Long story short, we have to wrap our toilet paper and paper towels in something to keep them moisture-free and hygienic. 🧻

We could wrap 6 rolls together (that’s the limit), but we’d need to use a much thicker paper. The net paper used (by weight) to wrap a 6-pack in heavy-duty paper vs. six individual rolls in the thin tissue paper we use is effectively the same. The only other option would have been to wrap all 48 toilet paper rolls in a big outer plastic wrap, which we don’t think is a worthwhile alternative.

Actually this story is worth going a little long on… When we first thought about wrapping our rolls we realised that our entire product - the tissue paper, core and cartons - were made of paper and cardboard. On the back of an envelope we worked out that on a surface area basis, wrapping our rolls would increase the amount of paper and cardboard we were using in our products by about 1%. We also realised that our rolls were where the bulk of our paper was being used. So to get comfortable with wrapping rolls, and the corresponding ~1% increase in our total paper surface area of our product, we reduced the width of our rolls by roughly 5%, from 105mm to 100mm. That made us happy to reinvest some of the paper we had effectively saved into our wrappers.

Now when people ask ‘why do you individually wrap your rolls’, we wonder if that’s the right place to focus - imagine the impact if everyone lobbied to reduce the width of all toilet rolls by 5, 10 or even 20mm!

Also, we think they look cute. They work wonders as an online product because they're eye-catching and shareable. We know this because our customers are constantly sharing snaps of their deliveries on social media, and gifting rolls to friends. This is really important because the more people share what we're doing, the more we can grow and donate to our non-profit partners working in clean water and sanitation! 💰

The wrappers can be recycled or repurposed.