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Photo of stack of toilet paper.

Using post-consumer recycled content toilet tissue saves natural resources including trees, water, and energy.

Janitorial Paper Products

Recycled content janitorial paper products have many benefits, including creating markets for recycled material, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and saving trees, water, and energy. In addition to these environmental benefits, jurisdictions in California are now required to purchase paper products with a minimum of amount of post-consumer recycled content whenever fitness and cost are equal (visit this CalRecycle website for details). For these reasons, we stock the restrooms at our facilities with recycled content toilet paper and hand towels.

How We Did It:

  • We worked with the Responsible Purchasing Network to conduct a market assessments for paper towels and toilet paper to determine the availability of products that consumermeet minimum recycle content levels within each paper product category.
  • Where it was more stringent, we referenced the federal Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines to specify minimum post-consumer recycled content.
  • We required vendors to offer products that are third party certified by Green Seal or UL/ECOLOGO, where available.
  • We involved a variety of stakeholders in evaluating the quality of the products, including janitors and building occupants.

Challenges:

Lingering effects of supply chain disruptions due to Covid and other economic forces resulted in vendors requesting more flexibility to deal with price escalations. Due to this, we changed the initial contract term from a three-year period to just one year, and added provisions to allow price escalations up to 3.5% when negotiating the two one year extensions allowed in the contract

Benefits:

  • Using post-consumer recycled content supports recycling programs for office paper, junk mail and newspaper; saves trees and other resources like energy and water; and reduces greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.
  • Products that are process chlorine free reduce pollution caused by chlorine, and third-party certified products are audited to meet wide variety of environmental standards.

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