What is bleached toilet paper?
The word "bleached" has been around for a long time. The earliest recorded use of the term is from 1610. And, for just as long, it has meant something that has been whitened from its natural colour,
All white toilet paper has gone through a bleaching process, but not everything we describe as “bleached” is whitened in the same way.
Sun-bleached hair and chemical bleaching aren’t quite the same thing, and then there’s washing and erosion, which can also strip colour away.
So, when you pick up a roll of “unbleached" toilet paper, how do you know what the manufacturer means? Grab those acid-wash jeans and get some lemon juice into your hair, today we’re blogging bleach.
Sun bleaching
As an eco toilet paper manufacturer, we’ll get the most natural method out of the way first; sun bleaching.
If you leave something outside for long enough the sun will strip the colour from it.
Wood, shells, bones - anything left in the open for months or years - gradually turns paler. This is the “sun-bleached” look that’s a favourite of interior designers and characterises the gentle colours of the UK coastline. It comes from UV light breaking down pigments. It’s why old plastic garden chairs take on a chalky colour, or why your hair looks lighter after a summer in the sun.
This probably won’t surprise you, but white toilet paper isn’t bleached by the sun. If it were, we’d be looking at huge strips of tissue laid out in fields, patiently waiting for the sun to do its work. With the average person in the UK getting through 127 rolls per year, we’d be talking about a huge amount of space, and a long time, to strip all that colour.
Okay, sun bleaching is out. On to bleaching method two.
Washing and detergents
Another way to strip colour from something is to wash it repeatedly. You’ve probably seen it happen to your favourite jeans. Enough rounds in the washing machine with strong detergent, and colour fades. That’s because the soap and water gradually break down the dyes until they are lost from the fabric.
Toilet paper pulp does go through a washing process, to remove impurities. This is particularly important when it comes to recycled toilet paper; which will be made from junk paper that might have inks or glues that would damage the quality of the final tissue or the machines that make it.
But this is a single, relatively gentle wash of the pulp. It’s nowhere near harsh enough, or repeated often enough, to strip all the natural brown colour from wood pulp, or the ink pigment from recycled paper that’s been printed on.
If it were, we’d have a whole new problem - paper that falls apart before it even reaches the roll. So, while repeated washing can bleach things over time, it’s not how toilet paper manufacturers do it.
Chemical bleaching
So, what do toilet paper manufacturers actually use when they bleach toilet paper? It comes down to chemicals.
Up until the 1990s most toilet paper (and most paper) was bleached using chlorine gas. But after a wave of research showing the devastating impact of the paper industry on animal and plant life in rivers near paper mills, manufacturers started to move to other bleaching methods. These are:
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ECF (Elemental Chlorine Free) Bleaching: Uses chlorine compounds to remove colour, but not chlorine gas. This is less harmful to the environment than older methods but still a bleaching process.
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TCF (Totally Chlorine Free) Bleaching: Uses oxygen-based chemicals instead of chlorine, like peroxide or ozone.
Both of these methods are widely understood to be less damaging than the terrible harms caused by chlorine gas, but whether ECF or TCF bleaching is superior is open to debate. A 1994 looking at the run-off from factories using TCF and ECF bleaching methods was not able to find any significant difference when it came to the toxicity levels of the rivers these factories fed into.
And there’s also some debate over what counts as "bleaching." Some paper manufacturers say “bleach” only means chlorine based bleaches. This is why some companies that sell white toilet paper made using peroxide (TCF bleaching) will say their products are bleach-free.
Others take a broader view; if you’ve used chemicals to strip the colour from your raw materials, you’ve bleached it. We’re in that second camp. Chlorine bleach wasn’t even invented until 1799, and by that time industrial bleaching (mostly using lye and acid) was part of the textile industry all over the world.
If you lighten your hair with peroxide, you’ve bleached it. And if you use ozone to strip the colour from flour, you end up with bleached flour.
As a company putting environmental impact at the heart of everything we do, we know it’s important to speak clearly and simply to avoid greenwashing.
Bleaching is bleaching, we use the word the same way you do.
What we mean when we say unbleached
So, when we say our toilet rolls are not bleached, what do we mean at Naked Sprout?
By now, you can probably guess.
We don’t use ECF bleach. We don’t use TCF bleach either. No chlorine, no peroxide, no ozone. We don’t leave our rolls out in the sun for months. We don’t put them through an aggressive washing cycle.
We don’t remove the natural brown colour from the pulp that we use in any way. Our toilet paper comes in the colour of the raw materials, free from unnecessary treatments. That’s what unbleached means to us.
Want to try toilet paper in natural shades of beige?
