based in Brighton, and our neighbours just down the road in Lewes offer a great example of dark green environmentalism. In 2007 a network of Lewes residents joined the movement for Transition Towns. This means they are creating and promoting local projects for renewable energy, food supply, and more. You can visit the Lewes Transition Town website to find out more about the fantastic work they are doing, and get some ideas for your own neighbourhood..
So that’s light green and dark green, but there’s one more shade, and it’s where you’ll find Naked Sprout.
Bright Green
Bright Green Environmentalism is focused on the future. Where other forms of environmentalism focus on conserving and maintaining what we already have, Bright Green environmentalists stress that necessity is the mother of invention. They believe technological innovation and human ingenuity will play a crucial role in creating a sustainable future.
This is a perspective characterised by optimism. The global sustainability crisis presents grave challenges, but human beings have shown themselves to be capable of rapid adaptation in the past, and we will again. Great strides towards more sustainable norms in architectural design, technology, and energy supply are not only possible, they are happening; improvements come faster and faster all the time. These changes don’t just maintain the status quo, they make life better for everyone.
At Naked Sprout we are Bright Green and growing! While other eco toilet rolls focus only on the raw materials in an attempt to conserve trees, we are forging ahead with the most ambitious targets for innovation in the tissue industry. To borrow a phrase from the writer Alex Steffen who first coined the green spectrum, we aren’t just being the change we wish to see in the world, we are mass producing change.
This means overhauling our energy supply so we use 100% onsite renewables in our circuits and our furnaces, re-imagining recycled tissue to take advantage of the huge surplus of waste cardboard delivery boxes, even changing the adhesive we use to a by-product derived from pine-sap.
Having done all this we calculate our climate footprint in painstaking detail, and publish our figures, in the hope that this will encourage the rest of our industry to follow suit.
In Conclusion
So that’s light green, dark green, and bright green environmentalism. At Naked Sprout we are firmly on the bright side of things, but at the end of the day we need every shade of green we can get. Personal choices, community organising, and technological innovations are all going to be part of a better future.
We’re proud to be part of the green rainbow at Naked Sprout, and we’re optimistic about what we, our customers, and our suppliers are going to be able to achieve together.
Want to join in the Bright Green Revolution?
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It’s been a whirlwind of a year here at Naked Sprout! With 2023 almost out the door, we thought we’d use our last blog of the year to take stock and look ahead. Here’s a round-up of our year.
More Deliveries - Ocado and Milk & More
Home delivery has always been at the heart of what we do. It guides the size of our boxes, the design of our products, and it’s factored into the way we understand our impact.
We have a natural affinity with Ocado, the world’s largest online grocer, who use the scale of their network to shift the dial towards more sustainable shopping. We were delighted to bring our products to their store early in the year, making our low-impact tissue products much more widely available.
And as of October 2023, we have even more ways of reaching you, thanks to our partnership with Milk & More. It’s great to see the once-familiar sight of the milk float back on UK roads courtesy of their friendly, personal service, and we couldn’t be more proud to be along for the ride!
Introducing Recycled
We founded Naked Sprout with a simple goal - to manufacture the best tissue products with the lowest impact. We got off to a strong start with our super sustainable bamboo tissue, but we didn’t want to stop there.
In 2022, we designed and developed a recycled roll that was made the Naked Sprout way, utilising an under-exploited resource: the glut of waste cardboard delivery boxes and kraft paper that has risen so dramatically since the pandemic. In April 2023, our new product was ready to launch - the UK’s first unbleached, recycled toilet rolls.
At first we offered our new recycled rolls in boxes of 24 rolls. The feedback was so good that we quickly put 48 roll boxes into production as well, perfect for stocking up.
Top of the Class with Ethical Consumer
It’s one thing for us to say that we’re the most sustainable toilet rolls you can buy; it’s far better to hear it from one of the most respected voices for ethical purchasing in the UK!
The Ethical Consumer, producing high-quality research and journalism since 1988, reviewed our processes for an in-depth analysis of the current UK market for eco toilet rolls. Published in May, their score table of 19 brands surveyed placed us at the top! As a relatively new company, we are truly proud to have gained their seal of approval for the work we are doing to bring about real change in our sector.
This Morning and The BBC
We had more reasons to celebrate at the end of May, when we were featured in round-ups of eco toilet rolls on This Morning and The BBC’s Shop Well For the Planet. Once again, we performed well! We were especially pleased to hear longtime consumer champion Alice Beer, pointing out that we don’t offset because we don’t have to. It’s true!
Some more in-depth discussion of our processes came courtesy of Radio 4’s Sliced Bread. Their team put together some really brilliant research double-checking the claims made in the field of sustainable tissue. We regularly grapple with greenwashing ourselves, so we were really glad to be able to help their team understand our processes, and the final show provides a nuanced discussion of the current state of play in this sector. You can listen here.
Tweaks to our Products
Being sustainable is not a one-time thing. We are always looking out for ways we can change our processes to reduce the impact of our toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and tissues.
In July 2023 we made some changes to improve the look, feel, and most importantly the impact of Naked Sprout. The changes include more compact inner tubes, redesigned boxes, deeper embossing, and an adhesive made from pine sap, a by-product of responsible forestry. All of the changes (apart from the embossing!) make a difference to our climate footprint.
