Green Daily

You bring your bags to the grocery store. You compost. You have solar panels on your roof, and bike to work.

So much good work! But do you flush away all of your valiant efforts when you wipe?

Yes, I'm talking about that kind of wiping. The next environmental battlefield appears to be in your bathroom, over toilet paper. And Americans are losing, badly.

Ninety-eight percent of the toilet tissue sold in the U.S. is made with virgin wood. So even though there are brands made of 50% or even 100% post-consumer waste, most people are still buying the thick, quilted "soft" stuff, like Charmin Ultra and Angel Soft.

You may think it's a small enough luxury, especially in these hard times, but in the aggregate, America's soft bums are doing more damage to the environment than our big SUVs and impossible to heat houses.

Some people complain about the texture of recycled toilet paper, but consider the alternatives ... people have used everything from phone books to corn cobs to old catalogs.

Just one more thing to think about when you're rolling your grocery cart down the aisle. Instead of paper or plastic, you can think, paper or fibrous vegetables.