Stop trading the Canadian boreal forest for toilet paper
The world’s largest intact forest ecosystem — the Canadian boreal forest — is being put at risk in part to make toilet paper.1
We shouldn’t flush away the boreal forest.
Companies are making tissue products we use for just a few minutes from virgin wood pulp harvested in part from one of our planet’s most important forests. We cannot allow this to continue.
That’s why we’re sending message to Procter and Gamble (P&G), one of our country’s largest producers of tissue products, telling it to stop using forests and make its products out of recycled materials instead.
1 million acres of trees are lost every year.
Covering over a billion acres, Canada’s boreal forest represents 25 percent of the world’s remaining intact forest — even more than the Amazon rainforest.2
The forest is the lungs of the Northern Hemisphere — absorbing greenhouse gases and releasing oxygen back to the atmosphere. In fact, this boreal forest removes enough carbon dioxide yearly to offset the emissions of 24 million cars.3
The cascading green region is also home to billions of animals: from the lynx, to caribou, to migratory birds.4
But this forest is vanishing — 1 million acres of trees are are chopped down every year.5 And according to a new report, at least some of this deforestation is to create the virgin pulp used to make household tissue products.
You can help protect Canada’s boreal forest:
We’re literally trading trees for toilet paper — and in today’s world that doesn’t make any sense, especially when less damaging alternatives exist, like recycled paper and wheat straw.6
Some companies are already using recycled alternatives, but P&G, with its leading brands of Charmin and Bounty, isn’t getting with the program.
As one of the largest tissue producers in the U.S., P&G has the means to commit to a more sustainable supply chain for its products — but the company continues to use virgin wood fiber because that’s what it believes its customers prefer.7
We shouldn’t be putting the planet and wildlife in jeopardy by felling trees to make tissue products we use for seconds. Take action: Tell P&G to do better for our planet and stop using our precious forests for its tissue products.
1. Ryan Flanagan, “How a toilet paper boom is harming Canada’s boreal forest,” CTV News, February 26, 2019.
2. “Fast Facts: Canada’s Boreal Forest,” Pew Charitable Trusts, March 19, 2015.
3. Ryan Flanagan, “How a toilet paper boom is harming Canada’s boreal forest,” CTV News,
February 26, 2019.
4. “Fast Facts: Canada’s Boreal Forest,” Pew Charitable Trusts, March 19, 2015.
5. Ryan Flanagan, “How a toilet paper boom is harming Canada’s boreal forest,” CTV News,
February 26, 2019.
6. Adrian Humphreys, “U.S. plush toilet paper use wiping out Canada’s forests, flushing away the future: report,” Vancouver Sun, February 26, 2019.
7. Adrian Humphreys, “U.S. plush toilet paper use wiping out Canada’s forests, flushing away the future: report,” Vancouver Sun, February 26, 2019.