I am Kaitlin Bailey from YES! Magazine. We are a nonprofit organization that publishes a wonderful ad-free quarterly journal, offering powerful ideas and practical actions for building a sustainable world. We have been around for more than 12 years and circulate about 55,000 print copies of the magazine nationwide. You can find us online everyday at yesmagazine.org.

One of the online stories we are running is about recycled paper products.

I stumbled upon your flickr graphic of the “Don’t Flush the Forest” campaign.

We are pleased to take you up on your offer of Creative Commons licensing, and wanted to let you know. We certainly will credit you.

Thanks.

and thanks for covering this issue, and for linking to our tissue guide.

facial tissue absolutely is a big part of the problem. we have a campaign targeting Kimberly-Clark specifically because Kleenex uses no recycled fiber. pretty crazy, but the brand that is synonymous with “tissue” is made entirely from virgin fiber, including some from the ancient Boreal forest in Canada.

i think this blog post by one of our forest campaigners is really interesting:

http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/greenpeaceusa_blog/2009/02/26/destroying_forest_to_make_toilet_paper_i

she attempts to show that a) Americans don’t actually prefer the soft stuff if they know that it comes from virgin forest; this “preference” is actually pushed on us by tissue companies like K-C, who charge a lot more for their “premium” brands — and spend tons of money marketing them, too. and b) that even K-C admits they can make tissue as soft as Kleenex with recycled content.

so why won’t they make their tissues from recycled pulp? who knows.

thanks again for covering this issue. if you’d like to cover more enviro issues, you should consider registering for our blogger alerts:

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press-center/bloggers-center