Recently one of the country’s most popular paper goods suppliers, Scott Products, did away with the cardboard inner tube inside of its toilet paper rolls and is now going tubeless. Here’s why that’s good news for the environment.
Each year over 17 billion toilet paper tubes are thrown away, and most end up in landfills. To put that in perspective, this amount of waste is enough to fill the Empire State Building…twice! And did you know that in New York City alone, 14,000 toilet paper inner tubes are thrown away every 15 minutes? In fact, just the tubes from toilet paper rolls account for millions of pounds of waste each year.
Since first putting out toilet paper in the 1980s, Scott Products has become the top supplier. Therefore, the company’s move to go tubeless carries even more environmental significance because it sets a precedent. What if every toilet paper manufacturer ditched the inner tube? Imagining the benefits of that is exciting for all of us environmental activists out there.
What if we were to expand on this strategy beyond just toilet paper? Many other products contain a wasteful component that can be eliminated in order to help save our planet. What if paper towel companies did this as well? Each year billions of paper towel tubes end up biodegrading in landfills, but they don’t need to be there.
If the average American uses about 741 pounds of paper per year, with 55 pounds of that being from toilet and towel paper, going cardboard tubeless could mean a huge waste-reduction and could help chip away at the spread of trash dumps across the country and world. If both the toilet paper and paper towel inner rolls were dispensed with, this could equate to eliminating a significant portion of the 55 pounds of waste, per person, per year, that we generate in just this one country alone.
The United States has an average of 319 million people in its population. While the paper waste does not seem like a prodigious figure for one individual per year, when you multiply that by almost half-a-billion people, that is a colossal amount of waste just from these two products alone. When you look at it like this, taking away the tube seems like a no-brainer. It is not a perfect solution to all of our environmental waste problems, but it is certainly a start.
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Toilet paper roll image via Shutterstock.