Toilet Paper and Carbon Sequestration? - by Robb

We’ve just returned from 2 weeks on the Coast Path in Cornwall. When we backpack we tend to get a bit obsessive about the weight we carry. We both carry a book to read and my practice is to tear out the pages of mine as I finish them and either use them as fire starter or toilet paper. Saves weight, saves resources, and is a sure fire carbon sequestration technology. How so?
First lets look under the seat at toilet paper. The following quote is from the Sustainable Concepts Newsletter http://www.designforward.net


“Toilet paper, that ubiquitous and apparently indispensable component of modern life, is often manufactured by cutting down the world's forests. In Canada, clear-cut logging claims half a million acres of Ontario and Alberta's boreal forests each year with much of the destruction earmarked for virgin paper tissue products. Similar activity is taking place in the Southeastern U.S. Recently, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council have started campaigns to educate the public on the environmental impacts of using these kinds of products.

The good news is that all of this industrial pressure for tissue products can be avoided simply by using recycled paper toilet tissue. In fact, if every household in the U.S. replaced just 1 roll of virgin toilet paper with just 1 recycled roll 424,000 trees would be saved!”

Article & Picture © GreenLine Paper
More Info at Kleercut... http://www.kleercut.net/en/

So what is the link to carbon sequestration? While all the business as usual folks go on about clean coal and developing carbon sequestration technology we are literally flushing away the most effective carbon sequestration technology there is, trees.
So please use toilet paper made from recycled content or even better don’t buy it at all, use recycled newspaper or old books and either put it in the bin, burn it in your woodstove, or throw it in your composting toilet. I can’t think of anything better to do with all those old Michael Crichton novels.