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This New Toilet Paper Doesn’t Need Trees and Could Change How We Think About Sustainable Products

This life-changing toilet paper is not only remarkably innovative but also friendly to the environment, also to the pocket.

BY NEHA B.

PUBLISHED 2 DAYS AGO

A boy is holding the toilet paper inside a bathroom. (Representative Cover Image Source: Freepik | Jcomp)

Nearly all of the traditional toilet paper rolls are made from virgin wood pulp, which is stripped away from trees and blasted into furnaces for a soft, smooth finish that millions of Americans feel each day as they rip a piece and brush it against their hip. Bumboo estimates that approximately 27,000 trees are cut down each year to create these rolls. The number is alarming, especially when a report by SkyQuest revealed that Americans will be using as many as 83 billion rolls each year by 2032. While some Japanese researchers were trying to tackle this problem, another anomaly came to their attention. On one side, all these trees were being chopped down, and on the other, billions of diapers were being disposed of in the landfills and oceans.

Two stylish toilet paper rolls decorated with floral design (Representative Image Source: Unsplash | Immo Wegmann)

EBSCO Research suggests that it takes approximately 550 years for a diaper to completely disintegrate, which means that the baby diaper a mother tossed in her trash bin a century ago is still lying somewhere on the planet, emitting harmful methane gas, contributing to global warming. With these two problems in consideration, the Japanese researchers stopped the two gaps with one bush by developing an eco-friendly version of the toilet paper. Branded “Shibushi Osaki Roll,” this is the “world's first toilet paper made from recycled diapers,” as reported by Mainichi, Japan’s most-read newspaper.

A baby in a diaper. (Representative Image Source: Pexels | Emma Bauso)

Sold in packages that feature a palette of light blues, greens, and oranges, this toilet paper was fashioned by a team led by the city of Shibushi and the town of Osaki in Kagoshima Prefecture, in collaboration with several private firms. The drill was initiated between April and September when two of the city’s municipalities began mass gathering of hygiene items like sanitary pads, wet wipes, and diapers. After racking up over 98 metric tons of these materials, they started repurposing them into the remarkably innovative toilet paper rolls. The game-changing rolls were made possible thanks to a technology provided by a Tokyo-based hygiene product maker called Unicharm Corp.

Based on their technology, the collected materials were passed through a string of processes, including sterilizing, deodorizing, and bleaching, until they were transformed into a new, amalgamated pulp. Truckloads of this pulp were dispatched to Poppy Paper Co’s Fukuyo plant in Yame, Fukuoka Prefecture, where it was vigorously blended with recycled paper. In just two months, the team was able to roll out a stock of over 35,000 toilet paper rolls into the market. "Please support this eco-friendly product, which aims to promote a sustainable society by reusing local resources," Takumi Obo, a spokesperson for the Osaki Municipal Government and the leader of the initiative, told the media outlet.

Person holds a bundle of toilet paper rolls (Representative Image Source: Unsplash | Elly Johnson)

Satoshi Yoshida from Poppy Paper's sales department added that the initiative is not only technologically notable but also outstanding in terms of environmental sustainability and waste management. "This initiative could help diversify the ways to secure raw materials, especially as used paper supplies are expected to decline with the rise of paperless systems and a shrinking population.” These life-changing rolls are priced at about 400 yen, or 2.70 dollars, for a 12-roll pack. They are currently available at seven stores in Kagoshima Prefecture's Osumi region and southern Miyazaki Prefecture, both in southwest Japan's Kyushu.