Going green, one stall at a time

The university is flushing a 20-year-old relationship down the toilet in order to go green.

After three years of searching, the university has dumped its decades-long bathroom supply contract with Kimberly-Clark for a four-year deal with competitor Bay West.

Bay West will spend the rest of the summer replacing thousands of paper towel and toilet paper dispensers in all academic and administrative buildings with new units set up to accommodate recycled paper, said Harry Teabout, the director of Building and Landscape Services.

"It's been quite an ordeal," Teabout said, adding that the university chose not to renew its Kimberly-Clark contract partly because of the rising costs of replacing broken machines from the early 1990s. Bay West will give the university about 2,500 toilet paper dispensers and another 2,500 paper towel dispensers for free as part of the new deal.

But the environmental impact is perhaps more significant.

"Using toilet paper made from virgin trees is the paper-industry equivalent of driving a Hummer," Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Wired magazine in April.

While most toilet paper includes some recycled content, the university's will be made entirely from recycled materials.

Teabout said the new dispensers have been installed in 15 buildings so far and are expected to be totally finished by the start of the fall semester, but work got stopped up when they realized the old dispensers left behind holes in the stall walls.

"Hopefully, once we get that taken care of, we'll be back on a roll," Teabout said.

Students like senior public and community health major Ray Mullings said they were unconcerned about the impending change to the campus bathrooms.

"If they're making toilet paper, they're probably doing it with the consumer in mind," he said. "I don't think I care."

Freshman journalism major Aaron Groff agreed, adding that he was happy to go green.

"Just the small things to help the environment, we gotta do it," Groff said. "I feel like they wouldn't give it to us if it was unpleasant."

Teabout said the specifics of the contract — including the cost of the paper — fall under the jurisdiction of the university's Department of Procurement and Supply. The officials responsible for the bathroom contracts could not be reached for comment.

Instability in the recycled toilet paper market could pose a potential problem for the university's new green initiative, according to an report in Chemical & Engineering News, a trade journal published by the American Chemical Society.

According to that report, prices of the material fluctuate based on the availability of recyclable paper, which is increasingly snapped up by Chinese markets.

rabdill at umdbk dot com