Mr. Whipple Was a Plush Toilet Paper Pushing Anti-Environmental Fiend

Mild mannered grocer Mr. Whipple was constantly trying to prevent his customers from copping a surrepititious feel of the Charmin toilet paper. But it wasn't their fault -- shoppers found the plush TP irresistably soft. In addition, by stocking such an addictive product, Mr. Whipple was, in fact, a toilet tissue pusher. Now, it turns out that Mr. Whipple was killing the planet too. As the Washington Post explains:

It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for "soft" (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three-ply and three-adjective).

It's a menace, environmental groups say -- and a dark-comedy example of American excess.

The reason, they say, is that plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old. They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods.

It has been slow going. Big toilet-paper makers say that they've taken steps to become more Earth-friendly but that their customers still want the soft stuff, so they're still selling it….

"It's like the Hummer product for the paper industry," said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We don't need old-growth forests . . . to wipe our behinds." 

But the battle against plush TP is just the latest front in the potty war. Not satisfied with their low-flush toilet victory, some green activists now want to ban all flush toilets as menaces to the planet. 

Go here for whole Washington Post article on the dangers of plush TP.