Lucky thing too, because during the summer we were knee-deep in calculations…
Climate labelling
We’ve always known it’s not good enough to just make claims about how sustainable or environmentally friendly we are; we have to be prepared to prove it. Partly this is so our customers know we are being honest and transparent with them, and partly it’s to change the norms in our industry towards more honesty and transparency by all manufacturers.
Throughout 2023, we’ve been undertaking painstaking calculations of our total climate footprint, taking into account everything from the growth and supply of our raw materials, to delivery to your doorstep. Our final numbers bear out our claims - our emissions are at least 50% lower than other eco alternatives.
Now that we have the numbers, we want everyone to see them. In November, we announced that Naked Sprout will be the first toilet roll in the world with climate labelling, with our full CO2e footprint printed on our boxes from the new year.
Giving Back
Toilet rolls are an everyday essential, but they’re easily overlooked. In fact, toilet rolls and hygiene items are among the most needed, least-donated products for food banks. We’ve always made donations to these organisations wherever possible, but through 2023, our logistics team has been putting together a system so that any dead stock and returns from our warehouse can be redirected to the fantastic Trussell Trust for distribution for homes that need them.
Our first large donation came in September, a collaboration between Naked Sprout, The Trussell Trust Brentwood, and D. Perfect and Sons (who hauled our boxes from the Midlands to Essex for free!) The footage of a whole team of wonderful volunteers bringing Naked Sprout to their centre was truly one of the highlights of the year.
We are also looking at other ways of giving back. We’re one of 21 B Corps based in Brighton and we love our city. One of the best ways we can invest in its future is by improving access to clean transportation, so we are sponsoring our own David, who looks after our larger orders, to volunteer with Brighton Bike Hub. This award-winning social enterprise repairs and refurbishes bikes at low cost for anyone who needs them. Dave still hasn’t mastered the finer points of gear calibration but he’s getting there!
A Big Thank You
Forget the calling birds and French hens; we need to tip our hat to the hauliers, scientists, journalists, delivery drivers, and volunteers who have been part of our story this year.
The biggest thanks goes to our wonderful customers. We wish you a very merry and bright festive season, however you’re ringing in the end of the year. We can’t wait to see how things unroll for us in 2024!
We’ve got something a bit different for you this week - a special treat for anyone about to enter a pub quiz, play some festive Trivial Pursuit, or just burning with a desire to learn more about toilet habits through the ages.
Yes, today we’re talking about the history of toilet rolls. Buckle up as we unroll the long and sometimes controversial story of this often unsung bathroom hero.
Early Days
Visiting the loo is a basic fact of life; all living organisms eat, and all of them need to get rid of waste. Where we differ from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we clean up afterwards!
So what did people use before toilet roll was invented?
In most cases the answer is “whatever they could find”. In the UK there is a tradition of using dock leaves, which are flat and broad and grow abundantly in our fields and woods. People who lived near coasts have often used seashells, and in the Midwest of the United States, where they grow a lot of corn, the soft husks of corn cobs would be saved for the purpose!
Using Paper
The very first recorded mention of paper being used in the toilet comes from China in 500 AD. Writing about the work of other scribes, the scholar Yen Chih-Thiu made a cheeky mention of texts that were far too valuable to “use for toilet purposes,” meaning that there were some documents that weren’t!
The popularity of paper products in China continued, with paper specifically made for the toilet being mass-produced by the early 14th Century. It took more than 500 years for the rest of the world to get involved.
The First Toilet Paper Products
The first standardised tissue product designed and mass produced outside of China came in 1857 - when Joseph Gayetty of New York started to make and sell toilet paper in flat packs of 500 sheets. Gayetty’s “Medicated Paper for the Water-Closet” was advertised as a healthy alternative to the printed newspaper that was often used at the time.
Toilet paper grew in popularity through the rest of the Victorian era, aided by the simultaneous spread of the public flushing toilets invented by British engineer George Jennings.
Fun fact, flushing toilets were first put on display at the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. Visitors to the exhibition could use these remarkable new conveniences at the cost of one penny, and this is where the phrase “spend a penny” comes from!
On a Roll
By the late 1800s we have toilet paper in sheets, and flushing toilets. But we’re still missing a central element, the cardboard tube!
Toilet paper is first sold in rolls rather than flat packs by Seth Wheeler in the United States, in 1871. Wheeler’s company are also the first to perforate their sheets, meaning that small amounts could be torn off easily.
Now, with our toilet paper finally on rolls we have a dilemma. We promised controversy and here it is - which way should a toilet roll hang?
This is hotly debated. When the US advice columnist Ann Landers gave her opinion on the topic her piece received more than 15,000 letters in response!
We’ve seen this ourselves at Naked Sprout - any picture on our social media that features a roll hanging on a holder will attract debate, with over-hangers and under-hangers passionately arguing for each side. But we have to thank a few particularly well-informed customers, who have pointed to this article, which includes images from the original patent of Seth Wheeler’s toilet rolls:
So over-hanging is what early manufacturers had in mind, but what about us?
We’ll happily take greenwashing and offsetting to task, but we know better than to wade into this one - we’ll leave it up to your preference!
Getting Softer
By the 1900s toilet paper is being sold in sheets, on rolls. We’re most of the way there, but there’s still one more aspect of a toilet roll we think is pretty important; softness.
Up until the mid 1900s the paper on mass-produced rolls had more in common with baking paper than the soft sheets we know today. And that wasn’t the worst of it, as late as the 1930s one brand marketed their rolls as “100% splinter free,” leaving us to assume some weren’t!
