Vancouver Secrets

Get Off My Ass.

If you’ve read the news lately, you’ve discovered that it’s time to  get tough on our rear-ends.

It’s the new Hummer.

The New York Times chose to frame this as a standard environmental cliche: Americans, with their unreasonable preference for soft, fluffy tissues and toilet paper, are destroying the Canadian boreal forest, and it’s up to environmentalists to guilt us all into buying the uncomfortable off-brand stuff we don’t really like. In this narrative, the big manufacturers’ hands are tied.

“Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.”

This blog has a good take on the subject – from Europe:

While we sturdy Europeans simply wipe once with a dried dock leaf and then carry on as though nothing untoward has happened, it seems that the Yanks are becoming increasingly reliant on multi-ply arse-cleansing solutions, much to the detriment of the aforementioned Lady Globe.

More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in The Land Of The Free comes from virgin forests, which according to Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council is, “a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.”

So what’s to be done? The yoghurt-weavers at Greenpeace are launching a campaign aimed at educating Americans to snap the fuck out of it, be more like the rest of the world and start using recycled loo roll.

But it’s set to be a tough battle as Americans frantically wipe their way through three times as much lavatory paper per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China.

Some might say it’s because they’re all completely full of shit but we couldn’t possibly comment…

Couldn’t agree more… give me my Royal toilet paper (you can save $1 here).

photo credit: Jessia Hime