Our updated LCA and our new starring roll
At Naked Sprout, we’re positive about toilet paper. And kitchen roll. And tissues as well. We don’t accept that the daily products we use to keep ourselves and our homes clean should come at a heavy cost to the environment.
Fortunately for us, our customers feel the same way. People choose our lovely soft tissue products because they don’t think bleach, plastic, and excessive wrapping are necessary to care for their bodies and homes.
The only way to make progress is step by step. Our products aren’t perfect, but as we enter our fifth year, we have a track record of improvements we’re really proud of.
Here's our latest improvement - after changing the way we manufacture our products in 2024, the climate footprint of our products has gone down. It's a great saving for all of our products, but in the case of one little roll, the difference is dramatic.
How have we cut down our emissions, and who’s the star of the show?
The big dip: 2023 vs 2024
Our previous Life Cycle Assessment was completed in 2023. At that time, our recycled toilet paper’s carbon footprint (2.05 kg CO2eq per box of 24 rolls) was slightly higher than our bamboo toilet paper (1.90 kg CO2eq per box).
Quite a few people asked about this. Since our bamboo comes from China and our recycled materials come from Europe, it stands to reason that the emissions for bamboo should be higher, surely?
The difference came down to how we collected the raw materials. Sourcing cardboard and kraft paper from scattered locations meant higher emissions from diesel-fuelled trucks criss-crossing to deliver materials to our factory. This is standard for recycled tissue – generally, it’s made out of some category of junk paper or card that needs to be collected from various scattered locations. In contrast, bamboo comes to our factory in compact pulp board form, on a single boat trip from China.
We understood why our recycled tissue had a higher footprint than bamboo, but we knew we could do better.
In 2024, we set up partnerships with major supermarkets in the area around our factory, allowing us to collect larger volumes of recycled materials in fewer trips. We also started to use a new cutting edge recycling centre, which is far more efficient and can recover greater quantities of usable fibre with less waste.
As a result of these changes, the emissions associated with sourcing our recycled material have dropped by a whopping 88%.
More tweaks
Changing how we collect and sort our recycled material is the biggest change we made in 2024, but it’s not the only one. By rethinking our supply chain and making targeted tweaks to packaging and transport, we’ve cut the carbon footprint across our entire product line.
1. Smaller cores
How do you make a toilet roll smaller, without cutting the value for money?
You shrink the cores! In 2024, we reduced the size of our cores by 4mm, bringing the width of the hole down from 42mm to 38mm. We took these new-look slimmed-down rolls and started wrapping our sheets more tightly around them. No tissue was removed in the process.
This change means our rolls take up less space. Which means…
2. Smaller boxes
Cutting down the size of our rolls allowed us to cut down the size of our boxes. Each box of Naked Sprout is now a compact package of lovely soft toilet tissue, with less air between the sheets and less air in the middle of rolls.
In 2023, we could fit 42 of our larger boxes of toilet rolls on a pallet. Now we can fit 60 of them, leading to a big drop in the emissions from transporting the rolls from our factory to our warehouse. And while we’re talking transport…
3. Rolls on rails
We brought trains into our transport network for the first time, so that our products can travel from the train station near our factory to the Channel by electrified rail. So not only are there more rolls in a load of Naked Sprout, but each load spends less time on a lorry and more time on a train - one of the lowest-carbon ways of moving goods.
The new standard for eco toilet roll (and other tissue products!)
With all these changes, here’s how our products’ climate footprints compare this year:
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Recycled toilet paper: 0.38 kg CO2eq per kilogram of product (down from 0.76 kg in 2023). Down 50%.
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Bamboo toilet paper: 0.65 kg CO2eq per kilogram of product (down from 0.72 kg in 2023). Down 9.7%.
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Bamboo kitchen rolls: 0.72 kg CO2eq per kilogram of product (down from 0.78 kg in 2023). Down 7.7%.
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Bamboo Facial Tissues: Footprint coming soon!
Rolling on
We’re incredibly proud of what we achieved in 2024, and as 2025 gets off to a flying start, we really feel like we’re making huge strides. None of this would be possible without our wonderful customers who choose to support us and make writing reports like this so rewarding. With every box and sheet they share their positivity and keep us rolling on.
Want to get your hands on these show-stopping loo rolls?
