Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast, where you'll weekly guide to the numbers

and the news and in life, and I'm Charlotte McDonald.

This week we're investigating a serious claim about toilet paper and it's damaging

impact on the world's forests. It's a claim that's been doing the rounds on the internet for some

time, and over the last few months it's been playing on British radio in an advertising campaign for,

you guessed it, a brand of toilet paper, but in this case recycle toilet paper.

15% of global deforestation is from toilet roll alone, but switched to serious tissues and they

don't cut down trees. In fact, serious tissues planted tree for every roll sold.

Well after that, several of you wrote into More or Less.

Hi all, as a loyal listener, I must confess to listening to the podcasts of a more commercial

nature. On some of these, there have been a spate of adverts from serious tissues,

an outfit that aims to make our toilet wiping habits more sustainable.

One claim that they make in these adverts is that 15% of deforestation is a result of toilet paper.

That sounds like a terribly big number to me. It's not a claim that I see repeated on their website.

Thanks Alan.

Hi team, I've worked on projects looking at various commodity impacts on deforestation,

and this claim seems very high. My sense is that the statistics have been misinterpreted

or misrepresented, which is obviously your speciality. So would you be able to look into this for me?

Many thanks Nick. Well, Nick and Alan and the others of you who got in touch, we've done what you

asked and investigated. First, we contacted the company whose ad it was, serious tissues,

and they directed us to a 2019 report by the American Environmental Organization,

the Natural Resources Defence Council, or NRDC. The problem with the report was we couldn't see a

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