13 Facts about Home Paper Products that May Inspire You to Hug a Tree

Toilet paper and other home paper products aren’t necessarily great party conversation starters. But with their impact on the environment, we should find a way to work these topics in so they become top of mind.

I recently spent a week at fellow green diva Meg’s house and was inspired by the toilet paper. Inspired.

The rolls of toilet paper didn’t have a cardboard tube. I purchase only recycled toilet paper to save trees and lighten my environmental footprint (no, not recycled as in already used, silly! I’m talking about toilet paper made from recycled paper) but had never seen toilet paper sans cardboard tube. So I became curious about the positive impact of eliminating (pardon the pun) the cardboard.

Listen to this Green Divas at Home segment then read on for more crazy stats!

Now for the 13 crazy (and some not so crazy) facts about paper home paper products & recycling

1. If every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber paper towels (70 sheets) with 100 percent recycled ones, we could save 544,000 trees.
2. If every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber toilet paper (500 sheets) with 100 percent recycled ones, we could save 423,900 trees.
3. Over 17 billion toilet paper tubes are thrown away each year. That’s enough to fill the Empire State Building. Twice.
4. If every household in the United States replaced just one package of virgin fiber napkins (250 count) with 100 percent recycled ones, we could save 1 million trees
5. Every minute, Americans throw away 32,280 toilet paper tubes.
6. Almost 270,000 trees are either flushed or dumped in landfills every day… 10 percent of that total is attributable to toilet paper (but I’m not sure how much of that are the actual toilet paper cardboard rolls. Plenty, I’m sure.
7. Toilet tissue accounts for 15 percent of deforestation.
8. We throw away enough paper to make toilet paper for a lifetime.
9. Every day, over 3,000 tons of paper towel waste is produced in the US alone.
10. To make one ton of paper towels, 17 trees are cut down and 20,000 gallons of water are consumed.
11. Decomposing paper towels produce methane gas. Methane gas is a leading cause of global warming.
12. The average person uses 2,400 – 3,000 paper towels at work, in a given year.
13. One ton of recycled paper (909 kilograms) saves 3,700 pounds (1,682 kilograms) of lumber and 24,000 gallons (90,849 liters) of water; uses 64 percent less energy and 50 percent less water to produce creates 74 percent less air pollution; saves 17 trees; and creates five times more jobs than one ton of paper products from virgin wood pulp. And Pulp and paper industries are the third largest industrial emitter of pollution!

Bottom line (again, sorry for the pun). None of us are perfect. I, myself, was a paper towel addict in a former lifetime (stay tuned for a blog post about my recovery). But if we can just cut back and work towards using recycled paper products, the planet will be in better shape. You never know… a tree might just hug you back!

What you can do:

1. Check out NRDC’s shopper’s guide to shop smarter for home paper products—vote with your dollars!
2. Go for recycled or reusable paper products like People Towels.