What is carbon neutral toilet paper?
We’re sticklers for the details at Naked Sprout. Our team puts a serious amount of work into measuring, verifying, and reporting our green credentials, and we’re well aware of the tactics and tricks companies can use to draw attention away from how they’re impacting the environment.
In past posts we’ve turned our attention to greenhushing, greencrowding, and the difference between “recycled” and “recyclable”. But today it’s a really big one - “carbon neutral” products.
The topic is especially interesting to us here in the UK, because some brands sell their eco toilet paper and tissues boxes with the claim that they are "carbon neutral" or even "carbon negative."
What does this really mean? Can you really make toilet rolls with no carbon footprint? Spoilers up front; no you can’t. Let’s get into why.
What is carbon neutral toilet roll?
Here’s the theory:
Making things, particularly making things on a large scale in factories, generally means burning fossil fuels. Coal, natural gas, and oil are the main sources of energy running through our global manufacturing networks, powering the machines that make things, harvest and extract resources, and move goods and raw materials.
But widespread burning of fossil fuels is having a catastrophic impact on our climate. When oil, natural gas, and coal are burned they release carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases, that trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere and raise the global temperature, ultimately leading to floods, droughts, landslides, and huge disruption to our lives and the lives of other species.
Seeing the devastation climate change is causing, the scientific community, along with the UN and other major international organisations are urging manufacturers to change the way they make things, to cut fossil fuels out of their factories and processes, and to think radically about how they can make all of their operations more sustainable.
The problem is that cutting out fossil fuels is expensive and difficult. It means seeking new sources of energy that might be costly or complicated to set up, meaning a hit to profits. For big manufacturers, a much cheaper and easier solution would be to find a way to keep burning fossil fuels, and somehow cancel out their negative effects, ideally without spending too much money.
That’s where offsetting comes in.
Understanding carbon offsetting
Carbon offsetting is a way that companies can try to make up for the carbon dioxide emissions they cause by taking the same amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Obviously there aren’t any big greenhouse gas-sucking hoovers out there, so how do you take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? There’s a few different ways that companies try to do this, including:
Reforestation: Planting trees to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
Renewable energy projects: Investing in wind, solar, or hydro energy projects that replace traditional fossil fuel sources.
Energy efficiency projects: Supporting initiatives that reduce energy consumption, like improved cooking stoves in developing countries.
The idea is that by investing in these projects, companies can balance the books when it comes to greenhouse gases, cancelling out the climate-changing emissions they’re responsible for.
And critically, they can do it without actually having to change how they operate, or the fuel they use. They can just pay a relatively small amount to an offsetting initiative, slap a “carbon neutral” sticker on their goods, and carry on business as usual.
Some businesses go even further, paying to offset more CO2 than the amount they’re responsible for. They can then claim to be “carbon negative” - far from adding to climate change, they’re actively reversing it.
All sounds too good to be true? It is.
Why offsetting doesn’t work
Let’s be clear; investing in renewable energy and planting trees are good things to do, but there’s no evidence that offsetting initiatives alone are going to do anything to slow or reverse climate change.
In fact, a recent study published by The Guardian found that the offsetting schemes some of the world's biggest companies are paying into are so poor in quality that they are effectively “junk” and possibly making matters worse.
And even the best projects can’t offer any guarantees. Nobody knows for sure if a particular project will work, or how well it will work long-term, and even if it does work in most cases it will take years to see the impact - trees take years to grow, renewable energy projects need time to become established. Meanwhile, businesses keep burning fossil fuels, and greenhouse gases keep building up in the atmosphere.
As better climate science becomes more widely known, the tide is starting to turn against offsetting. Greenpeace has started to openly describe offsetting as a scam and a “bookkeeping trick,” top climate scientists are saying they’re simply not enough, and could be “worse than doing nothing.” As a result, companies aren’t shouting quite so loudly about their products being “carbon neutral” or “CO2 negative” as they used to. But if you search for carbon neutral toilet rolls you’ll see that plenty of brands are still following the same script; make bathroom tissue paper products the standard way first, then turn to offsetting to cancel the climate debt.
What are they trying to cancel out? The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in paper making comes when tissue pulp is dried - this is a process that requires a huge amount of hot air, and the hot air that’s used comes from furnaces that are usually powered by natural gas.
While biodegradable toilet paper and eco-friendly toilet rolls might reduce some kinds of waste, it’s the emissions from production that remain a serious concern for brands claiming carbon neutrality. With so much hot air needed, it’s easy to see why some companies are sticking with offsetting as the easiest solution, even if it’s not really a solution at all.
We don’t offset at Naked Sprout, so what do we do instead?
What is the real alternative to offsetting?
Instead of investing in the dubious science of offsetting, we believe responsible businesses need to return to the fundamentals of the problem. If burning fossil fuels is releasing too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we need to find ways to stop burning fossil fuels.
It’s easier said than done of course, but it’s not impossible. Green technology is moving at a breath-taking speed; every year we’re finding better ways of generating the power we need to make the things we use.
At Naked Sprout, we manufacture our affordable toilet paper using renewable energy that’s generated on-site, we don’t add to the strain on the environment by using unnecessary bleach and wrapping, and we actively seek ways to bring down emissions in our transport chain. And those hungry furnaces? They’re powered by renewable biomass that comes from the area around our factory, not natural gas.
Instead of putting “carbon neutral” on our boxes of recycled and bamboo toilet paper we print our actual climate footprint, and we are working with the Science Based Targets initiative to find the best ways of bringing that footprint down.
It’s a work in progress, and it’s much more effort than offsetting, but we believe it’s the best, most positive way forward.
Conclusion
The way we grow things, make things, and transport things is changing the climate, and planting trees isn’t going to stop it.
Carbon-neutral eco toilet rolls sound nice, but they’re not the solution to our environmental challenges, and they’re no substitute for direct action to reduce emissions. The real goal should be to adopt more sustainable practices that reduce CO2e from the start.
At Naked Sprout, we’re proud to break from the pack of “carbon neutral” “carbon negative” and “net zero” toilet rolls, and raise the bar for more transparent, low carbon manufacturing.
Want to try toilet rolls that are low carbon without claiming to be no carbon?
