CALM DOWN – The Truth about Loo Paper

Stop right there. Stop the stockpiling. No need to panic. I’ve just come off the phone with a lovely gentleman from the British Retail Consortium and his message is crystal clear: Britain is not going to run out of loo paper anytime soon.

The UK has enough loo paper in storage – with millions of rolls being being made on a daily basis – to last for weeks if not months if the Covid-19 outbreak leads to the public being told to stay at home.

That’s one of the few bits of happy news we have coming out of this horrible crisis. But what perplexes me is why has there been such a snooty response to those who have been stockpiling loo paper? Twitter and the TV are teeming with people damning those who have bought a few extra rolls as crazed lunatics. Some commentators who should know better have been taking the mickey out of people who have stocked up with a few hundred rolls, although you have to agree that seeing Gemma Collins donning plastic gloves to buy her loo rolls was a little over the top.

Whether to stock up on loo paper or not is fast becoming one those talking points, a bit like Brexit, that crosses tribal loyalties: the Stockers and Leavers perhaps ?

Why loo paper in particular, is the question I keep hearing asked? If the Apocalypse is coming, why not store up on the more substantial staples like tea or baked beans or whisky and wine? Or as one nameless acquaintance suggested, time to go mad and buy those Louboutins.

Here’s why. The Brits are addicted to the loo roll, particularly the softer, silkier and cushioned versions. The UK used up 1.25 million tonnes of hygiene paper last year: about half of which was toilet tissue, the rest was made up of hand, facial, industrial and sanitary tissues.

Each of us consumes about 16 kg a year, almost four times the global average but way behind the US where the average person uses up to 25 kg each per year. Our European cousins, more used to the water and squat solution to cleansing, are catching up too and now consume 15.5 kg per person.

Now for the gory detail: the average Brit uses eight to nine sheets of loo paper per visit, which is an average of 57 sheets of paper a day.  In an average home, a normal roll of loo paper lasts about five days.

This all adds up to a humungous mountain of paper: the average Briton uses 100 rolls of loo paper every year – more than 20,000 sheets. And just absorb this little fact: it takes about 384 trees to make the paper that each of us uses in a lifetime.

We like the stuff. So stockpiling loo paper does makes sense; it’s an entirely rational decision to not want to run out of such a basic necessity, one which has now been around for well over a century. (The first recorded use of paper for hygiene was in China, in the 6th century, and then mass produced there in the 14th.)

Here in the West it was not until the 1890s that the first known commercial tissue paper – created on a roll – was invented in the UK 1890 by the Scott brothers, Clarence and Edward Irvin. It took another 50 years or so for the more luxurious two-ply paper to be introduced to a nation brought up on those rather horrid crispy see-through paper sheets.

Luckily for us, about half of all the UK’s loo rolls are made in Britain so we are not overly reliant on imports. While the paper maybe made here, the owners are foreign: they include America’s Kimberley-Clark (makers of Andrex), Essity, the Swedish hygiene giant which makes the Cushelle and Velvet brands and Germany’s Wepa group. But between them they manufacture at 17 plants around the country, and they are all operating at full steam.

Indeed, the Confederation of Paper Industries, the trade body for the industry, has gone out of its way to assure consumers that they should not be worried. It says we are not going to run out as the UK’s manufacturers are working flat out to keep up production schedules, the wholesalers are full, the warehouses stocked and supply chains are running normally.

Yet demand has soared since the virus outbreak. In the last two weeks Essity, which supplies about a third of all UK toilet tissue, reports that it has sold 63 million loo rolls – more than twice the 24 million rolls sold in the same two weeks last year.

Essity – whose shares were up by 4% this week despite the market meltdown – says it can cope with the upturn in demand. At its toilet paper factory in Stockport, workers are churning out 4.7 million new loo rolls a day, 365 days a year. That’s 171 million toilet rolls a year.

Tony Richards, the factory’s operations director at Essity, says they have 84 million rolls stored in the warehouse at any one time and capacity for 120 million rolls. What’s more, Richards, who you can see here trying to calm down a panicking public, adds production can be ramped up if needs be.

So while I’m a Stocker let’s go easy on the stockpiling, as it only leads to more frenzied panic. What happens is that when people are out shopping they see the shelves empty of toilet paper, so panic and go elsewhere to buy in other stores, and then there is a run. This leads to the shortage scare stories that we have seen all over the media, and yet more frenzied buying.

But the supermarkets have not run out. The big retailers assign a certain amount of space in each store for certain products, which sell fairly routine amounts in a normal week. So even the tiniest run on the loo paper leaves them with gaping holes, gaps on the floor which take time to plug because more stock has to be brought from the warehouses or distribution centres.

In fact, the panic is causing the problem. Panic buying is pulling forward demand, and that’s what is causing the local shortages and empty shelves at CostCo and other places. Ironically, local corner shops have not sold out so quickly.

Behind the empty shelves, the big supermarket chains – whose bosses are in constant contact with the government over all supplies – say the supply chains are working smoothly. Perhaps more importantly, the British manufacturers have big reserves of the raw paper pulp materials, which do come from Scandinavia and South America, required to make the tissue paper.

What is not true, is that the UK is facing a crisis because most toilet paper is imported from China. According to the CPI, there is a small chunk of tissue imported, but its negligible.

Paradoxically, scares over a no-deal Brexit may well have helped prepare the industry for a sudden surge in demand as the big manufacturers stocked up with extra supplies ahead of last year’s deadline. And if we do run out of loo paper ? Well, there’s always those old-fashioned plastic shower units that you can fit to your bath; that’s the next thing to buy. Make your own bidet. Time to go continental.