Soft household tissue was first popularised in the UK in the 1940s by St Andrew’s Mills, who became Andrex, but it took a while for soft sheets to become the uniform standard. Crispy, waxed toilet rolls were still used widely in schools and public lavatories in the UK well into the 1990s. Those of us who remember using this scratchy stuff would probably rather go back to dock leaves!
So Who Invented Toilet Rolls?
After all of this - who would we call the inventor of toilet rolls? If the question comes up in a quiz you can ask the quizmaster to be more specific! Do they mean the first toilet paper, the first time it’s on a roll, or the first time it’s the soft tissue we rely on today?
Having toured the history we’ll say that the biggest strides towards modern toilet rolls are made by Seth Wheeler in the 1890s, whose company was the first to roll toilet paper using perforated sheets.
(though you still had to watch out for splinters!)
And if you want toilet roll that’s softer than corn husks and more sustainable than ancient documents, we’d recommend Naked Sprout ;)
We’re fully in the seasonal swing now. If you’re organised you’ll have your travel arranged, your meals planned, and your presents sorted.
Or, if you’re anything like us, you’re still adding to a very long to-do list!
With many of us about to start dashing around looking for gifts for our nearest and dearest, lots of companies are ramping up the greenwashing in the hope of winning a spot under your tree. Here’s how to spot and arm yourself against their tactics.
Problem: “Recycleable” plastic
We’re all familiar with the sad sight: a pile of plastic packaging that sits next to the tree once the presents are opened. With plastic waste filling our land and seas, brands are rushing to promise that they won’t be adding to the pile, insisting that, even if it is plastic, their packaging is 100% recyclable.
This means that, in theory, you could recycle the packaging, but it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to. If your council doesn’t have the right facilities (and access to recycling in the UK is wildly uneven) they’ll go to landfill or an incinerator.
Solution: Shop around for gifts with less packaging in the first place. And for the necessary packaging, you can’t beat cardboard, which is recycled widely across the UK.
Everything we make at Naked Sprout is already either recycled cardboard and kraft paper, or it’s made from ultra-sustainable bamboo. All of our packaging can be recycled in your paper recycling, and it’s so free from harsh chemicals that it’s all compostable too!
Problem: Eco Branding and Buzzwords
More and more people are trying to minimise the environmental cost of their purchases. Brands know this, and it’s common to see words like “eco,” “environmentally-friendly,” and “ethical” popping up in product descriptions and marketing. Some companies use images of the earth or endangered animals to signal to environmentally conscious shoppers - we’re on the same page.
There’s nothing wrong with pictures of animals, but they don’t mean anything on their own. If a brand is throwing out the idea of environmental responsibility, without giving details about what they’re actually doing to use resources in a responsible way, you need to wonder why.
Solution: If a company is talking the talk about sustainability, they should be able to prove they walk the walk. Ideally there should be certifications that support their claims, such as the FSC logo, the Living Wage Foundation, and B Corp certification.
Online databases can provide a brilliant resource as well. The independent UK publication The Ethical Consumer maintains a database of brands in a range of sectors. After going through their processes (and coming top in their list of eco-toilet rolls) we can say that they’re thorough!
Problem: Greenlighting
Greenlighting is when a company takes great pains to highlight one ethical or eco-friendly aspect of their operations such as charity donations or tree-planting programs (more on that later), and avoids discussion of other aspects of their business.
We can see lots of examples of this in makeup and cosmetics - with brands that shine a spotlight on their vegan status, meaning that they don’t contain animal products and aren’t tested on animals. This is great, but many of these same brands are failing to mention the toxic chemical pollution that comes from their manufacturing - damaging entire ecosystems and all of the animals in them. And what about the people who work for them, are they being paid fairly, with good jobs? Human beings are animals too!
Solution:
If you notice a company trying to keep discussion of their eco-credentials to one narrow section of their practices, that’s a great opportunity to change the subject.
Companies who are truly doing everything they can to be ethical and sustainable will consider their whole supply chain in terms of fair labour, sustainable raw materials, CO2e reduction and pollution. They won’t be trying to limit discussion to just one thing.
This is where B Corp certification can be a really helpful tool. B Corps are companies who have volunteered to be independently assessed across their operations as a whole. At Naked Sprout we are incredibly proud to be the highest-ranked toilet roll company with B Corp, and we’re only aiming to go higher.
Problem: Offsetting and Treewashing
Gifts start their lives as products, and most products are made using fossil fuels. In the mid 00’s more environmentally conscious brands started to “offset” their climate debt by paying organisations to plant trees, in the hope that the carbon dioxide absorbed by these trees is enough to zero the balance.
But the science of offsetting is dubious, to put it mildly. Greenpeace have described offsetting as a “greenwashing scam,” a way for large companies who are the biggest polluters to avoid the effort and expense of changing their processes and simply buy their way out of the PR issue.
The Advertising Standards Authority in the UK have recently changed their guidelines around the use of offsetting claims, so fewer companies are boasting about being “carbon neutral”. But some of the same companies are still paying the same offsetting initiatives to plant trees in the hope that that planting trees, by itself, is enough to make customers overlook the polluting parts of their processes. It’s called Treewashing, and it’s growing!
Solution:
Be wary of any product describing itself as “carbon neutral” or “carbon balanced”. And even if a company isn’t using those words, be wary of brands that emphasise tree-planting programs - often this means they know offsetting doesn’t cut it any more, but they’re still hoping to keep some of the green halo without actually changing their processes.
