The Zoo’s campaign encouraged visitors to choose toilet paper made either from 100% post-consumer recycled paper, or from paper with the internationally-recognised FSC logo – a certification which VicForests’ operations have unfortunately failed to meet. Given that most Australians don’t use recycled toilet paper, millions of trees are being flushed down the toilet every year after a single use. So it’s a bummer that the campaign’s been canned.
And there’s heaps of other ‘stuff’ that we also use just once and throw away. It might only take 10 seconds for us to unwrap and use an item before it disappears forever down a dark hole never to be seen again – by us.
But behind everything we use is a story which often starts in a distant part of the world in a beautiful field somewhere. A natural resource is extracted, trucked, refined, produced, manufactured, packed, stored, shipped, distributed and sold – and that’s just before we use it! So we decided to lift the lid on some household items that we use once and chuck and suggest some alternatives.