Music lovers attending the Coachella Music and Arts Festival will be able to go to the toilet, without any eco-guilt, thanks to the work of a sustainable paper products company, whose bamboo- and sugarcane-based toilet paper is 100% tree-free.
For one of our most common ‘disposable’ items, toilet paper, we still rely on a slow-growing resource – trees – and every day, the equivalent of 27,000 trees get flushed down the toilet, adding up to about 10 million trees every single year. Trees aren’t the best renewable source of pulp for producing paper items like toilet paper, mostly because of their slow growth rate (about 2 inches per month). A far better choice would be to use faster growing species to turn into this ‘flushable’ product, such as bamboo (which grows about 100 inches per month, and takes just six months to go from seed to harvest) and sugarcane (which grows about 12 inches per month).
Mark Samuels and Josh Askin, of Nimbus Eco, have spent a bunch of time and effort researching alternatives to traditional paper, such as straw, bamboo, and sugarcane, and have been sampling new manufacturing technologies to come up with a more sustainable solution for our everyday sanitation needs. They found that bamboo fiber could create a strong toilet paper, and sugarcane fiber could add softness to it, so their flagship product, Nimbus Extra Soft Toilet Tissue, combines both of those materials into a strong and comfortable product that is sustainable and practical.
“The unique blend of bamboo and sugarcane in each one of our products is at the core of our sustainable philosophy. Both of these plants are grown on farms and harvested by hand, dramatically reducing waste and carbon emissions. In fact, our sugarcane comes in the form of bagasse, the fibrous by product created from the extraction of sugar after the cane has been crushed.
Essentially, we’re taking a throwaway product and repurposing it in a positive way. As for bamboo, this plant is the fastest growing in the world with some species able to grow over a meter in just one day. The long fibers make for a soft and thick paper that is perfect for toilet tissue and just about any paper product you can imagine.” – Nimbus Eco
According to Nimbus Eco, because bamboo can grow quickly without the need for pesticides, herbicides, or irrigation, and sugarcane can be harvested multiple times before being replanted (and the fiber leftover from sugar production, bagasse, is often burned or discarded), these two renewable paper fiber sources make for a natural fit for an eco-friendly toilet paper.
“Our complete range of sustainable, tree-free paper products are comparably priced against traditional paper products as well as recycled paper products, and products in the sustainable category. Our Nimbus Extra Soft toilet tissue is especially competitively priced and one of the easiest and most rewarding change businesses and individuals can make to have a positive impact on the earth.” – Mark Samuels, Nimbus Eco
If every person in the US used a just a single roll of the company’s new tree-free toilet paper, instead of the traditional tree-pulp-based toilet paper, about 470,000 trees could be saved each year, according to Nimbus Eco, and this sustainable toilet tissue is also chlorine-free and safe for septic systems means, so it’s simple to swap out for just about any bathroom situation.
Nimbus Eco also has a line of other tree-free paper products, including EcoSoft Napkins, Two-Fold Hand Towels, EcoPaper Towel Roll, Heavy Duty EcoPlate, Blue Cold Cups and an EcoToGo Container (clamshell), which are available through the company’s website or through Amazon.com.