Hello, I am the toilet paper lady. I am the shopper who rushes up, wide-eyed, to the managers at the grocery store to ask why my brand of choice, Scott Tube-Free, has gone missing from the shelves. I point to the line in the big merchandise ordering book to make sure they see the right item. I follow up in a week to see if they’ve reordered my precious product.
I’m not normally this picky, but Scott Tube-Free is extra special. It is the only toilet paper on the market without a cardboard tube in the middle of the roll. Living, as I do, on the sixth floor of a building with no elevator, I am especially attuned to frivolous waste. Every little thing that goes up my perilous staircase has to come down again. And then there is the environmental concern. Cardboard is made from trees, and cutting down trees contributes to global warming, so getting rid of toilet paper tubes has to be good.
Therefore Scott Tube-Free is the most important toilet paper, and its availability must be vigilantly assured. Right?
Once, when my local Key Food was out of stock, I cornered a manager and learned it was because Scott was rebranding the product. (It used to be called Scott Naturals.) Another time, the folks at Key Food just stopped ordering it, thinking maybe nobody wanted it. I set them straight.
Then, in late October, a manager told me that Scott was redesigning the packaging and that I would have to wait a few months for the toilet paper to return. A few nights later, I decided to check Scott’s website for clues. We were down to our last few rolls of toilet paper in the apartment. The end of tube-free living was staring us in the face.
“Tube-Free toilet paper has been discontinued,” a message on Scott’s Tube-Free page said, “but is still available at select retailers while supplies last.”
This, I thought, was a sad day not just for me, but for Earth. I have long tried to help the planet by buying whatever household products cause the least amount of harm, like reusable water bottles and canvas shopping bags, but it’s hard to know what really makes a difference. There didn’t seem to be any ambiguity about Scott Tube-Free, though.
How could Scott, and its parent company, Kimberly-Clark, justify taking away the only product of its kind?
In my search for answers, I learned about waste and consumer choice; about environmentalism; about the different ways Americans and Europeans wipe their tuchuses. And I learned that what had seemed obvious to me was not conclusively true.
‘Flagship’ toilet paper
Kimberly-Clark is the first and only maker of toilet paper without cardboard tubes. Scientists at its Wisconsin facilities designed and patented a way to make the paper roll up around a stiff, hollow center that would hold its shape during packaging and transport. They also designed various accouterments, like a special dispenser for industrial-volume tubeless paper, the kind you might see in a public bathroom but which is not available for retail purchase.
The patent for “coreless tissue rolls and method of making same” bears the names of eight engineers. Some are experts in the act of rolling; others are chemists who devised a way to use hydrogen bonding to stick parts of a tissue web together. The patent was issued in 2009 and still bars competitors from adopting those methods. (Interestingly, the Scott Paper Company was also the first company to introduce toilet paper with cardboard rolls, back in 1890.)
I reached out to a Scott spokeswoman, Caiti Bieberich, for answers. Her first response made me hopeful. “Scott brand also invented the category, so there’s pride in our firsts to market,” she wrote, promising to connect me with a company expert. The tone of her next email was different.
“The brand actually made a decision to discontinue the product line in 2019 to focus its efforts on Scott ComfortPlus and the flagship Scott 1000 toilet paper,” Ms. Bieberich wrote. “Happy to chat through any additional toilet paper questions you may have and sorry that’s not more helpful on Scott Tube-Free, specifically!”
That was all I would ever get from Scott. Luckily, The New York Times has a resident paper and cardboard expert, my reporting colleague Michael Corkery. If anyone was going to learn the likely reasons that prompted Scott to walk away from its own exclusive, he would. He called up Dan Clarahan, a longtime veteran in the paper industry and the president of United Converting, a company that sells manufacturing equipment that makes tissue products, including toilet paper.
Mr. Clarahan said that he did not know specifically what drove Scott’s move. But generally, he said, tube-free methods do not significantly reduce the amount of fiber in a roll of toilet paper, because some manufacturers have to add fiber to these tubeless rolls to give them their shape.
As long as a consumer recycles the cardboard tube, “it’s a wash” in terms of saving trees, Mr. Clarahan said.
For the manufacturers, it can be more efficient and less costly to produce toilet paper with the rigid rolls in them because they can be produced faster than tube-free bands.
There was also the consumer element. Americans, according to Mr. Clarahan, want comfort. We use more toilet paper than Europeans because we’re in the habit of bunching up a wad of it rather than unspooling a few sheets and neatly folding them. Roughly 70 percent of us bunch, while 90 percent of them fold.
