November 26th, 2007
“Shop Smart, Save Birds” is the plea on the NRDC’s shopping guide designed to help consumers delineate which brands of paper towels, tissues, napkins and toilet tissue contain recycled fibers and which do not.
Through the non-profit NRDC, you can also send a note to Kimberly-Clark to green up its act.
Kimberly-Clark – and other big manufacturers of similar products – could do a much better job of producing recycled paper products if they tried harder, the NRDC says. The paper giant already makes recycled paper goods for commercial clients, like restaurants and hospitals, and many of those products are less expensive to produce, says Darby Hoover, an NRDC senior resource specialist.
If K-C would expand its test products and give consumers the option of buying recycled personal paper products, they’d find there’s a market for them, she said, adding, “People really get the obscenity of turning forests into toilet paper.”
Some of those who “get it” include Rice, American and Harvard Universities and hundreds of other large and small commercial buyers that have quit buying paper products from Kimberly-Clark until the manufacturer changes its policies, Brooks said.
Why are Kimberly-Clark and other large paper companies like Georgia Pacific and Proctor & Gamble so slow to switch?
The problem is partly wrapped up, like a roll of Cottonelle, in the fluff and softness of the consumer products. Environmentalists believe that the big paper manufacturers, having spent decades cultivating consumer preferences for springy toilet paper and soft but tough tissues, are reluctant to change the course they’ve set.
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