Please Don't Squeeze the Old-Growth Forests

Posted 03 3 2009 1:22PM

The Nation --

Of all Charmin's wiping-challenged bear ads, this one stands out. It's less the stray pieces of wet tissue that have somehow become stuck across two-feet of bear butt than the strategically placed football--did Charmin's superwholesome parent company Procter & Gamble really animate a poop?

For several post-Mr. Whipple years now, Charmin ads have been demonstrating ever more detailed aspects of swabbing one's privates. Does paper migrate from the anus? They have the spot above or this slightly less graphic one for you. Are you torn between your desire for an extra strong or an extra soft tissue? They offer this ad (coming out before the election, it not so subtly suggests that red-staters crave strong and blue-staters, well, you know, they're soft on everything).

If your overriding concern, however, is absorption, then this boast about the brand's "6,009 tiny absorb bubbles on each sheet" is the thing. For the demographic more grossed out by the bears' cuteness than their hygiene, Charmin has this tad hipper, Web-only spot in which an apparently Brooklyn-based bear auditions to be the brand's mascot by repeating the line, "Charmin Ultra Strong doesn't leave behind leave-behinds."

But actually, Charmin and other companies that cut down forests to make toilet paper produce leave-behinds much worse than hypothetical globs of lint: for instance, toxic chlorine-based bleach, used to turn tree pulp into a whiter white; and carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming--normally trees absorb CO2, of course, but, unlike the short fibers in recycled material, virgin trees have nice long fibers that can be made into the billowy soft paper to which we've become accustomed.

"This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous," says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution."

Toilet-paper news was on a roll last week when Greenpeace issued an ecological guide to the best and worst toilet paper (based on the percentage of recycled content and use of nontoxic bleach), and the plusher flusher brands, Charmin and Cottonelle, were found seriously wanting. For the past few years, Greenpeace has been targeting Kimberly-Clark, producer of Cottonelle, Scott, and Kleenex, to go green. Cottonelle also uses an adorable animal, a puppy, to push its ultra velvety luxo softness in its "Be kind to your behind" campaign.

Producing TP out of recycled paper saves forests, reduces global warming, uses less water, and creates less waste, so why aren't we demanding that the major paper players do it? Some of us may mistakingly believe that toilet paper made of recycled paper (newspapers, etc.) is made of recycled toilet paper. Yikes! That would be gross (and impossible: how would it be retrieved?). Or we believe it's too rough. But the oldest maker of recycled paper in the country, Marcal, has already shown that green TP is quite comfy enough. It's expected to launch a national ad campaign for a still greener roll on Earth Day.

The prime reason Americans have been obsessed with softness, while Europeans and others are just fine with recycled (and use less paper in the first place) is that people in other countries haven't been subject to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pulp fictions like Mr. Whipple and puppies and bears (oh my). Decades of such marketing has created a fetish for softness for our (increasingly soft) bottoms.

It's embarrassing that such ads, much less such products, are made in the name of our "consumer preferences"--especially in a time of worldwide economic and environmental crises. Forget adorable animals, the more apt mascots for Charmin and Cottonelle are those morbidly obese, infantilized folks in Wall-E (they appear below about one minute in). The film, which won the Oscar for best animated feature last month, doesn't mention how the bots service the wiping needs of the humans, but surely they do it with TP containing far more than 6,009 absorb bubbles in each sheet.

Like this article? Try 4 issues of The Nation at home (and online) FREE.