CA M PA I G N U P DAT E
TREES TO TOILET PAPER: CANADA’S GREAT BOREAL IS BEING WIPED OUT
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Canada’s boreal forest is being leveled at an alarming and unsustainable rate: a million acres a year. breed, from whooping cranes to the great gray owl, along with a majority of North American songbirds. They join year-round residents that include Canada lynx, moose, pine marten and the iconic boreal woodland caribou, a distinct subspecies of reindeer, not to mention more than 600 communities of Indigenous peoples who have relied on the forest’s bounty for millennia. The Canadian boreal is majestic, timeless and irreplaceable—and it is, quite literally, being flushed down the toilet. Canada’s boreal forest is being leveled at an alarming and unsustainable rate: a million acres a year is logged, the equivalent of seven NHL hockey rinks per minute. The oil, gas and mining industries
From left: The Broadback Valley in the traditional territory of the Cree Nation of Waswanipi of northern Quebec; caribou
have all added to the destruction, but the greatest threat is the one posed by logging, driven in large part by rapacious demand in the United States, the destination for more than three-quarters of all boreal wood products. The wood ends up as lumber, packaging and, perhaps most alarmingly, throwaway tissue products like paper towels and toilet paper. In fact, U.S.-based consumer-goods conglomerates like Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific use boreal softwood pulp for all
of their flagship household tissue products. Even though recycled content and alternative fibers such as bamboo and wheat straw are readily available, these multibillion-dollar companies instead adhere largely to decades-old formulas that rely on virgin pulp, despite their substantial research and development budgets that could be invested to develop more forest-friendly products. “Shockingly, no major household brand of toilet paper, or of facial tissue or paper towels, for that
matter, contains any recycled content—zero, none,” says Shelley Vinyard, boreal corporate campaign manager at NRDC and coauthor of the recent report The Issue With Tissue: How Americans Are Flushing Forests Down the Toilet. Charting the destructive impacts of clearcut logging on Canada’s boreal, its Indigenous peoples and its wildlife— and calling out the big American consumer-goods manufacturers for their outsize role in this ecological crisis-in-the-making—the report is the opening salvo in NRDC’s campaign to dramatically disrupt what Vinyard calls the “tree-to-toilet pipeline.” The paper’s publication was quickly followed by a call to action targeting Procter & Gamble, maker of Charmin, the top-selling brand of toilet paper in the United States. More than 80,000 NRDC Members and online activists swiftly flooded P&G’s CEO, David Taylor, with demands that the company stop making throwaway products sourced entirely from virgin trees. NRDC is also working with [Continued on next page.]
BOREAL FOREST © GREENPEACE; CARIBOU © ISTOCK
t’s been called the Amazon of the North and the earth’s green crown. Just below the Arctic Circle, the largest intact old-growth forest on the planet rings the globe, spanning Alaska, Russia, China, Scandinavia and Canada. The latter country’s share of this magnificent and primeval wilderness—the boreal forest—is vast, stretching across a staggering one billion acres from Newfoundland and Labrador all the way to the Yukon Territory. The boreal is a dense mix of towering spruce and fir trees interspersed with aspen and birch, scattered with lush peat bogs and verdant wetlands. More than three billion birds migrate there to