Study of UK’s top bamboo loo rolls show some are made from other woods

In the bathrooms of the ecologically conscious, bamboo toilet paper is the new bottom line – a supposedly green alternative to the bog-standard pulp-based loo roll that requires the chopping down of 1m trees a year, just to be flushed down the pan.

will wipe away that smug feeling: samples of three out of the five of the UK’s top bamboo brands were actually made from other woods, some of them heavily implicated in deforestation.

A significant proportion of global deforestation is directly linked to demand for toilet paper, so finding ecologically sound alternatives is serious business.

She added: “Businesses must take responsibility for ensuring their products contain what they say on the packaging, so that shoppers who want to make sustainable choices can trust the information they are given.”

Tom Trow and Sanmarie Grobler, co-founders of Bazoo, told the Guardian they were investigating the problem and seeking to ensure that no future contamination could take place, while affected customers were being contacted.

A spokesperson for Bumboo told the Guardian the problem appeared to be in a shared storage facility where “parent rolls”, which have not yet been made into the finished product, were kept.