The future is Bamboo, backed by Science!
At Cheeky Panda HQ, there’s nothing more we love than learning about bamboo and all its benefits. That’s why in 2024 we had a carbon footprint Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) conducted on our toilet paper. The results came out, and we couldn’t have been happier! Our toilet paper had 45% less life cycle carbon emissions compared to the global average for recycled paper, and 24% less than the global average for virgin tree-based paper! But this got us thinking, what about all the other benefits of bamboo outside of carbon?
That’s why we teamed up with LCD Consulting to complete a cradle-to-grave LCA of our toilet paper across the full suite of 18 impact areas.
The report uses The Cheeky Panda’s primary data collected from its bamboo supply chain and compares it with industry average rolls, which combined data from virgin wood and recycled tissue paper.
This compared impacts such as land and water use, non-renewable fossil fuels, ozone depletion and global warming potential. This saw a saving of between 35-99% across all but two impact areas. What a result!
A few notable savings compared to industry average toilet roll:
Global Warming Potential - 48.4% saving.
Our bamboo’s overall low impact processing comes from the hand-cut harvesting method, low fuel use in pulping, lack of chemical de-inking and purification processes.
Land use – 95% saving.
Water use – 85% saving.
Ozone depletion – 58.5% saving.
Non-renewable fossil fuels – 51.6% saving.
Another subject our report covered, which is not usually in LCAs, was the impact of our toilet rolls on biodiversity, the variety of living things. This is represented as Mean Species Abundance (MSA) which shows how intact nature is to its original state, on a scale of 1-0, with 1 being completely natural and 0 artificial.
Our bamboo comes from naturally growing native forests which are harvested using a hand-cutting technique, and had an MSA of 1, the best score. When compared to single species managed forests, which many virgin wood toilet papers use, this had a massive 80% difference in MSA, showing how our toilet paper is also helping to keep nature at it’s most natural!
And finally, for us, one of the most important results in the report…Endpoint impacts. These are the overall impacts of our toilet roll on species and human health.
This showed a massive saving across both indicators, with species impacts being 73% lower than the industry average and for human health 63% lower. This is so special for us as this really cuts to the heart of what we are trying to do with our products: better for planet AND better for people!
So, there you have it – a roundup of our latest and greatest LCA. We’re proud to be leading the bamboo revolution by investing in this report which shows that a simple switch to Cheeky Panda bamboo toilet paper from recycled or virgin wood can have such a big impact. So why not embrace your inner panda and make the switch effortlessly?
