How is toilet paper made?
The average person in the UK uses 127 rolls of toilet paper per year. That’s over two rolls per week, spread out over 6-10 daily visits to the toilet.
That’s plenty of time to get curious about this humble household helper, and as sustainable toilet paper manufacturers we’ve found that people have a lot of questions! Today our post is inspired by our soft toilet roll in both its bamboo and recycled variations, and we’re getting right back to basics.
How is toilet paper made?
Who invented toilet paper?
Toilet paper has been around in some form for centuries. In ancient China, wealthy households were known to use paper for personal hygiene as far back as the 6th century, and larger scale production of toilet paper specifically for use in the toilet is recorded in China as early as the 14th century.
But the commercial toilet paper as we know it today didn’t really come into play until the 1800s. In 1857, Joseph Gayetty, an American inventor, introduced his “medicated paper for the water closet” as a healthier, more hygienic option than the squares of newspaper and catalogues that many people in North America and Europe were using at the time. This paper was hard and not absorbent, it wasn’t until the 1940s that softer tissue-type paper started to be manufactured in the UK.
By the early 20th century, mass-produced toilet paper rolls had become a household staple in many parts of the world, and over the last 50 years we’ve seen innovations like coloured toilet paper, scented toilet paper, and - our specialty - eco toilet paper.
But all good toilet paper starts the same way - with pulp.
How toilet paper is made the standard way
Today, most conventional toilet paper is still made from virgin wood pulp, which means it starts with cutting down trees. Pulp that’s produced in Europe will usually be made from trees grown in commercially grown forests, with spruce, fir, and other softwoods favoured because their long fibres make for stronger paper.
Here’s a look at the process:
Pulping and bleaching: Trees are cut down, stripped of their bark, and chipped into small pieces. These wood chips are then soaked and mashed (usually with chemical bleaching agents) to break them down into a pale, fibrous pulp. This pulp is pressed and formed into boards that can be easily stacked and transported to paper and tissue makers.
Blending and drying: At the tissue factory, the boards are broken down and blended with water, and the smooth paste is then spread onto huge mesh sheets. The paste is dried with hot air, normally generated by burning natural gas in furnaces, and the giant sheets that this creates are wound into huge rolls called “parent rolls”.
Conversion: The parent rolls are “converted.” This means that the long, wide, parent rolls are wound into long, thinner “logs,” and then the logs are chopped down to the individual toilet paper rolls you use at home!
This conversion stage is often what separates the very big brands from smaller ones. It’s common for big brands like Andrex to cut down parent rolls that they have actually made themselves, with tissue that they have blended and dried in their own factories. Smaller brands often buy in “parent rolls” that have been made elsewhere, and just do the final “converting” stage of winding and chopping, which requires much less energy.
Naked Sprout is unusual among the more “indie” manufacturers, in that we manufacture and convert our own parent rolls like the big companies, but we’re powering this process in an unusual way (more on that later!)
Finishing and packaging: The dried rolls are packaged (sadly in with excessive dyed paper and plastic a lot of the time) and shipped off to stores.
To sum it up, traditional toilet paper production is a resource-heavy process that depends on trees, bleach, dyes and fossil fuels, especially in the drying stage as the pulp is dried to make “parent rolls”. With global demand for tissue products at an all-time high (and growing), this has a big impact on the environment.
So what about more eco alternatives to toilet paper?
How toilet paper is made - eco edition
Eco toilet paper sold in the UK will generally change up the formula in a few key ways.
Firstly, they often use a more sustainable raw material than trees. Bamboo is a great shout because it grows much more quickly than trees and doesn’t have to be replanted after being harvested (it keeps growing from the root like grass).
But is bamboo toilet paper (more) eco friendly than recycled? We need to look at the rest of the process to be sure. It’s worth finding out how far the finished products are travelling and how they’re being transported, if your toilet paper is made from a company that manufactures its own tissue or just “converts” rolls that have been made elsewhere, and how much actual detail they’re sharing about their supply chain.
Either way, most eco rolls are still bleached white, and even in the case of bamboo and recycled toilet paper, the stage of drying pulp will almost always have been done using fossil fuels. It’s this part of the process that drives the high CO2e emissions in the tissue industry, and contributes the most to climate change.
Many eco toilet paper brands will therefore “offset” these emissions, as a way of balancing the books. We don’t believe in offsetting at Naked Sprout, because there’s no evidence it works! If you’re interested we’ve written a post spelling out the case against offsetting.
So how do we do things differently?
Why is Naked Sprout the most sustainable toilet paper in the UK?
At Naked Sprout, we believe that good toilet paper should be made in a sustainable way at every stage - with better raw materials and no bleach, less emissions from fossil fuels, and a transparent supply chain. Here’s how we’re doing things differently:
Bamboo and recycled pulp
We use FSC-certified bamboo to make our bamboo toilet paper, our boxes of tissues, and our paper kitchen towels. For our recycled pulp, we’ve decided against the printed documentation used by many eco brands - instead we’re using recycled waste cardboard that is gathered from businesses in the area around our factory.
Either way, this means we end up with a lovely brown pulp, and we don’t have to turn to bleach.
No bleach or harsh chemicals
We skip the harsh chemicals and keep our toilet paper au naturel. No chlorine bleach, no peroxide bleach, no dyes, no fragrances.
Our toilet paper is made with bamboo or recycled cardboard treated with water, salts, and soaps to help break it down and clean it. All of the ingredients we use to make Naked Sprout compliant with REACH certification, meaning they’re essentially neutral in their environmental impact, and our water is so clean that it can be returned to the beautiful river Fluvia after we’ve used it.
Renewable energy to dry our tissue and cut our rolls
While other toilet paper suppliers turn to fossil fuels to dry their tissue, we power our furnaces with renewable biofuel, ensuring that our emissions from the critical drying stage are effectively zero.
Not only do we make our own parent rolls, we convert them too, using solar panels and wind turbines to generate the electricity that powers our winding and chopping machines.
So the whole manufacturing process is carried out at our B Corp tissue mill in Spain, and all of it is powered by renewable energy - no offsetting required.
Plastic, packing, and transparency
Once the rolls are dried and chopped they are slotted neatly into our slim cardboard boxes, with no plastic and no extra paper wrapping. Everyone who works for Naked Sprout, in our factory or the rest of our business, is paid at least a living wage.
And finally, we offer transparency on all of the above. Every green claim we make is evidenced according to the high standards set by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, and the Green Claims Code. You can see it all here!
Good toilet paper made sustainably
That’s the end of the roll! The story of toilet paper is much more complex - and hopefully more interesting, than you might imagine.
We’re proud to be part of the history of this simple everyday convenience, and to be rethinking every step - from sourcing and manufacturing to energy and packaging.
Our mission is simple: to provide soft, high-quality toilet paper (and other tissue products) with a much lower environmental footprint, and to provide a model of sustainable business that can inspire change across our industry.
Want to try an real eco alternative to toilet paper made the standard way?
