Collaboration of municipalities and private firms uses pulp sourced from used hygiene products
The first toilet paper in history was produced by a Japanese public-private collaboration using recycled resources, including discarded nappies. There are already seven establishments in southwest Japan’s Kagoshima and Miyazaki that sell the recycled toilet paper.
In partnership with Poppy Paper, a manufacturer of toilet paper, and Unicharm, a manufacturer of nappies and other hygiene products, the cities of Shibushi and Osaki in Kagoshima led the initiative. Disposable nappies were first recycled by the towns in April 2024 when they separated them from other garbage during collection. Urine pads and wet wipes were among the 98 metric tonnes of hygiene products that the initiative had gathered by September and turned into toilet paper.
Sterilising, deodorising, and bleaching the gathered materials to make them resemble new pulp is the first step in the recycling process, which was created by Unicharm. In order to make toilet paper, the treated materials are then transported to Poppy Paper’s Fukuyo facility and combined with trace amounts of recycled paper. Over the course of two months, the firm created about 30,000 toilet paper rolls, which are marketed as the Shibushi Osaki Roll.
“This initiative could help diversify the ways to secure raw materials, especially as used paper supplies are expected to decline with the rise of paperless systems and a shrinking population,” says Satoshi Yoshida, from Poppy Paper’s sales department.