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Modern recycled toilet paper is soft and white (although not whitened with chlorine bleach) and virtually indistinguishable from non-recycled. It's widely available in food co-ops and natural food stores in the Seventh Generation brand (and some others) and, perhaps in some supermarkets as well. Trader Joe's has a brand of recycled toilet paper, too.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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Fleece jackets, cardboard boxes, and water bottles are still being made, they're just not being made in the quantities they were during the boom times and they're not being made out of recycled materials, they're being made out of virgin materials. And why are virgin materials more economical to use than recycled materials? It's because the virgin materials industries are able to externalize much of their costs (particularly environmental costs). This is a place where government intervention in the market is entirely appropriate and badly needed. If the extractive industries were required to internalize all their costs, it's very likely that recycled materials would be more economical than virgin materials for manufacturers to use. Then the environment would benefit in two ways -- extractive industries would cause less environmental damage, and the demand for recycled materials would provide strong incentives for recycling. Think of how many people who don't currently recycle would if the collectors paid them instead of them having to pay the collectors.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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The idea of selling more products in re-usable/refillable containers is a very good one. Studies done in the early days of modern recycling (early 1970s) showed that in terms of "net energy" (total energy used from resource extraction, transportation, manufacturing, recycling, etc), the best system is to package as many products as possible in refillable containers. The model is the old system of bottling beverages in local plants, returning the bottles to stores and then to the local plants. The studies showed that it would be better to package canned food in glass jars with a deposit and return them for refilling. We already have standardized jars (mason jars) ready for such system.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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