On a recent visit to my local Trader Joe’s, I counted 42 pumpkin or pumpkin-spice products, including actual pumpkins. “I’m surprised it’s so little,” says Phil Lempert, a grocery store analyst and the editor of SupermarketGuru. 

Pumpkin spice — generally made up of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, often with cloves or allspice or both — has become a mass-marketed marker of the onset of fall, and a widely mocked one to boot. To publicly embrace this spice blend is to brand yourself as “basic” (if a person), as pandering (if a brand), or as contrarian (if also acknowledging the status of pumpkin spice in the culture). 

Trader Joe’s might be the largest and most diverse purveyor of pumpkin spice products in the country, as if a giant stood atop a packaged-food facility with a two-story shaker of the spice blend, just drenching everything in brown powder. This year, the company is selling pumpkin spice bagels, pumpkin-spiced O-shaped cereal which has no relation to a more famous cereal, pumpkin spice face masks, pumpkin spice cinnamon rolls, granola, oatmeal, caramel corn, Greek yogurt, rooibos tea, tortilla chips, and pumpkin-spiced pumpkin seeds. Among many more.

There’s also an influx of simply pumpkin, without the spice, as though the humble squash snuck onto store shelves behind the spice blend that bears its name. Dog treats, soup crackers, alfredo sauce — all of these are offered, seasonally, with pumpkin in them, often without the pumpkin spice. No other fall crop, not even the apple, receives branding in quite this way. You must buy these products simply because they are associated with fall.

The company did not respond to multiple requests for an interview; Trader Joe’s is notoriously (at least in media circles) uninterested in speaking to the press. In addition to emailing them, I also dug up a couple of phone numbers which were listed in association with Trader Joe’s communications staff. Those numbers were either wrong numbers or out of service. I sort of respect this.

In any case! Trader Joe’s anonymously told a writer at the Washington Post, back in 2016, that the California-based company had started selling pumpkin-spice products in “the mid-1990s.” Trader Joe’s, as you might guess from its vaguely tiki-inspired aesthetic, first opened under that name in 1967. But it wasn’t until 1987, when CEO John Shields took over from the company’s founder, Joe Coulombe, that Trader Joe’s began to expand outward from its California base. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the number of Trader Joe’s locations multiplied by five in the 1990s; 1996 found the first Trader Joe’s on the East Coast, in the Boston area. Today there are nearly 500 locations across 43 states. (Sorry to Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, and West Virginia.)

Trader Joe’s is an unusual grocery store for a bunch of reasons. The vast majority of its products are its own house brand, their specific provenance unknown. (Lempert describes Trader Joe’s sources as “one of the best-kept secrets in the industry.”) They rely on packaged goods, but will introduce and remove products from store shelves frequently — sometimes for seasonal reasons, sometimes because a product hasn’t sold well, sometimes because a product does sell well and they want to drive up demand. Their prices are low; their stores are colorful and friendly, albeit with sometimes-uncomfortable exoticist imagery. (Trader Joe’s was inspired by, and named after, tiki restaurant pioneer Trader Vic’s.)

But much of what makes Trader Joe’s unusual also makes them a perfect fit to overload their store shelves with pumpkin spice products. For one thing, Trader Joe’s is a very clever company, and knows what time of year they’ll sell the most stuff. “From back-to-school through the Super Bowl has the biggest food purchases of the year,” said Lempert. The fall is crammed with food holidays: back-to-school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s. 

This is the time of year when food retailers — along with many other retailers — make their most money. Americans gorge during the fall. Trader Joe’s leans into this like few other grocery stores do: They blanket their stores in fallen leaves, huge bins of pumpkins and apples, and scatter seasonal fall offerings across all their aisles. There are seasonal foods to be had in spring and summer; even winter has clementines. But it’s fall where the most money can be made, and so it’s fall when Trader Joe’s puts the most effort into creating specific seasonal products to squeeze out every last dime.

Trader Joe’s also has the vibe to go along with the tropes of fall, the warm blankets and hot cup of tea gripped with both hands. “Their retail environment goes out of its way to make you feel comfortable,” said Lempert. Trader Joe’s is aggressively friendly, slightly goofy. They have free coffee. Pumpkin spice has many of those same associations of warmth and comfort and childhood. The tones match.