Planting trees is great but companies should be transparent about what their emissions are, and point to concrete steps they are taking to make them lower. In 2023 Naked Sprout became the first toilet roll brand in the world to include climate labelling on their products, and we want to see the rest of our industry follow suit.
Conclusion
We all have plenty on our plates at this time of year. No company is perfect, and none of us are perfect shoppers either. But when it comes to greenwashing, a little extra awareness goes a long way. Hopefully, this rundown will help you see the red flags in amongst all the green, and give festive greenwashing the old heave ho-ho-ho!
And when it comes to gifts, it’s always a good idea to run through the basics. Will the recipient enjoy this? Does it make you think of them? If we were to be very cheeky, we might even suggest you get them something absolutely 100% free of greenwashing, that you know they’ll use sooner or later…
Just a thought!
The festive season is right around the corner and with it a mountain of wrapping paper. Gift-givers in the UK get through about 108 million rolls of the stuff every year!
The environmental impact of all this wrapping is alarming for those of us in the toilet roll game - we know the processes and emissions associated with producing that much paper. And we take a special interest in wrapping for another reason; at Naked Sprout we are one of the few eco toilet roll companies who don’t wrap our rolls.
With many of us gearing up to scale the great Wrapping Mountain of 2023, and some other eco brands even adding to the pile with special Christmas wrapping on their toilet rolls, we wanted to focus on this very modern practice. Why do some eco tissue brands wrap their rolls, and why don’t we?
Why don’t you wrap your rolls?
First things first. We launched Naked Sprout in 2020 and our position has always been the same - we are a wrapping free zone.
We don’t wrap our rolls for the same reason that we don’t bleach them. The paper, dyes, and chemicals that make all that colourful wrapping doesn’t grow on trees. Wrapping our rolls would drastically increase our climate footprint and add unnecessary dyes, chemicals, and bleach to our operations. We couldn’t do it without a really good reason.
So what are some of the reasons given by the wrappers? Here are a few we’ve heard.
Reason 1: Blocking Moisture
Some eco tissue companies state that wrapping their toilet rolls keeps them free of moisture. The thinking here is that absorbent material like tissue will absorb moisture from the atmosphere, damaging the rolls.
Of course there is some atmospheric moisture in the air at all times (particularly here in the UK!) and it’s possible that the wrapping keeps some of this out. But atmospheric moisture is also on our clothes, our carpets, our books, just about anything you can imagine. It would be a concern if rolls were regularly showing any signs of damp as a result of normal atmospheric moisture, but this simply isn’t the case.
And we are especially wary of this reason because of what “blocking moisture” can mean in the paper industry.
You may have heard of PFAS. These are toxic “forever chemicals” that are added to products to make them resist water, stains, and heat. We now know they also may have serious implications for human and environmental health. Toilet rolls are thought to be a major culprit in spreading PFAS into our water supply. A recent study by the University of Florida tested rolls from manufacturers around the world and found fluorine, a marker that PFAS are present, in all of the rolls.
The implications for the health of people who use toilet rolls with PFAS is being urgently investigated. In the meantime, we need to understand why PFAS are in toilet rolls in the first place.
We believe there are two main ways PFASs are entering toilet rolls - either from lubricants used in the machinery to stop them sticking, or from water-repelling wrapping.
We don’t use any lubricants with PFAS at Naked Sprout, and we keep our tissue pulp separate from our machinery with a layer of felt. We also don’t wrap our rolls, so we were already confident our processes were free of PFAS. But after the University of Florida study came out we tested our bamboo rolls to get some independent confirmation. We were relieved but not surprised, by the result: no PFAS detected. We're currently waiting on the results of the same tests on our recycled rolls, and we expect they'll say the same.
We cannot speak for other companies, we don’t know the materials they are using on their paper wrapping to help keep their rolls free of moisture. We are aware that one brand (who wrap their rolls) have admitted that organic fluorine, the marker of PFAS, has been detected when their products were tested, but they have not specified if these were found in only the wrappers, or in the toilet tissue itself.
We think most companies out there will have done their own testing. If you’re looking at wrapped rolls it’s worth asking about the rolls, and the wrapping, and whether they have been tested.
Reason 2: Easier storage
Next up in the reasons for wrapping - easier storage. Some brands argue that wrapping their rolls makes them easier to store at home, and keeps them free of dust.
We consider ourselves toilet paper experts but we must admit we’ve never seen a dusty roll! We did a quick straw poll of people here at Naked Sprout and found that most of our team keep their rolls in the box they came in, normally in a cupboard somewhere, and just retrieve rolls as they go.
Of course if you did have some rolls that were left unused and out of the box for a very long time you might see some dust accumulate; you could take off the outside sheets (about two sheets would be needed) and that should fix the issue!
Reason 3: Protection in transport
A last reason you will often hear is that wrapping rolls provides protection in transport, in case boxes get damaged or boxes get wet.
Damaged boxes are the bane of any company that delivers directly to customers! Our own position is straightforward. We keep revising and strengthening our boxes, and working with our delivery partner to identify stress points and mitigate them. We will replace any rolls that are damaged or wet, or offer a refund if that works better.
We’d hope other companies are doing the same thing, whether they’re wrapping or not. After all, a box that’s been soaked by rain will still have wet rolls in it, even if the rolls are wrapped. Unless, of course, the rolls are wrapped tightly with something that repels water, bringing us right back to the concerns about PFAS in toilet rolls.
