The secret life of toilet paper tubes

The chances are, if you’re considering trying a new toilet paper you’re wondering about the thickness, softness, or number of sheets; not the tube they’re wrapped around.

It’s fair enough, but we think every part of Naked Paper deserves a chance to shine, so today, we’re talking tubes. What we use to make them, how we make them, and what happens when you’ve finished the roll. 

Our cardboard tubes aren’t just core to our rolls, they’re at the core of our whole operation; allowing us to make the most of the materials we have at hand and keep our products consistent.

How toilet paper tubes are made

Cardboard tubes are thicker than tissue, they’re stronger than tissue, and they don’t absorb like tissue. So it might surprise you to learn that they can actually be made with a very similar process, at the same factory.

At Naked Paper, we make our toilet paper cores entirely in-house, on the same production line that makes our tissue. 

For raw materials, we use locally sourced cardboard and packaging paper collected from supermarkets and warehouses in the area around the factory. This is the same pile of packaging waste that we use to make our recycled tissue, and it comes to us via the same recycling centre.

Before this material gets cleaned and pulped, we do a quick sort by colour, and depending on what we find we sort it into one of two groups:

For our tissue: The card and paper used for our sheets of recycled toilet paper, recycled kitchen rolls, and recycled tissues is "colour controlled," meaning it's all roughly the same shade of cardboard brown. This keeps the colour of our rolls consistent from batch to batch, without resorting to bleach or dyes.

For our tubes: Making our inner tubes gives us the perfect opportunity to use up any raw card or paper that would throw off the colour consistency for our recycled tissue products. So any card or paper that’s very dark, very light, or very thick (more on that in a bit) ends up here.

If you’ve ever noticed that the tubes inside Naked Paper toilet rolls and kitchen rolls can vary a bit in shade, this is why. In our experience, customers expect the sheets of tissue to look basically the same with every order, but nobody minds if the inner tubes are a lighter or darker brown from box to box.

Cleaning and glue-ing

Once the raw material is sorted it’s broken down into pulp and cleaned with gentle soaps and salts. If you'd like a full breakdown of the ingredients we use to clean and bind our products with no bleach in sight, you can read our full ingredients list here.

At this stage, our the recycled pulp for our tubes is mostly the same as the recycled pulp for our tissue (other than a bit of variation in colour). After cleaning, we get to the stage where the biggest difference comes into play: thickness.

For our tissue: We spray the pulp out very finely – just 19gsm per ply – to keep it both soft and flushable.

For our tubes: The pulp is sprayed out much thicker. Each of the three layers used to spiral our tubes is made to hit a target of roughly 110gsm.

This thick layer of recycled pulp is pressed, rolled, and dried into a large “reel” or roll of card that’s about three metres wide. We cut that large roll down into 7-10 cm strips. Three of these strips can then be layered together with a natural, plant-based adhesive into a spiralling structure that forms a long rigid cylinder.

And we’re ready to roll! 

The long cardboard cylinders are fed into our winding machinery and wrapped tightly with our beautiful, unbleached recycled or bamboo tissue to create long “logs” of loo roll. These logs are then chopped into individual rolls and packed into our recycled cardboard boxes ready to go to our wonderful customers.

Over to you

You’re probably familiar with the next bit.

The toilet roll tubes arrive in your home in boxes of 24 or 48 toilet rolls (or 6, if you’ve bought one of our smaller boxes on Ocado or Able and Cole). 

Most customers will get through a single roll in just under a week, though it might be more or less depending on whether you work from home, or if you have a bidet, among other things.

Either way, the tissue goes down the drain and we end up with an empty tube. What’s next?

Before you head to the recycling bin, there is another way to give Naked Paper tubes a second life. A lot of our customers share pictures and stories of using our inner tubes to plant seedlings.

To use an inner tube as a planter you just fill them with compost, pop your seeds in, and let them grow on your windowsill. Here’s a simple demonstration of the principle from the shed of our logistics manager Dave, who has sown his with different varieties of tomatoes.

When the seedlings are ready to go outside, you can plant the whole tube straight into the ground or in larger pots. Because the tubes are completely bleach-free and held together with a natural pine-resin glue, there’s no harsh chemicals that could end up in the soil.

If you aren't green-fingered, don't worry. Our inner cardboard tubes and boxes are made from recycled cardboard in the first place, but can they be recycled again?

Absolutely. Cardboard toilet paper tubes, including ours, can be recycled easily across the UK. You can simply pop them in your recycling bin along with your cereal boxes, egg cartons, and our own cardboard delivery boxes.

The end of the roll (for now)

At Naked Paper, we make soft, strong, bleach-free toilet rolls that are designed with care from the outer box center core.

Making our cardboard tubes ourselves means we can refine our processes to make the most efficient use of the materials we have to hand, and it also means we know 100% of what goes into your box.  

Curious about another part of our manufacturing process? We are always happy to share the details. Let us know what else you’d like to hear via email at hello@nakedpaper.com, or pop a comment on our Facebook or Instagram. We will be back with more tissue facts before you've finished your next box. 

Want to enjoy these thoughtfully made cardboard cores (and the 320 sheets of bleach-free loo roll that go with them?)