Your future toilet or tissue paper could be Sonora soft, as Kimberly-Clark plans to make goods from a Southwest desert plant called hesperaloe to try cutting back on using wood.
Hesperaloe, like cactus, is a type of succulent with fleshy leaves.
Unlike cacti, hesperaloe plants, also called red yucca, don’t have sharp spines. They’re part of the same subfamily as the agave plant, according to the website for Utah’s publicly owned Conservation Garden Park.
Kimberly-Clark’s paper goods portfolio includes Kleenex tissues and Cottonelle and Scott toilet paper. The company said in a release this month that it’s identified hesperaloe as an alternative fiber source, contrasted with wood pulp and “traditional forest-based fibers,” to make its products.
The upside of using hesperaloe, Kimberly-Clark said, is that it’s native to the Southwest’s desert climate, so it doesn’t need much water. The company said it has built a facility in Arizona to try and use hesperaloe as a “rapidly renewable natural fiber source.”
Kimberly-Clark arrived at the idea of using hesperaloe after testing 70 alternatives to traditional wood pulp. Jeff Melucci, Kimberly-Clark’s chief of strategy and business development, told The Wall Street Journal that “we tried to pulp everything from wood straw to bamboo. Everything.”
Other fibers that Kimberly-Clark tried were made from algae, chicken feathers and seaweed, according to The Journal.
One environmentalist group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, cheered the company’s alternative fiber initiative as a way to reduce the clearing of forests in the Northern Hemisphere for wood.
Nearly 2 million trees are cut down a day just to meet global demand for toilet paper, according to a 2022 study by consulting group Edge.
“If Kimberly-Clark can scale up production of this fiber sustainably and without displacing other native ecosystems, this could alleviate significant pressure on the forests currently used to make tissue products,” Shelley Vinyard , the NRDC’s director of global nature, said in a release.
