Greening the Bathroom

Specifying more environmentally friendly paper products is one step toward sustainable practices.

One area where you can achieve signigicant improvements towards sustainability goals applies to the purchase of sanitary paper products, which includes bathroom tissue, paper towels, facial tissues, and cleaning cloths.

There are numerous issues to consider when seeking to improve the environmental footprint as it relates to these products, but prime factors include recycled content of the product, certification of the product by a third party, and the type of manufacturing process.

Recycled content in paper products can be post-consumer or pre-consumer. In the industry, it’s widely agreed that post-consumer content is the more significant figure when seeking to lessen environmental impact. This is because post-consumer material has been used by a consumer, returned to a manufacturing source, and used again for another generation of product.

Pre-consumer content is comprised of materials recycled at the point of manufacture. An instance would be scraps from a manufacturing run that are placed back into the loop for a next batch. Recovered fiber refers to the total amount of post-consumer and pre-consumer combined.

In its procurement guidelines of sanitary products in federal facilities, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) specifies post-consumer content of at least 20% for bathroom tissue and 40% for paper towels.

For those concerned with environmental health, a hot button in paper manufacturing is the use of chlorine to bleach wood pulp. When chlorine is combined with a carbon based substance, such as wood, it produces by-products called chlorinated organic compounds, including dioxins and furan. These compounds, which were identified in the 1980s by the EPA as carcinogens, can be released into the ecosystem through air and water.

Since the time the EPA released this information, many paper mills have responded to concerns by ceasing the use of elemental chlorine gas for bleaching and began using a chlorine derivative, primarily chlorine dioxide. ECF (elemental chlorine free) denotes a product made from virgin paper that has been bleached in this way. Chlorine dioxide significantly reduces the emission of organochlorines; however, it does not completely eliminate the production of these toxins.

There are also processes to bleach paper without the use of any chlorine. Products manufactured this way may bear the labels PCF (processed chlorine free) or TCF (total chlorine free). PCF indicates the product uses recycled paper in which the recycled content is unbleached or bleached, without chlorine or chlorine derivatives. TCF means the product is made from virgin paper, but is unbleached or is processed without chlorine or chlorine derivatives.

It’s useful to think of green products as being on a continuum. In applying that concept to purchasing, facility managers should ask themselves, ‘How do we keep moving in a direction on that continuum that will continue to reduce health and environmental impact?’ By comparing products and strategies, facility managers can figure out the best option.

In weighing the options, facility managers will, of course, want to make sure the product performs to the facility’s standards and that users will be satisfied with it. There is often a misconception that paper with a high percentage of recycled content will be scratchy and uncomfortable. That may have been true in the past, but not anymore. While each facility may have different performance requirements, there is a quality threshold which will be acceptable to most occupants.

When considering their next steps in the sustainable journey, facility managers may find re-specifying sanitary paper products to be an effective choice. With the huge amount of these products consumed daily, it may not be such a small thing after all.