Tissue – the environmental way
June 29th 2009 Everyone likes soft toilet tissue and wipes, says Mark Dewick, Metsa Tissue’s UK sales director, so washroom paper products are here to stay. However, manufacturers must deliver the required quality with the minimum of effect on the environment
Metsalitto, Metsa Tissue’s parent company is owned by a cooperative of 131,000 forest owners in Finland and buys only from sustainable forestry. It holds the Forestry certification; the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), and was awarded the highly respected Nordic Swan* for its environmentally aware production.
Sustainable forestry is one area for responsible choice, but there are many actions that manufacturers and the increasingly discerning buyers can do to ‘green up’ washrooms and workplace wiping. Manufacturers can stop land fill by using the waste sludge from recycled paper as valuable free fuel. Metsa Tissue burns 70,000 tonnes of sludge each year, to provide heating for 5,000 homes in central Sweden, saving 5,500m3 of oil and lowering carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Metsa are proud of our industry-leading environmental policies, but we are never complacent. We constantly look at our purchasing, production and delivery systems and put similar environmental demands on all our suppliers and distributors.
Home from home washrooms
Workplace washrooms in the past two decades have become luxurious places based around home comforts and quality domestic products. We all want soft, fluffy toilet tissue at work and paper hand towels that feel like linen ones. To achieve this some manufacturers have adopted a production process called TAD ‘Through-Air-Drying’, which involves pumping hot air under pressure to create the ‘fluffy and absorbent’ feel. The down side is that an enormous amount of fuel and hot air is wasted. Metsa Tissue would not be allowed to retain its Nordic Swan* eco-label if it used this production method.
We believe TAD has no place in the environmentally aware washroom because we have two and three ply toilet tissue, hand towels and wipers that can give the same results without this high energy cost.
Less is more
Having completed your enquiries as to how your chosen washroom and wiping paper products are produced and delivered; checked the manufacturer’s environmental policies and are ready to place an order, there is one more very important consideration, ‘cost in use’.
This is the real cost of performing each task and it is where a cheap product like single ply toilet rolls or ‘C’ folded hand towels become a very expensive and environmentally bad choice. The cost per sheet of these products may be low, but so is its absorbency and ability to perform your task, so we take handfuls of product not one or two sheets/towels/wipers.
Research proves that one sheet of quality tissue does the job of several sheets of low-grade tissue and the overall cost per task is less with the quality one. Cheap product requires more staff time refilling dispensers, more storage space, more orders for product, more invoices to pay and more diesel to deliver. You only get what you pay for and if you are tempted by cheap flimsy products you will get a poor result and often more waste to dispose of.
There are other ways of minimising cost and reducing waste. Most paper towels are provided in wall dispensers, which accept only full-sized (23.5 x 34.0mm) products. There are occasions, particularly in schools, where smaller towels are adequate for smaller hands so we have developed a free hand towel dispenser adaptor to sit inside the dispenser to reduce the aperture so that smaller towels fit standard dispensers, saving money and waste. I hope I have illustrated the fact that being environmentally friendly is doubly smart because it can save you money and create less waste. There has never been a better time to look at your paper product purchases. Setting a good example at work and explaining your environmental policies to employees can only benefit their own decisions when purchasing for the home.
Eco friendly production methods and products are no longer a dream, they are a reality, and the choices you make now will benefit the generations to come.
www.metsatissue.com More articles from Metsa Tissue Ltd: | 