And we make split-second decisions about what to buy. Shoppers buying their toilet paper at big box stores like Walmart and Costco spend an average of a second and a half to two seconds deciding which product to buy.
Shoppers often decide on which pack of toilet paper to purchase based on appearances. Cardboard cores can make the rolls look larger, making consumers think they are getting more value, even though they may not be getting more sheets of paper. Bigger, in other words, is better.
“Generally, people do not pay attention to sheet count,’’ said Mr. Clarahan. “They are trying to get out of the store as quickly as possible.”
‘I love you more than my family’
I felt deflated after Michael shared Mr. Clarahan’s information, but I knew there was another dimension to the story. There were people like me all over the country who were really upset about losing their tube-free toilet paper.
Scott Tube-Free’s website has been flooded with more than 2,000 protests from devotees of the product begging Scott to reconsider its decision, with all-caps titles like “DON’T DISCONTINUE.”
“Please bring this back … I LOVED not having a tube to recycle!!” one customer begged. “We are on our own septic system and this paper is not bulky, soft, sturdy (so you don’t need a lot) and had the additional glory of NO ROLL at the end.”
Another fan said: “Scott tube free toilet paper is the highlight of most of my days!!!! I NEVER want to see an empty brown tube in my bathroom again. I love you more than my family sometimes!!!!”
I began fantasizing about hoarding any remaining rolls I could find, the way the “Seinfeld” character Elaine Benes hoarded “the sponge,” a discontinued birth control product.
Another commenter on Scott’s website had the same idea. “I finally saw 2 packs of rolls at a local store around early December and we bought, no joke, 96 rolls,” the commenter said. “I’ve got 6 kids and there’s always company. Not having to deal with the tube means my kids actually put on a new roll when one runs out.”
‘Using 600-year-old trees to wipe your butt’
I still couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that, environmentally speaking, having an empty cardboard tube at the end of a toilet paper roll was the same as not having one.
So I turned to Ben Dunbar, the manager of waste operations at AET Group, a Canadian environmental consulting group.
Mr. Dunbar and his group study the waste habits of people in cities and rural areas around North America. They comb through trash left on the street for collection or removed in bulk from skyscrapers to see what kinds of things people throw out. They sort what they find into as many as 100 different categories and track what happens to it.
“The cores in the middle of toilet paper rolls are technically boxboard materials, paper-based, recyclable,” Mr. Dunbar said. But, he added, they don’t always end up where they should be.
“Sometimes the cardboard tubes from a toilet paper roll can fall into the realm where yes, technically, that type of material is recyclable,” he said. But when it gets to the recycling plant, it “doesn’t always end up with the cereal boxes and other things in the category,” he added.
Toilet paper cores, in other words, are like Post-it notes. They’re made of recyclable material, but they’re so small that they sometimes get lost in the shuffle at recycling facilities. And that’s if they even make it into the recycling bin at all.
People see bathroom waste as dirty, so they throw it away immediately instead of carrying it to where they store recyclable materials, Mr. Dunbar said.
His conclusion? There really is an advantage to eliminating the cardboard tube.
“If a manufacturer can reduce the amount of packaging associated with its product that’s generally a good thing,” he said.
If that was the case, why weren’t other toilet paper makers clamoring to use Scott’s tube-free method? I decided to check with Seventh Generation, which is based in the nutty-crunchy town of Burlington, Vt., and markets itself as green above all else.
I did not find Seventh Generation’s chief executive, Joey Bergstein, pining after coreless technology. Tubes, he said, are easy to recycle. It’s the recycled paper in his product that makes it better for the planet. Scott was making its tube-free toilet paper out of trees cut down for just that purpose, he said. Mr. Bergstein trotted out a talking point that has also appeared in his company’s promotional material: If Scott and the other toilet-paper makers using new timber all switched to recycled paper it would save 740,000 trees.
“It’s crazy to think of using 600-year-old trees to wipe your butt,” he said. Seventh Generation’s toilet paper is made from recycled office paper, the kind that piles up next to the printer. Its cardboard tubes are made from recycled materials too, including old shipping containers and other pieces of corrugated cardboard.
Having nailed down these various details, I am convinced that, overall, Seventh Generation’s toilet paper is a more environmentally friendly product than my former beloved tube-free option. I’ve switched allegiances, but I’m not happy. The Seventh Generation rolls practically evaporate in my bathroom and the empty cardboard tubes gather on the floor.
In the back of my mind are the wails of others bereft of Scott Tube-Free. We still need time to grieve.