Problems with delivery are far and away the exception rather than the rule. If these exceptions were producing so much waste that they outweighed the material and climate cost of wrapping every roll we sell, we’d rethink our stance. But they don’t, not even close.
Other eco brands are starting to acknowledge this, with several now offering unwrapped rolls as an alternative to their wrapped products.
It turns out that dust and moisture and transport snags aren’t enough to stop companies from selling bare rolls if there’s a market for them, but they still sell the wrapped version, and these are the ones they feature in their advertising. Some will include a single wrapped roll in the box even if you purchase their bare rolls.
Why is this, given the extra pollution, emissions, waste, and cost? We can’t speak for other companies, but there’s one more important reason we haven’t got to yet…
Reason 4: It’s Pretty
Many eco brands have been quite open about this; wrapping toilet rolls is a way of making products eye-catching, and showcasing the name of a brand when they are displayed in your home.
It’s a bit of bathroom-based marketing, in other words. It also makes the products look attractive in posts on social media.
We realise we may be taking a hit by not doing this, but given all the concerns we’ve listed above, it’s just not worth it to us.
Wrapping might make a toilet roll look extra special, but we think ours are pretty special already. Taking the care to treat resources with the maximum respect is more important to us than getting our name out there or covering our products in eco messaging.
So Naked Sprout rolls come to you in their birthday suits, from our factory to your home.
We don’t have to wrap, so we don’t!
Want to try our rolls in all their naked glory?
Black Friday kicks off the start of the festive season with a round of discounts and flash sales. The lure of the event is tempting for customers, and it’s tempting for companies as well. With so many big promotions it can be difficult not to get swept up in the mad dash to the checkout.
But we try to take things slowly at Naked Sprout. When we look at the impact Black Friday has on our environment, even the most seasoned of seasonal bargain hunters can see the problem with this annual festival of consumption - a huge pile of waste.
So as the makers of the most sustainable toilet rolls in the UK, and with the biggest shopping day of the year around the corner, we want to take a moment to share our thoughts about Black Friday.
The Problem with Black Friday
We’ve all been there - standing at the till with something we don’t really need but can’t resist, because the discount is just too good. On Black Friday companies crank the temptation up to 11. The deals on offer might not even be the best bargain, a 2022 Which? study found that 98% of goods discounted on Black Friday are available at the same or a lower price throughout the year. But the urgency of the limited time offer gets people buying all the same.
With offers on every product imaginable, millions of goods are made, discounted, and sold - but are they actually being used?
In a lot of cases, the answer is no. A study in 2019 by Phil Purnell, professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds, found that 80% of the products (and their packaging) sold through Black Friday sales end up in landfill or incinerators “after a very short life”. When we consider the materials, road miles, energy, and packaging involved in manufacturing and delivering these goods, it’s a grim picture of waste.
So it’s not surprising to see more eco-conscious brands swimming against the Black Friday tide. Patagonia’s famous “Don’t Buy this Jacket” campaign of 2011 outlined the total environmental and human cost of one of their staple items - and advised customers not to buy new clothes if they could replace, repair, reuse, or recycle instead. Some companies go further, shutting up shop altogether on Black Friday.
The situation is a bit different for us at Naked Sprout. We are in the business of necessity - nobody is buying toilet rolls for the thrill of it! Unlike many of the plastic-wrapped items hitting the Black Friday shelves, we know our toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and tissues will actually get used.
So we’re not closing up for the day, but we’re taking it as an opportunity to think about the message we’re sending as a company, our place in the market, and our place in your home.
Our Big Reduction
You may have noticed us hitting our social media with a big bold reduction - 50% off.
This isn’t a special promotion and it’s not a new offer. It’s the same reduction we offer every day; products that generate 50% less CO2e emissions than eco alternatives, due to the groundbreaking way we manufacture.
That reduction in CO2e represents significantly less fossil fuel used to make the same number of toilet rolls. But we cut out much more than that. We don’t use plastic, we don’t use bleach, we don’t use harsh chemicals like formaldehyde to fluff up our fibres, and we don’t use dyes or fragrances.
We’re even finding ways to reduce waste from other companies. Our recycled rolls are made from recycled cardboard delivery boxes and craft paper, just like the kind that will be flying around this Black Friday! This is a source of waste material that is growing rapidly, and currently under-used so we’re happy to do our bit to reduce the pile. Even our adhesive is a by-product, derived from pine-sap harvested as part of responsible forestry projects.
We know there are more beautiful rolls out there - with colourful dyed wrappings, bleached tissue, and fancy inserts. But we’re right back again to the main problem of Black Friday - the unnecessary waste of it all. Let’s remember, this is a product that’s going to be flushed away!
Keeping it Consistent
We’re keeping our pricing consistent over the next few weeks, so that all of our new and returning customers pay the same price as they stock up for the holidays, with no extra pressure placed on our warehouse, supply chain, or delivery network.
As we head into the festive season, we know our products will be playing a supporting role; helping with the cooking, making sure the loo is well-stocked for guests, and dealing with the inevitable sniffle along the way. It seems a bit odd to gush about tissue products but we are really proud of our place in your home, and grateful for every order.
In return, we are offering full transparency. From 2023 we will be printing on our boxes the full climate footprint of Naked Sprout, a reminder of the material costs and processes that go into making our products.
