White Toilet Paper

Environmentalists used to take it as an item of faith that you should buy only undyed, plain toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels. Ideally you would buy unbleached papers, which would reduce some of the dioxin pollution involved in papermaking, but people just won’t buy unbleached toilet paper. Our local hippie coop sells recycled unbleached paper TP with the unfortunate brand name “Second Use Recycled Toilet Paper.” I insist on being the absolutely first and only user of this type of product.

The theory behind eliminating unnecessary dyes is that these papers are purchased as garbage, you buy them specifically for flushing or throwing them away. Sure you want to have a nice little colorful border pattern on your paper towels or TP as it hangs there on the dispenser, otherwise the additional dyes serve no functional purpose. But when you consider the millions of tons of these paper waste products going directly into landfills every year, it doesn’t make any sense to add hundreds of tons of waste dyes along with it.

Lately I’ve had a hard time buying plain white paper towels and tissues. I go to the grocery store and they only have dyed “designer” Kleenex in beige or blue, and paper towels with printed borders, they have no white products at all. Apparently over the years, consumer resistance to colored kleenex and other products has been breaking down. I guess you can sell any kind of crap to people if you introduce it gradually.

It’s not hard to find TP in white, as long as you want double or triple-roll 12 packs. I don’t know where to store it all. I bought a Northern double-roll 6 pack today because it was the smallest the store had. When I got to the checkout, the checker said it was only 10 cents more to get the 12 pack of double rolls, I should swap. So I did. But I draw the line at triple-rolls.

5 thoughts on “White Toilet Paper”

  1. I don’t have any idea where you could buy unbleached toilet paper in Virginia, sorry. It’s not a very popular product, it’s brown and ugly. Like I said, people don’t like brown toilet paper, people generally associate pure white paper with cleanliness and brown with filth, so they just don’t go for the brown TP.

  2. Brown toilet paper is not ugly to everyone. I find white TP ugly, pretentious, and hostile toward the planet. Many bathrooms are now in neutral tones, and the brown looks beautiful with them.

  3. I prefer the unbleached toilet paper because I try expose myself to as few exnoestrogens as possible. Maybe if people knew about the devestating effects of xenoestrogens and if they knew that they were contained in bleached products and being smeared on their private parts, then they would quickly learn to like brown paper too. 🙂

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