Guest Blog Post by Serious Tissues
Picture this ... you are a small child playing in the park on a hot and sunny day; the trees keep you covered under their precious shade. As you keep walking you are getting older and it gets warmer yet there are fewer and fewer trees in the park. You wonder, why? What happened to the beautiful trees that were protecting you from the sun? Extreme right? Almost a nightmare…
Across the world, every single day we cut down 27,000 trees just to make toilet roll. This means we are flushing 10 million trees down the toilet every year. An absolutely staggering number. But what does that mean on an individual level?
On average a person uses the equivalent of 384 trees worth of toilet roll in their lifetime. An entire forest just to keep your backside clean. That means that on average a family of five cuts down half of Hyde Park just to have super soft toilet roll in their downstairs loo.
But there is an alternative!
Trees are amazing, and they should not be treated as single-use products. As human beings, we need them to survive. They have a major role to play in fighting climate change. Trees are the most powerful natural climate solution we have, and we need them now more than ever. Trees capture carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away for generations. An extensive global tree planting programme could remove one-third of all carbon emissions created by human activity (Science, July 2019). One of the easiest swaps you can make to stop cutting down trees is by changing the toilet roll you buy. By choosing toilet roll made from recycled paper, not a single tree is harmed. Instead, the roll is made from a wide range of paper already in general circulation, whether that is office print-outs, cereal boxes or the occasional picture sent home from nursery. It’s still soft and strong enough to do the job it’s designed for but no precious trees are cut down in the process. Why should you pick recycled over virgin pulp toilet roll? That is easy, it’s far better for the planet. To start with, 24 trees are cut down per tonne of virgin pulp, whereas recycled leaves the trees where they should be. In the ground, doing the amazing things they do; capturing carbon, providing habitats for wildlife, retaining water and providing shade for future generations.
Recycled paper treads far more lightly upon the planet too. The process of making the rolls uses far less energy, water and releases almost 2/3rds less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as you can see below:
When using recycled paper, you are saving trees instead of cutting them down and the process of making recycled toilet roll is also less harmful to the environment than the virgin toilet roll. It’s an absolute no brainer, we need to switch to recycled toilet roll. Making that swap shouldn’t be a hassle, and Serious Tissues is here to help.
We are on a mission to stop treating trees as a single-use product. That is why, to make our toilet roll we don’t use trees, we save them. Serious Tissues are made of 100% recycled paper here in the UK which helps reduce our carbon footprint since we are not shipped halfway across the world. They are plastic-free, with no dyes or perfumes.
And finally, the vitally important bit, for every roll we sell we plant one tree to reverse deforestation, capture carbon and make the world a cleaner, cooler place.
As mentioned above, the average person uses the equivalent of 384 trees worth of toilet roll in their lifetime. By taking an annual subscription to Serious Tissues, you could be a long way to replacing those trees in a single year.
Come and join us, together we can make the world a better place. You can save the world from your toilet seat, Seriously!