… or very silly if you think about it.
One of the blogs over at EcoFriendlyDaily.com recommends “Creating a Tree-Free Home.” “Tree-free” did not turn out to be as onerous as I thought it would be:
“Tree-free means reducing or eliminating paper products in the house. There are a million places we use paper everyday, from sticky notes to disposable plates. Just spend a day counting how many wood-based products you use and you’ll see; it’s everywhere, and most of the time it’s unnecessary.”
The post recommends replacing paper plates, paper napkins, paper towels with cotton substitutes. It’s the disposable diaper versus the cloth diaper dilemma. Arguing whether the use of water, energy, and detergents to clean soiled cloth is preferable to paper is beyond my capabilities.
But then the post says…
For instance, “Toilet paper with a high post-consumer content (at least 80%) is a healthy medium too. No one wants to get rid of their toilet paper, but by using unbleached, recycled paper you’re helping to keep trees standing. You can also find hemp paper or paper from alternative sources…”
What’s with toilet paper? TP seems to be the latest forest product to be squeezed.
I agree that bleaching (or perfume, for that matter) doesn’t add to TP’s overall function and buying toilet paper with recycled paper is fine. But is it really environmentally preferable to switch from wood to substitutes to make paper?
Paper can be produced from most any woody material. Yet, using substitutes, such as hemp, bagasse, straw, or kenaf, to make paper may be less environmentally friendly than wood, unless it’s the leftovers. As Dekker-Robertson and Libby point out, “It would be erroneous to believe that a plantation of sugar cane, or kenaf, or any annual crop is as environmentally friendly as a plantation of trees. Tree plantations are more biodiverse, even though such plantations may be less complex than a ‘wild’ stand.”
For every complex environmental problem there is a solution that is elegant, simple, and wrong.
Nullius in Verba 