And if you did want to buy something for someone you love, might we suggest something that you know for sure they will actually use? If nothing else, it’s one less thing to think about!
We are all becoming more conscious of the impact our daily lives are having on the environment. Businesses know this and have been quick to jump on the eco-friendly bandwagon, plastering their products with green labels and eco-friendly claims. But is it all just a facade?
At Naked Sprout we are making concrete changes to our tissue products and the processes we use to make them to ensure our operations are actually sustainable. Greenwashing, to us, is public enemy number one - a way for companies to dodge the hard work it takes to reduce their impact and replace it with marketing ploys.
So we’re using our blog to delve into the deceptive world of greenwashing, exploring real-life examples, dissecting the tactics employed by businesses, and empowering you with the knowledge to make informed choices.
We’ll kick off with one of the basic terms you see in the discussion around sustainability - energy. What counts as energy, how does the use of energy in manufacturing drive climate change, and is energy the same thing as electricity?
Let’s plug in.
Energy and Electricity
In our daily lives, the terms "energy" and "electricity" are often thrown around interchangeably. We might use either to describe how we heat water, power our appliances, and light up our homes. But some companies are taking advantage of this blurry line between the two terms to avoid telling the whole story of how their operations are impacting our climate.
So what’s the difference? We’ll start with energy. Energy is the blanket term for any kind of active, working, force that does stuff. Heat is energy, motion is energy, light is energy.
Many forms of energy can be converted into electricity; a form of energy that flows down metal wires in circuits. The electric batteries, and circuits that were developed throughout the 1800s are foundational technologies of the modern world; powering much of our daily lives from simple lamps to complex computers.
But electricity doesn’t come from nowhere, it needs to be generated. And, most of the time, generating electricity means burning fossil fuels.
Fortunately things are looking up, with the invention and widespread adoption of generators that make electricity from renewable sources of energy like the wind and the sun. Most of the Naked Sprout team are based in Brighton - on a clear day we love to see the beautiful Rampion Offshore Wind Farm out in the Channel, providing enough renewable electricity to power the lights, kettles, and TVs in half the homes in Sussex.
But that’s just electricity. What about the rest of the energy we use?
Buzzwords and Blurry Lines
Think about a standard car that runs on petrol burned in an internal combustion engine. The car isn’t powered by electricity, but it still needs energy, and this energy has a climate cost. Transport exhaust from cars, lorries, ships and planes are a key driver of climate change that is not associated with the supply of electricity.
Industrial manufacturing processes still rely on many non-electrical forms of energy, and this energy use can add up to a huge climate footprint outside of their electricity supply.
Let’s take a simple example, using a made-up company, “Green Roll,” who market their toilet rolls based on their environmental credentials.
It’s relatively easy for Green Roll to bring some amount of renewable electricity into their operations. For instance, they can have solar panels installed at their warehouse so that their daily electricity needs are no longer provided by generators running fossil fuels. So their climate footprint has gone down - a very good thing.
But that’s not all the energy you need to make toilet rolls. Assuming they’re manufacturing using standard tissue-making methods, Green Roll’s total energy requirements break down into about 40% electricity, and 60% heat.
We’ve covered the importance of heat in detail in an earlier post on the total climate footprint of our manufacturing processes. In summary, all paper making requires a huge amount of heat, generated in furnaces, to dry rolls. Most manufacturers burn natural gas to power these furnaces, releasing a huge amount of climate-changing emissions in the process.
So now Green Roll has a dilemma. The best thing to do would be to find a way of generating heat from renewable resources, like we have done at Naked Sprout. It’s not as cheap as using fossil fuels, and it takes work to set it up, but it’s a necessary step towards a truly sustainable process.
On the other hand, Green Roll can take advantage of the blurry line between “energy” and “electricity” - and say that, with the installation of their new solar panels, the “energy” they use at their factory is coming from renewable sources. They only mean electricity, but customers won’t necessarily know that. And so the biggest source of CO2e in their process is being swept under the rug.
So what can we do?
When you see a manufacturer talking about the “energy” they use, ask them if they mean all energy, or just electricity. Does their process involve drying using furnaces burning natural gas, heavy lifting using diesel-powered forklift trucks, or the long-distance transport of products or of raw materials on standard diesel lorries?
If so, electricity is not the only form of energy at work, but some brands might not be able to give much more information - because they don’t scrutinise their supply chain at this level of detail.
At Naked Sprout we obsessively track all of the energy we use at every stage of our processes, and account for all of it. Our processes aren’t perfect, but we will always give an honest accounting of our total climate footprint, and the concrete steps that we are taking in our raw material supply, manufacture, and delivery to reduce our emissions.
Want your toilet rolls without a serving of greenwash?
We’ve reached the end of the road - the last stage on this tour of our Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Over the last four posts we’ve counted the total climate cost of making the UK’s most sustainable tissue products.
For our grand finale we’ll show how it all stacks up; how Naked Sprout compares to other eco rolls, what difference this makes to your own climate footprint, and the changes we want to see in our industry.
Taking Stock
If you’re just joining us now, or want a refresher, here’s the story so far.
In 2023 Naked Sprout commissioned the most detailed and transparent Life Cycle Assessment in our industry. Our assessment takes the same obsessively detailed, cradle-to-grave view of our processes that we do.
