Can’t go paperless here: demand for soft toilet paper getting hard to meet

April 22, 2010
Courtesy of the American Chemical Society
and World Science staff

The rise of elec­tron­ic com­mu­nica­t­ions is in­di­rectly mak­ing it ev­er harder for ma­n­u­fac­tur­ers to sat­is­fy Amer­i­cans’ pref­er­ence for soft toi­let pa­per, says a new re­port. But the pa­per pur­vey­ors are hop­ing the prob­lem can be solved through clev­er chem­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing.

The de­vel­op­ments are de­tailed in an ar­ti­cle in the April 19 is­sue of Chem­i­cal and En­gi­neer­ing News, an Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal So­ci­e­ty pub­lica­t­ion.

Low-priced soft toi­let pa­per comes largely from re­cy­cled of­fice pa­per, but the rise of e-mail and pa­perless com­mu­nica­t­ions means used white of­fice pa­per “is get­ting in­creas­ingly hard to find,” wrote Mel­o­dy Voith, sen­ior ed­i­tor of the pub­lica­t­ion, in the ar­ti­cle.

The short­age of used of­fice pa­per as well as news­print is af­fect­ing oth­er sec­tors of the pa­per mar­ket as well, the ar­ti­cle adds. A short­age of re­cy­cled pa­per can be made up with pa­per from freshly chopped trees, but this is cost­li­er and tougher on the en­vi­ron­ment.

Pa­per from “vir­gin” trees is the high­est qual­ity and con­tains long fi­bers from the cell walls of plants. As pa­per is re­cy­cled one or more times, the fi­bers are pro­gres­sively bro­ken down and weak­ened, and the pa­per qual­ity di­min­ishes.

The recycled of­fice paper used to make toil­et paper it­self contains in­creasing am­ounts of re­cycled paper, Voith ex­plains. That de­creases its use­fulness for mak­ing high-qual­ity per­son­al paper soft enough to sat­isfy picky con­sum­ers.

“To keep costs down, pa­permakers are us­ing low­er and low­er grades of re­cy­cled fi­ber and at­tempt­ing to make high­er grades of pa­per with it,” Voith wrote. “The trend has cre­at­ed a grow­ing niche for func­tion­al chem­i­cals that im­prove as­pects of pa­per qual­ity in­clud­ing strength, wa­ter re­pel­len­cy or ab­sorb­en­cy, soft­ness, smooth­ness, col­or and bright­ness, and print­abil­ity.”

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