Kimberly-Clark turns away from ‘natural’ trees to make toilet paper

Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Scott, Kleenex, Huggies and Kotex, is moving away from wood pulp from natural forests for its paper products. The company is building a plant in Yuma, Arizona, to scale up use of hesperaloe, a low-water succulent native to the southwest United States, as an alternative fiber source for toilet paper, tissues, diapers and feminine hygiene products. It's also testing wheat straw, sugar cane and sorghum as other options, after spending about $250 million on this research over the past decade.

This builds on a pledge the company made two years ago to stop using fiber from "natural forests" — meaning old-growth and naturally regenerating trees, mostly in cooler climates — though it hasn't set a firm deadline beyond saying it will happen sometime after 2030. So far, it says it has cut its use of natural-forest fiber in half since 2011, with most of its wood pulp now certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, a group that verifies responsibly managed forestry.

This is mainly a shift in how one large manufacturer sources raw material, not something that changes what's available on store shelves yet. Smaller brands, like the newly launching Paddy Paper, already use alternative fibers such as leftover rice straw. Bigger competitors have moved more slowly: Procter & Gamble has tested bamboo-based Charmin and committed $20 million toward non-wood fiber research, while Georgia-Pacific uses hemp and jute fibers in some products, though not its bathroom tissue.