Making the Case for Bamboo Toilet Paper

06/09/2020 | Nature Fluent

The Amazon is on fire much like California is right now...Unlike the massive blazes that have been engulfing California, the fires raging in the Amazon are being set by people and the government of Brazil. It is being burned to make room for things such as animal agriculture and coal mining, both of which are known to make climate change that much worse.

But why are trees so important? And can bamboo toilet paper help?

Trees are important to basically every place and every life-form on Earth. This is because they are able to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and release oxygen, they can also get rid of pollutants that technology puts into the air.

Also, when trees are cut down and processed/burned, all of the carbon that they have absorbed is released back into the atmosphere, exasperating climate change. So keeping trees alive benefits humanity as a whole far more than cutting them down for something frivolous like toilet paper.

Importance to indigenous peoples

Nearly 500 indigenous communities live within the Amazon rainforest. So the main issue with burning it down is because it destroys the homes of hundreds of thousands of people who have lived there for millennia.

According to Quartz:

“When national parks were formally introduced in the United States in 1916, it was under a misguided idea that these lands needed to be kept pristine and undisturbed by human activity. This ignored the hundreds of years of management by Native Americans, in which forest ecosystems evolved side by side with informal management from native communities including wood gathering, grazing, and small scale agriculture, as well as low-intensity burns set in order to regularly clear brush and prevent larger, more intense fires.

Prohibiting indigenous communities from managing today’s park lands has actually increased the likelihood and intensity of forest fires over time.”

Indigenous communities shape the forests and benefit both the forests and the communities who live inside of it. Removing the indigenous population has caused havoc as trees are seen as a resource and not as something worthy of protection.

The Boreal Forests and Bamboo Toilet paper

Like the Amazon rainforest, the Boreal forests in Canada are being chopped down dry and turned into a commodity. In this case, the forests are being mowed over in order to make toilet paper. Manufacturers of major toilet paper brands are all cutting down these forests in order to make a single use item.

Many new companies have emerged and are beginning to help by creating toilet paper without the need for trees. Some of these toilet paper brands are made entirely out of recycled paper, while others, like our brand, Cottontail is made from bamboo. This reduces the need to chop down trees, as bamboo is a fast growing and sustainable alternative to regular tree cutting.

While many communities are working towards replanting trees as a result of carbon credits, the best thing to do would be to reduce our consumption of trees altogether. Making the switch to bamboo toilet paper is one thing we can do to help make the world a better place for us all.