How we make our transport more efficient
Tissue products are one of those everyday conveniences we can’t live without. Whether it’s cleaning up a small spill or handling daily hygiene needs, tissue products like toilet paper, paper towels, and facial tissues play a key supporting role in our homes.
But while they’re great at absorbing spills, they’re not so great at being efficient to transport. In fact, they’re hiding a bit of a grubby secret: tissue products are incredibly inefficient to ship because they’re so light and fluffy. When it comes to commonly transported materials, only polystyrene and cork have a worse density to value ratio.
So when you’re trying to make environmentally friendly toilet rolls, it’s a bit of a conundrum. How can we keep our toilet rolls soft on the skin, and light on the environmental footprint?
What makes tissue paper so light?
Let’s start with the fluffy stuff. Tissue paper is light because that’s how it’s designed. If you looked at tissue under a microscope you’d see a pattern of tiny micro-folds, called “crepe”. These micro-folds give the tissue its thickness and, more importantly, its absorbency. Two creped plies placed on top of one another (like we use at Naked Sprout) will produce soft, spongy sheets.
However, these micro-folds also mean that tissue paper takes up a lot of space. There are 320 sheets of toilet paper on a Naked Sprout roll, and each sheet occupies significantly more space than the same amount of printer paper would, for example. And of course tissue paper comes on rolls, with a hollow core. This keeps things neat in the bathroom, but that empty space in the middle adds to the space needed to transport them. Finally, toilet rolls are round, which isn’t exactly the best shape for fitting snugly into rectangular shipping boxes.
All this extra space - the air in, around, and outside toilet rolls - means that when it comes to transportation, toilet roll makers aren’t just moving rolls, they’re moving a whole lot of nothing as well. And that “nothing” adds up in terms of pallets, containers, and road miles.
So, what can we do to make this process more efficient? Here’s how we’re tackling this challenge at Naked Sprout.
1. Bamboo bales, Not bamboo rolls
The first step in making our tissue transport more efficient is reconsidering how our raw materials travel. At Naked Sprout, our recycled rolls are made from material that’s gathered from within 85km of our factory. But what about our bamboo?
Our bamboo is grown in huge forests in the Sichuan region of China, you can find out more about our suppliers and their fantastic sustainable crop here. Of course, we’re not the only company offering environmentally friendly toilet paper made from bamboo. But there’s a significant difference between Naked Sprout and other brands when it comes to our logistics.
Our bamboo travels from China to Spain by river and then by sea - a long journey that’s made more efficient than you might think because of one key detail. We don’t actually make our products in China, so Naked Sprout bamboo travels from Asia to Europe as compact bales of raw dehydrated bamboo pulp, not as finished toilet rolls.
These bales are dense and packed tightly; we’re not shipping fluffy rolls and cardboard cores across the seas. One shipping container of bamboo pulp bale holds enough raw material to make seven containers of finished toilet rolls.
3. Designing out wasted space
Once the bamboo and recycled material is at our wonderful fossil fuel-free B Corp factory in Spain we get to turning it into tissue, and even at this stage we're thinking about transport. In 2024, we made a significant change to our rolls by redesigning the core to make it 8mm thinner. This small, simple change means that there's less air hanging around in the centre of each roll. This in turn allows us to reduce the size of our boxes, meaning we can fit more rolls into each shipment.
In 2023, we could fit 42 of our larger sized boxes on a pallet, now we can fit 60 of them. When you multiply it across thousands of pallets and shipments, the savings in terms of road miles add up quickly.
We also listen to our customers, who often have fantastic suggestions for designing out waste. Some have pointed out that coreless toilet rolls or flat-packed sheets could be an even more space-efficient solution, and we’re actively exploring these possibilities!
3. Rolling on rails
Once our products are made and boxed, they need to travel from our factory in Spain to DPD’s distribution hub in the Midlands. Starting in the Spring of 2024 this journey has been made by electrified rail, rather than by road.
This change lowers the transport emissions associated with our distribution. We’re currently in the process of finalising an updated CO2e Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to include our 2024 revisions to the size of our boxes and the way we transport them, and the updated figures will show a significant reduction as a result.
4. Reducing, reusing, recycling
There’s more to transport inefficiency than just shipping air. A lot of toilet rolls on the market come with additional elements that add unnecessary weight and bulk. A typical roll might be bleached, wrapped in dyed paper, or even perfumed (!)
Extras like this might add to the appeal on the shelf or the screen but they come at a cost. Bleach doesn't grow on trees, and neither does brightly dyed paper or fragrance. Dressing up loo rolls with any extra cosmetic elements means more steps in manufacture, more packaging, and more road miles.
At Naked Sprout, we’ve gone back to basics. By stripping away unnecessary extras, we’re not only simplifying our products but also reducing the environmental impact of getting them to you. We don't need to ship dyes or bleach or fragrance to our factory, and we're not increasing the demand for these unnecessary add-ons in the first place. And we reuse everything we can to minimise the amount of waste leaving our factory at the end of the process. Off-cuts from our bamboo rolls go into the mix for our recycled rolls, even the little bits of pulp leftover in our water are collected and used in our biomass boiler.
Conclusion
Transport might seem like a small part of the impact of everyday products, but when you consider the sheer volume of things being shipped every day, and the range of sizes, weights, and packaging solutions in play, there’s huge scope to improve things.
There’s always more to be done, but next time you restock with Naked Sprout, you can do so knowing that we’re working hard to keep those beige rolls as green as possible - right down to how they get to your door. By rethinking everything from sourcing to design we’re taking care to ship less air!
Want to try tissue products that designed with efficiency in mind?
