| green consumer | WHY SOFT PAPER IS ROUGH ON FORESTS
Popular in U.S. households, plush toilet tissue requires pulp from virgin timber, some harvested from old-growth boreal forests. Increasingly, greener options are becoming available. ByMike Rotide
sets—and begins to release car- bon dioxide and other gases. “One of the great dangers of overcutting in fragile boreal regions is accelerating the release of stored carbon in the trees, soil and peat layers,” says Eric Palola, senior director of NWF’s Forests forWildlife Program. According to the U.S. Fish
Next time you shop for toilet paper, before you reach for the soft stuff, consider the Black- burnian warbler. This splashy white, black and orange Neotropical migrant nests in the forest canopy—preferably of coniferous, old-growth trees—near the tip of a tree branch, where it secures its nest with a spider web. In the archi- tecture of the forest, the bird has established itself in the attic and the roof. The connection to shopping?
The fluffy toilet tissue pur- chased by most Americans, and stocked in virtually all of our supermarkets, requires pulp containing long wood fibers found only in virgin timber (from live trees).When you use premium tissue, you flush down the toilet part of a tree that may have been felled solely for that purpose. And that tree may have been harvested from Canada’s boreal forest, where 57 percent of Blackburnian warblers breed—along with a
| 16 | NATIONAL WILDLIFE
third of all North American songbirds. “When you clear-cut the for-
est, there’s no longer mature forest habitat for birds,” says biologist JeffWells of the Boreal Songbird Initiative (BSI). The continent’s complex, 1.4- billion-acre boreal ecosystem of trees, wetlands, rivers and tun- dra is also vital habitat for cari- bou, bears, moose, lynx and a host of other species. Beyond providing wildlife
habitat, the boreal is one of Earth’s great sponges for carbon dioxide, our most significant greenhouse gas. Together, the forests ringing the land masses at the top of the world store more carbon than any other ter- restrial ecosystem. On the rela- tively cold forest floor, fallen trees and leaves pile up, pre- served as if in a refrigerator, locking carbon in a layer that can be 10 feet thick.When many trees are cut, the land heats up—especially during summer when the sun barely
A THIRD OF all North American songbirds, including Blackburnian warblers (left), breed in Canada’s boreal forests, which also store prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide. Yet 5 acres of these forests are cut down every minute for newspapers, promotional mailings, catalogs—and toilet paper.
andWildlife Service, an area the size of Connecticut is clear- cut from boreal forest each day. That’s five acres per minute. About two-thirds of the harvest is pulped for paper, mostly for newspapers, promotional mail- ings and catalogs. Only a small fraction is made into toilet paper. But it’s a fraction, say conservationists, that doesn’t have to be used at all—and it is not insignificant. On average, each American
uses about 23.6 rolls of toilet paper a year, 95 percent of them made with fiber from virgin timber. Although an increasing amount of this pulp comes from tree farms in the southern United States and other parts of the world, thousands of tons still come from boreal forests. So, what is an environmen-
tally conscious consumer to do? One good choice is to buy toilet tissue made from recycled paper. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that if every household in the United States replaced a single roll of virgin fiber toilet paper with a roll from 100 percent recycled paper, the wood saved would add up to 423,900 trees. The drawback is that recycled paper
LEFT, CINDY L. GRIMES; RIGHT, BLOOMIMAGE / CORBIS
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