Can you recycle toilet paper tubes?

Most of us use toilet paper every day. Unless you're using coreless tissue, you'll be left with an empty cardboard tube at the end of each roll. 

For the average person in the UK, that’s 127 tubes to dispose of every year. Or 72 tubes, if you’re using extra-long Naked Paper rolls.

What’s the best way to dispose of all that rolled-up cardboard, and how are toilet paper tubes made in the first place? We’ll start at the beginning.

How are toilet paper tubes made?

At Naked Paper, we make our toilet paper cores in-house, in our wonderful B Corp factory in Spain. They start life in our recycling centre, part of the same pile of locally sourced cardboard and paper packaging that we use to make our recycled rolls.

After this waste packaging is sorted and prepared, but before it's cleaned and pulped, we do a quick sort by colour. 

The card and paper used for the actual tissue of our recycled toilet paper is "colour controlled," meaning it's all roughly the same shade. That way, we can keep the colour of our rolls consistent from batch to batch, without resorting to bleach or dyes.

But we don't control for colour when it comes to our inner tubes, so these give us an opportunity to use up any card or paper that would be too dark or too light to use for our tissue.

If you’ve ever noticed that the tubes inside our Naked Paper toilet rolls and kitchen paper towels can vary slightly in colour from box to box, this is why! In our experience, customers expect the sheets of our recycled toilet tissue to be broadly the same colour every order, but nobody minds a bit of variation on the inner tubes.

To make the tubes, we mix this pile of leftover card and paper with water and roll it out to to make a large roll of card about three metres wide. We cut that roll down into narrow strips, usually between 7 and 10 cm. Then, we take three of these strips, layer them together with a plant-based adhesive, and combine them in a spiralling structure to form a cylinder.

That’s what forms the strong cardboard core in the middle of your toilet roll. Making them at our factory means we know 100% of what's going into Naked Paper toilet rolls, and our recycling process is as efficient as can be.

Can toilet paper tubes be recycled in the UK?

Our inner cardboard tubes, and our boxes, are made from recycled cardboard in the first place, but can they be recycled again? Absolutely. Cardboard toilet paper tubes, including Naked Paper tubes can be recycled easily in the UK. 

They’re made from cardboard, which is widely accepted in household recycling collections. Just pop them in your recycling bin along with cereal boxes, egg cartons, and our own toilet roll and tissue boxes!

Why is paper and cardboard so easy to recycle?

Paper and cardboard are the most widely recycled materials in the UK. Even those of us without bottle or plastic collections are likely to be able to separate out card and paper in their household recycling. As a result, 80% of waste paper and card in the UK is recycled.

Cardboard is so easy to recycle because of its simplicity. Card and paper are made from cellulose fibres that can be reused several times through simply soaking, pulping, and drying into new sheets. Turning waste paper and card back into usable fibre doesn't require intense heat like metals and glass, or complex chemical treatments like some plastics do.

That’s why, at Naked Paper, we love working with cardboard to make our recycled rolls. It’s so simple and clean to give it a second life it would be a shame not to. And because cardboard isn't typically printed on in the same way that office paper or marketing materials are, we don’t need to introduce bleach into the process. 

It’s all part of our mission to reduce the impact of what is, at the end of the day, a product that’s used once and flushed away.

The end of the roll (for now)

So yes, you can recycle toilet paper tubes. In fact we do it ourselves; any offcuts from our toilet roll tubes, like the seconds from our bamboo rolls, will go into the mix for our recycled toilet paper, and might even end up as another tube.

At Naked Paper, we make soft, strong, bleach-free toilet rolls that are longer-lasting, lower-waste, and made from renewable, recyclable materials – including the tube. We make our cores in-house, from locally-sourced card and paper, in all the varied colours of the raw materials.

By using recycled materials in our own production we cut the amount of new resources needed in the first place. And by keeping our tubes (and our boxes) recyclable, we make it easy for you to send them on to their next life.

Want to check out these recycled, recyclable inner cores for yourself?