We source our raw materials with care, counting the emissions involved in every stage of supply and transportation so that we can improve our process, and unlike other eco brands our efforts don’t stop here. With no fossil fuels used in our manufacturing, nearly all of the energy that we use at our factory is generated on-site or comes from local sources of naturally-renewing biofuel. We manage our final delivery with DPD, taking advantage of their established network and rapidly growing fleet of electric and biofuel-powered vehicles. And none of our numbers include offsetting.
How does this compare to how things are normally done?
The Bog Standard
We are serious when we say we offer a truly sustainable alternative to other toilet rolls, and we’re not drawing easy comparisons here. If they weren’t buying our rolls most of our customers would choose another eco brand, or recycled rolls made in the UK. So that’s who we compare to, using known facts and published data about the standard processes used to make other eco toilet rolls.
What do these standard processes look like? Here’s what we know about the production methods made by other eco rolls.
Bamboo rolls made in China
The bamboo rolls sold by other eco brands in the UK are, as far as we know, all made in China. This means cheaper labour and less regulation around emissions than in the UK and EU. It also means higher emissions from transport, as these companies ship finished rolls rather than raw pulp.
And when we look at the wider design priorities and operations of these companies we still see bleach and chemical whitening, unnecessary dyes and wrapping, and a fossil-fuel intensive manufacturing process that may or may not be addressed by offsetting.
Recycled rolls made in the UK
Recycled rolls manufactured in the UK are manufactured using all or mostly fossil fuels, very often come with plastic wrapping, and will almost always be bleached or chemically whitened.
We should also point out that “made in the UK” can mean several different things, from the entire process of converting pulp to rolls, to just taking finished rolls that have been shipped from overseas and boxing them in the UK.
Either way, the raw material to be recycled will generally come from outside the UK, so transport emissions are still high. These emissions are actually getting higher - most manufacturers use waste office printer paper as the raw material that they recycle. The rise of home working since the pandemic as well as the widespread move to paperless offices has meant that this resource is becoming scarce. So manufacturers are importing from further and further afield to meet their needs, leading to more road miles for the same quantity of material.
If you’ve read this far, you know we set our standards higher.
Making the Change
So, in the final analysis, how do our numbers stack up against those of our competitors?
Sadly most toilet roll companies don’t publish their carbon emissions. This is why we asked Carbon Footprint to calculate our carbon footprint, and create profiles for a typical bamboo and recycled toilet paper that we could use to compare.
Carbon Footprint used published data around raw materials, distribution and manufacturing to make profiles for standard bamboo and recycled toilet paper that were as close to 'real' as possible. They included embodied raw emissions, the manufacture/processing, and all transport elements up to delivery to the customer’s doorstep.
Now we can make some comparisons. Here’s how these numbers chart.
We can see the huge difference we are making by manufacturing without fossil fuels for electricity or heat - a massive chunk of emissions for other brands that is just a tiny sliver for us.
But how does it work out at the individual level? We estimate that one person will use just under one roll of Naked Sprout per week. For the sake of neatness, let’s call it one of our 48 roll boxes per year.
For our recycled toilet roll this would mean 4.92kg of CO2e emitted, and 4.66kg of CO2e for our bamboo.
If the same person were to use the equivalent weight of standard recycled toilet rolls found on UK supermarket shelves, the climate cost would be 14.36kg. If instead they were to choose bamboo rolls made in China the emissions would be around 15.20kg.
This means that the difference you are making by switching to Naked Sprout is significant. Just one person switching from a standard recycled UK product is saving the equivalent CO2e as burning 10lb of coal. And, for that same person, switching from a bamboo brand made in China is the equivalent of charging a phone 1282 times.
That’s just one person. Naked Sprout is used by offices of hundreds of people, tap rooms, cafes, and wonderful customers up and down the country who are converting their families and friends. We are excited about the difference this is making. But at the moment we can only describe this difference in estimates.
If other brands are doing better we want to hear about it. Actually, we want everyone to hear about it - we think the situation merits complete transparency. So we’re not just putting our numbers on our blog.
Looking forward
Back in 2007 Tesco announced they would be adding carbon labelling to all of their own-brand products. Five years later this initiative was dropped, with Tesco explaining that it was a lot of work to calculate these figures, and that other retailers weren’t providing the same information.
We get it. It is a lot of work to calculate your climate footprint, and the numbers don’t mean much if other companies don’t follow suit. Sixteen years after that initial announcement the situation is more urgent than ever, but clear reporting is still hard to find.
But our customers still care, we still care, and so we’re pushing forward. We have been inspired by Oatley’s move to include the CO2e figure for each of their products on their product packaging. We want to see the same thing in tissue manufacturing.
Starting in 2023, we will be printing the CO2e involved in producing Naked Sprout on our boxes.
We are proud to be the first brand of toilet paper to be doing this, and we sincerely hope we won’t be alone for long. When it comes to the environmental impact of the products you use every day, you really shouldn’t have to ask.
Conclusion
And we’re done!
It’s been a whistle-stop tour of forests, furnaces, and forklifts. More than anything we hope this series has demonstrated the amount of thought and care we put into making Naked Sprout.
This is what it takes to make the most sustainable products in our sector. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible. After three years we feel optimistic about the scale of change that is possible, not only for us but for everyone manufacturing tissue, and manufacturing more generally.
We have no intention of stopping here - that number on the box will keep going down. We’ll be back with an update in 2024!
Want to try a truly sustainable alternative?
Welcome to part four of our series on our Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), unwrapping the obsessive detail that has gone into calculating our climate footprint at Naked Sprout.
