If every Canadian family used one roll of recycled toilet paper in their bathrooms today, the number of trees saved across the country would be just under 50,000.
Yeah, that’s an awful lot of outcome for such a simple act.
Suzanne Blanchet, president and CEO of the Cascades (pronounced Cask-ad) Tissue Group, which specializes in recycled paper products puts it another way: “It will take 50 years to grow a nice tree for a product like a piece of paper towel or a (facial) tissue or a bath tissue that lasts five seconds.”
Montréal-based Cascades has been making recycled paper products since it began operating in 1964, and, from the sigh in the voice of the CEO when she is asked about the history of the product, it hasn’t always been easy.
Finally though, things are changing for Cascades’ products. Having the words “recycled” or “organic” on the label has gone from being a marketing liability to a marketing bonanza, especially for companies like Cascades that walked the walk before everyone else talked the talk.
A few months ago when Greenpeace was holding a protest outside a grocery store in Mississauga, one of its members was handing out a guide to paper products that rates manufacturers on their environmental practices. Cascades was at or near the top of every category, since it is the only producer of tissue paper to receive both EcoLogoM and Process Chlorine Free (PCF) certification for its paper-bleaching process.
The firm uses about 80 per cent less water than the industry average in its process of taking the office paper we throw in our blue bins, putting it in a giant blender, screening out the debris, washing it so the ink floats to the top, creating a pulp, bleaching it and making new paper.
Went looking for Cascades in my local store, but no luck. In fact, the company has had a hard time getting equal space on store shelves in Ontario, because the big brands have a lot more influence and money to spend influencing the retailers about product placement. Many retailers don’t want to take a risk with something a little different.
Now, however, Cascades products are finally available in Mississauga. They’ve been at the Highland Farms, at Matheson Blvd. and Hurontario St., since January.
Blanchet says the company also achieved a recent “breakthrough” by getting Wal-Mart Canada, which has its corporate offices in Meadowvale, to start carrying its Satin Soft recycled brand in Ontario beginning this April.
In a phone interview from her Montréal office, Blanchet said the company had done well in much of the rest of Canada (especially in B.C. where all those forest-loving hippies live) than it has in Ontario.
Now, however, customers are starting to ask for recycled products and are starting to go elsewhere if they don’t find them. When she stayed at a hotel in Québec City recently, where her firm’s products were in use, management could not say enough about the positive response they have received from guests.
“In the 1980s and 90s lots of people used to say that recycled products were too rough and not as clean and white,” says Blanchet. “At the first, it was rougher but now it is just as good. Recycled things were under the radar. Now people want to care about the planet and that is a big motivator.”
There is virtually no cost difference in producing paper products from virgin forest or recycling it if — and this is a big if — you have integrated processing facilities such as Cascades has.
Let’s hope this will be like trans-fats and pretty soon, all the other paper companies will start jumping on the bandwagon. As consumers we need to insist they do the right thing.
A new consumer survey, which Cascades commissioned to go with its new marketing push in Ontario, found 83 per cent of respondents would switch toilet paper brands if they thought it would save trees.
Why not? It doesn’t cost anything. And with every flush, there comes a cleaner conscience.