But seemingly the biggest reason why Trader Joe’s has gone all-in on pumpkin spice, besides the obvious reason that it sells and Trader Joe’s is in the business of selling things, is that it’s a perfect fit culinarily. Trader Joe specializes in small twists on familiar classics. You know an “everything” bagel; how about just the spices from that, which you can put on whatever you want? How about a tater tot casserole, but made from cauliflower? Or peanut butter cups, but they contain both peanut butter and jelly?

Trader Joe’s can feel different to different kinds of shoppers. For many millennials and Gen Z-ers, raised during the American food revolution in which concepts of sustainability became mainstream and everyone seems to put turmeric in everything, Trader Joe’s is not adventurous at all. This isn’t a value judgment; Trader Joe’s sells many tasty things and is usually affordable with them. For suburban boomers, the vibe might be much more unusual, compared to most supermarkets.

Trader Joe’s makes it a point to not really stock anything that would be unfamiliar, and thus threatening, to most Americans, including the white boomers who were raised on a more limited variety of foods than newer generations. They sell frozen, microwavable pad Thai, not dried shrimp or tamarind paste. It’s a fine line to walk, and Trader Joe’s is vigilant about finding that balance of something unusual enough that you could only find it at Trader Joe’s, but not so unusual that you don’t know exactly what it is and what it will taste like.

Pumpkin spice is the perfect vehicle for this sort of experimentation. The individual spices within the pumpkin spice blend can be used for all kinds of things, but in the United States, those flavors — cinnamon, nutmeg, clove — are deeply associated with desserts and with the fall season. There’s no particular reason for this, as those spices have plenty of savory applications, and nobody in this country much cares about which season spices were harvested in, but those are the associations we have.

They’re also powerful spices, especially when used all together. That means that Trader Joe’s has a beautiful opportunity: You can pretty much put pumpkin spice in any dessert, and the shopper will know exactly what it will taste like, even if they’ve never had that exact dessert before.

Breads and pastries, pancakes and waffles, ice cream and granola: these are all fair game. It’s extremely easy, and tempting, to conjure up the flavors of cinnamon and nutmeg. You don’t have to have eaten a pumpkin spice pancake to know what it will taste like. And pumpkin spice is, despite any backlash over the reckless over-pumpkinizing of fall foods, a crowd-pleaser. Most people like it.

Familiarity, at least as much as the influence of Starbucks’s pumpkin spice latte, is the reason for Trader Joe’s insane yearly list of pumpkin and pumpkin spice products. There are plenty of other autumnal favorites that could be rolled out as seasonal offerings: It is, after all, the season of apples, pears, and grapes, in addition to vegetables like Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli, all of which have had trendy moments recently. But at my local Trader Joe’s, though there were 42 pumpkin and pumpkin spice seasonal products, there were only three seasonal apple products, plus one spaghetti squash. 

This isn’t because pumpkins are more popular than apples; they assuredly are not. It’s because apples don’t provide the same Trader-Joe’s-y-ness that pumpkins do. Try sticking apple into some of those pumpkin products, and it’s hard to feel like they have much pull. Apple-cinnamon oatmeal? Quaker Oats has sold that for decades. Apple yogurt? Apple-flavored tea? Not interesting, or not appealing. There’s also the fact that pumpkins, unlike apples, can be both savory and sweet — helpful for pumpkin ravioli, which couldn’t really have an apple equivalent. Pumpkin spice, as a spice blend, can go in just about anything; apple, as a fruit, has trouble providing its flavor to shelf-stable packaged foods.

Trader Joe’s sells a ton of pumpkin and pumpkin-spiced products in large part because they have stumbled on something that is achingly perfect for what they’re trying to do. It’s familiar, but can be used in slightly unfamiliar ways; it’s cheap; it’s trendy; and it’s associated with the company’s biggest-selling time of year. Pumpkin spice and Trader Joe’s were made for each other.