In our previous pieces we have covered the scope of our LCA, the climate impact of our raw materials, and the groundbreaking manufacturing processes that make our products the most sustainable in the industry.
Today, we take our rolls to the end of the road, travelling from our factory in Spain all the way to your door.
Clearing the Decks
In part two of our LCA series we dealt with everything that comes into our factory; our raw materials and the emissions it takes to bring them to us. In this post, we’re thinking about everything that leaves our factory. Before we shift our rolls, we need to account for our waste.
We try to be as circular as we can at Naked Sprout. We don’t have seconds at our factory, because damaged boxes and wonky rolls go back into the mix for our recycled tissue. We even harvest the paper residue that comes when we clean the water we’ve used, and feed it back into our biomass furnace.
But we can’t use everything. The waste cardboard boxes that we collect for our recycled tissue will sometimes contain non-paper elements like bits of plastic or staples, wooden pallets break from time to time, and some of the raw materials we use have packaging that can’t be recycled.
By the scale of most manufacturers this is a miniscule amount of waste. We source our cardboard as responsibly as possible to minimise the amount of non-paper elements it contains - and sort this onsite to ensure that we can monitor and improve where possible. And if you think of the stages we are taking out by not transporting natural gas to our factory, not using bleach or dyes, not including extra wrapping on our boxes - and the packaging that would be associated with all of this - our pile of waste is very small in comparison. But it still needs to be disposed of, and so we still count the emissions that come from this disposal.
That’s the bins sorted. Time to deliver some toilet rolls!
The Final Stretch
The science of logistics is not the most inspiring topic on the face of it, but it’s an absolutely critical part of human history, going right back to the invention of the wheel. Good supply lines have fostered the exchange of knowledge and culture, and enabled people to build settlements in the most remote regions on Earth.
Where the environment used to present challenges for logistics, logistics is now one of the main drivers of damage to our environment - approximately one quarter of all global CO2e emissions come from transportation. When customers ask us how our bamboo is transported, and how our toilet rolls come to the UK, they are checking to make sure we are taking these miles into account.
You can be assured we are. The last leg of the journey for the UK’s most sustainable toilet rolls is handled by the UK’s most sustainable logistics company.
Delivering with DPD
There are two legs of the final stretch of the journey, and DPD covers both. DPD’s heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) bring our rolls from the factory in Spain to their logistics hub in the Midlands via road and sea. At the hub, orders are sorted and added to individual courier rounds, to be delivered on the familiar red, white, and green vans that come to your door.
So what’s the climate cost of these final miles?
We chose to deliver with DPD because of their portfolio of sustainability initiatives, the most substantial of any of the major delivery firms working in the UK. Some of the highlights - they are recycling and reusing 90% of their packaging waste, building new facilities powered entirely by renewable energy, and they’ve had their net zero target validated by Science Based Targets.
Eventually, we want to see all Naked Sprout products delivered on electric vehicles, and DPD are working towards that goal. During 2022 they doubled the number of electric vehicles in their fleet from 1500 to 3000, and by the end of 2023, they will be delivering to 30 major towns and cities in the UK on electric vehicles only.
They’re also making massive changes to their HGVs, like the ones that carry our rolls on the first leg of their journey from Spain. By the end of 2023 they aim to convert their entire fleet of HGVs to run on Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil, resulting in a 90% reduction in CO2e emissions.
So we’re aligned with DPD on the importance of making changes right now, rather than just setting targets for the future. But there’s an area where we don’t quite agree, and it’s reflected in our CO2e emissions. That’s the issue of offsetting.
Offsetting
As we’ve covered, traditional methods of manufacturing everyday items are causing huge disruption to our climate. Many companies want to do better. But moving away from fossil fuels requires relentless attention to detail, creative thinking, and compromises. Even with the best will in the world, it can seem slow going.
In recent years more environmentally conscious brands have started to “offset” their climate debt by paying organisations to plant trees, or by supporting renewable energy projects, in the hope of zeroing the balance of their own climate footprint. As part of their wider portfolio of sustainability initiatives, DPD have their own offsetting program investing in renewable energy projects around the world.
But the science of offsetting is being urgently called into question, and we’ve decided that it’s not going to be part of the picture for us at Naked Sprout. So, although DPD calculates and purchases an offset to cover the emissions that come with transporting our rolls, we can’t in good conscience count this in our figures. Even the emissions offset by DPD have been included in our total.
This is another area where we diverge significantly from other eco tissue brands - many of whom purchase offsets to cover their own manufacturing with fossil fuels, as well as accept and record the offsetting of their suppliers. We can see the temptation - these delivery emissions make up 16% of our total CO2e, a decent chunk! But we think it’s important to focus on making straightforward reductions to emissions through actually changing processes, rather than investing in the more speculative calculations of offsetting.
With DPD rapidly decarbonising their fleet we’re looking forward to seeing more real reductions every year, and including these reductions in our figures.
Adding it up
That’s it for the last part of our process. In total 17.8% of the CO2e generated by every kg of our bamboo toilet rolls comes from this final stage of waste management and delivery.
And now the rolls are at your front door, part of the climate footprint of your own home.
In a way, this is the most important part. The reason we go to such lengths to reduce our emissions is so that we can say to customers that switching to Naked Sprout will make a genuine difference to their everyday climate footprint.
In our next post we’ll see how we stack up against the norm.
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