23/11/2020
Bamboo Bobbi was created by Intelligent Facility Solutions. The core mission is to allow as many businesses and households the chance to choose ethical products, by making them as affordable as possible, whilst still maintaining the high quality and good value.
We’ve kept our products really simple. No unnecessary fancy wrapping or packaging like your other brands. This only adds weight, and uses additional resources like water, bleach and inks. Plus, it just increases costs for customers!
The independent report produced by Steve Shelley aimed to find out whether bamboo toilet paper, even though shipped to the UK from China, has environmental benefits compared with your typical toilet paper.
Toilet paper produced from virgin forest trees is one of the most wasteful products, destroying whole forests for a single use product. So, this research looked at the advantages of using bamboo in the production of toilet paper.
The scientific literature makes the following claims as benefits of bamboo:
- It avoids the need to reduce and replant conventional forests which can take up to a century to grow back.
- It’s faster growing than other sources, it’s actually one of the world’s fastest growing plants.
- Bamboo production and harvesting can be a sustainable process for rural farming communities.
- It’s less damaging in terms of the loss of biodiversity.
- It potentially has a lower carbon footprint than conventional paper manufacture.
The above table gives you some idea of the production process for bamboo, and which parts are emissions heavy and which aren’t. As to be expected, transportation to the UK forms a large chunk of the total carbon emissions in making bamboo toilet roll.
The next table shows a comparison across different branded toilet rolls and their relative carbon emissions per roll, with the ‘present case’ being Bamboo Bobbi. Even though Essity may appear to have the lowest figure for emissions (101gCO2e), this is not the case. Essity figures don’t include any Scope 3 emissions, which are ‘ activities of the organisation, occuring from sources that they do not own or control . These are usually the greatest share of the carbon footprint, covering emissions associated with business travel, procurement, waste and water.’
So, their supposedly low emissions figure is not an accurate portrayal of their true carbon emissions, which in reality will be much higher.
Taking this into account, Bamboo Bobbi has the overall lowest carbon emissions (114gCO2e), and is made from bamboo, which has been proven to be a sustainable material.
Summary
Through an analysis of previously published work in the field and various data sets, the report concluded that bamboo toilet paper does indeed have a wide range of environmental benefits, even when taking into consideration the transport and shipping costs and emissions to the UK.
