Dear Editor,
As if the onslaught of U.S. tariffs on goods from the Great White North weren’t enough…
… now this, per Bloomberg via The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington.
The Trump tariffs on Canadian petroleum, cars, hydropower, medications, vehicles, and softwood lumber for construction include wood pulp for … paper products. Yes, that includes toilet paper.
For texture and performance, toilet paper and paper towels depend on NBSK or northern bleached softwood kraft pulp. Standard toilet paper contains about 30% NBSK, while utilitarian paper towel material contains about 50%. In fact, many U.S. mills demand it for its tensile strength and absorbency. Canada’s fir and pine forests are the source of NBSK.
Bloomberg interviewed Brian McClay from South Carolina, who tracks the global pulp market, and learned that “the US imported about 2 million tons of Canadian NBSK last year [2024].”Frederic Verreault, vice president of a Quebec wood processor, told Bloomberg, “They [U.S. mills] don’t buy our products for our pretty eyes. They buy our products because they are the best and the most integrated into their factories.”
Bloomberg notes the “cascading effect” of the tariff, whereby as high lumber prices curtail demand for softwoods for use in both construction and manufacturing, fewer pulp logs will make it to the sawmill, driving up production costs.
And just as Vermont products were left to rot on the wharves of Lake Champlain during the Jeffersonian trade embargo of 1808, the stacks of logs already harvested for the U.S. will be an almost total loss. And if the tariff climbs to 50%, the sawmills that provide the wood chips that are processed into pulp will go out of business, McClay predicted.
But an eventual shortage of toilet paper is not the only fallout. According to the University of Maine Pulp + Paper Foundation, pulp is showing hope of substituting for plastics in microchips, batteries, and electronic circuit boards.
And there is no substitute for NBSK’s superior absorbency for household paper goods.
