Plastic free toilet paper everything you need to know

Let’s talk about plastic free toilet paper! I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with seeing shelve upon shelves of toilet paper covered in plastic packaging. It’s not like it has to remain fresh or will go off! I can only imagine it is to stop the toilet paper from getting wet.

Bogstandard supermarket toilet paper is very slow in going plastic free. Plastic coated toilet paper is ludicrous as it’s already a plastic free product by nature, and then it’s covered in plastic for our convenience. Supermarkets and brands like Andrex could overnight stop millions of tonnes of unnecessary plastic ending up in our bins and landfill.

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Who Gives a Crap

For the last two years, I have been using Who Gives a Crap to purchase toilet paper. I went with them as they were the only ones that I had heard of and, to be honest, I liked the colourful packaging they did. I tend to buy stuff like this in bulk because it’s more cost and time effective. All their toilet paper is 100% recycled paper, so no virgin paper at all. I use their Bamboo variety as it’s a renewable plant.

There are a few different options with Who Gives a Crap where you can buy either 24 or 48. They cost £24 and £36 respectively, so if you have the space for the larger box, they are certainly value for money at 75p a toilet paper. You can also get other items in your delivery as well, such as kitchen papers and facial tissues.

They have had criticism as an organisation for using too much ink on their packaging. When looking into it, they use water-based inks that are food-grade standard. Also, they make great present wrapping material!

Who Gives a Crap are a B Certified Corporation which is not an easy certificate to get. You have to have very high environmental standards to achieve this status, making me feel comfortable using a product that has minimal impact on the environment.

Other plastic free toilet paper providers

Over the last 18 months, I have seen several other plastic free toilet paper providers startup. They all seem to be offering a very similar product(s). What I have been interested in is Bumboo. They allow you to have all your toilet paper delivered with no paper packaging, making them even more environmentally friendly. Something to think about as we need to reduce our waste, not just make it all recyclable.

Other things to think about

If you are unable to source plastic free toilet paper, have a look where it comes from. Try to ensure it doesn’t use virgin paper and instead uses recycled paper.

How about its CO2 footprint? According to the book, How Bad are Bananas – Mike Berners Lee, from discussions they had with Tesco, they figured out the CO2 footprint was 1.1g per sheet for their recycle stuff compared to 1.8g for their traditional paper. As you can see, recycled paper is much better all round then for the environment.

I hope we see supermarkets catching up on this area as its such a no brainer and will have such massive impacts on reducing plastic. They need to act now.

Do you use plastic free toilet paper? If so, what do you use? Anything you would like to see different? For more posts from Matthew Ward, check out “how to shave your face with a reusable razor”. Be sure to follow Sustainable Womble on Instagram where Matthew shares inspiring insight on how to live a more eco lifestyle.