How do we use water to make toilet rolls?
When we reach for tissue products, whether we’re in the toilet, the kitchen, or wiping our noses, we don’t normally think about how they’re made.
We’re here to change that. We regularly post about how we make sustainable toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and tissues, so anyone who’s interested can have all the facts they need to make a judgement call about the environmental ins and outs of these everyday conveniences. Our blog post today is prompted by an email from our customer Harriet, who got in touch to ask about how we use water.
It’s an important question! Water is an indispensable part of paper and tissue making, and it's also, of course, one of the most critical elements of our environment. Water mismanagement and waste is hugely damaging to all life on earth.
Where does water factor into the process of making toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and tissues, and what are we doing to conserve this precious resource? Let’s get into it.
Watering and bleaching
To make tissue, you start by collecting raw materials. This can be wood pulp, recycled paper and card, bamboo, and a range of other materials. At Naked Sprout we’re using bamboo and recycled card and paper packaging.
Keen water watchers will notice that water is already involved before the raw materials have made it to the factory - trees and bamboo won’t grow without water. Luckily in the case of bamboo the long stalks spring up quickly, taking up less land than traditional timber sources and only needing rainwater to grow.
Once the raw materials have been collected they are mashed and mixed with water to form a slurry. At this stage, many companies will add bleach to make sure their pulp reaches the bright white shade that people (sadly) still expect from toilet paper. Bleaching, using either chlorine bleach or hydrogen peroxide, is particularly common in recycled toilet paper manufacture, where printed office paper is a common raw material.
And it’s worth pointing out that bleach doesn’t grow on trees! The process of manufacturing, packaging, and transporting bleach involves water, plastic, and emissions. So whether you’re using chlorine or oxygen-based bleaching agents, there’s compounding environmental costs to consider, for the sake of a cosmetic alteration that doesn’t actually change the function of your tissue products at all.
We don’t bleach at Naked Sprout. Our toilet rolls are made from unbleached bamboo pulp (which is pale brown) or recycled cardboard boxes and kraft paper (which are also brown). Plenty of people think we’re loopy for making brown toilet rolls, but we’re happy with the colour and luckily so are our customers!
Testing and filtering
Bleach is one source of chemicals that isn’t being added to our mix. Other harsh or damaging chemicals found in toilet rolls are formaldehyde, PFAS, and fragrances. We don’t use any of these either. All of the chemicals used to make Naked Sprout have passed the EU’s stringent REACH certification, meaning that they do not negatively impact the environment, and our toilet rolls have been tested and found free of PFAS.
The upshot of this is that our water can be returned to the river Fluvia in the same condition as it was taken. And we don’t expect you to take our word for it. Our factory tests the water that enters and leaves the factory four times per year, and makes sure that there has been no degradation in key environmental markers. You can see an example of our water testing on our website, and our PFAS testing as well.
But before we return the water to the river, we need to give it a bit of a filter. A common by-product of making tissue products is a fine scum made up of paper fibres that ends up on the surface of the water you use to make the pulp. This pulp by-product is the same material as our toilet rolls, and we put it to good use. We collect it all together while we’re filtering the water and, once it’s dry, we feed it into our biomass boiler.
So the process of cleaning and filtering our water before returning it to the river actually helps us to fuel our furnaces as well!
Conclusion
You can’t make toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, or facial tissues without water - and the overuse and pollution of water by tissue and paper manufacturers can have serious environmental consequences. At Naked Sprout the water we use in our factory is borrowed from the river Fluvia, and by avoiding dyes, bleach, and extra chemicals we can ensure it’s still clean when we return it.
Hopefully that’s reassuring! A big thanks to Harriet for getting in touch to ask about how we use water. It’s really important to us that we are being transparent in how we make Naked Sprout, so if you have any burning questions about our processes or the tissue industry let us know, you can reach us at hello@nakedsprout.uk.
Want to try loo rolls made with water that’s borrowed, not wasted?