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If you were a kid in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of the rainforest probably has a permanent spot in your brain. From about 1986 through 1992, a mass movement centered around saving the rainforest dominated popular culture. Ads for cheeseburgers, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many, many more products included blue-green tropical imagery and vague environmentalist messages. Movies like Ferngully and TV shows like Captain Planet capitalized on the trend. The chain restaurant Rainforest Cafe launched; the clothing store Banana Republic was jungle-themed. You might have worn an oversized t-shirt with a toucan or a spider monkey on it.

Looking back, the entire “save the rainforest” thing feels frivolous, ineffective, naive. We obviously didn’t save the rainforests; today, tropical rainforests face a host of foes both new and old, ranging from palm oil plantations to slash-and-burn agriculture. But this era of simplistic cartoons and lizard-emblazoned candy was actually the birth of the modern American environmentalist movement. It was unlike any conservation project seen before, and we’re not likely to ever see anything like it again. 

Prior to the early 1980s, conservation and environmentalism were extraordinarily limited. There were essentially two branches. You could have the old, Teddy Roosevelt-style land conservation, fairly bipartisan and almost entirely projects by rich, white men designed to rope off their favorite spots in the United States. The Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act were all passed during Republican administrations (though it’s worth noting that Nixon vetoed both of the latter). The activists I spoke to largely described the pre-1980s conservation movement as elitist and paternalistic, but most importantly domestic.

Environmentalism, as opposed to conservation, was something for bearded weirdos and not something the national media felt at all obligated to examine. “Nobody took you seriously,” says Daniel Katz, the founder of Rainforest Alliance. “You were a hippie radical lefty. You were a tree-hugger. You were seen as a nut! And I wasn’t a nut.” From 1981 to 1984, the New York Times published a single article dealing with the rainforest by that term. It was a review of a seminal book on rainforest conservation, Catherine Caulfield’s In the Rainforest, and it is a truly bonkers document. An actual quote: “Despite her bias toward efforts to save the forests, her account is balanced.”

The term “rainforest” is a vague one; generally it refers simply to a forest that receives a lot of rain. There are rainforests in British Columbia, Norway, and Korea. But the rainforest most often referred to during the 1980s and 1990s was tropical rainforest: the Amazon rainforest, Congo rainforest, big chunks of Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Central America.

Even the word “rainforest” was new at the time. More typical was “jungle,” which conjured Joseph Conrad-type images of savagery and danger. Nobody in the United States or Europe seemed to really care much about the destruction of what was seen as a hostile landscape of blood-sucking insects, man-eating beasts, malaria, and cannibals. (These are, obviously, inaccurate descriptions.) But there was a burgeoning scientific community studying these environments across the globe.

Those scientists began to sound the alarm within their own communities. These tropical forest environments, they said, housed a greater percentage of life for their area than anyplace else on the planet. There were thousands, probably millions, of new species to be discovered. And there were commercial concerns, too, especially for the pharmaceutical industry, as dozens of drugs (quinine, turbocuarine, cortisone) were derived from rainforest plants. And these forests were being destroyed at alarming rates, largely for agriculture, ranching, and logging.

A few books, including Caulfield’s and The Primary Source by Norman Myers, both published in 1985, tried to reeducate the public: That feared jungle is more than you think.

A new crop of environmentalists, many of them previously anti-war activists during the Vietnam War, picked up the cause. They were based in San Francisco and New York, and they weren’t thrilled with the few existing environmental groups. Friends of the Earth was mostly based in the UK; Greenpeace was focused on whales (and some activists had — and have — ethical issues with them, anyway); the World Wildlife Fund was animal activism; the Sierra Club and National Resources Defense Council were all about the United States. There weren’t organizations speaking specifically about the rainforest, so these activists founded their own.

The Rainforest Action Network was founded in 1985 by Randy Hayes and Mike Roselle. Hayes had just come off a 10-year stint filming a documentary with the Hopi Native American tribe. In the Southwest, he was hanging out with the more radical Earth First! group and learned about the plight of the rainforest from them. “For me, my earliest interest in the issue was kind of connected to my interest in indigenous peoples,” says Hayes. 

Rainforest Action Network was based in San Francisco at the time, and Hayes made the very good decision to get in touch with a man who might be the unheralded force behind the entire modern environmental movement: Herbert Chao Gunther. Gunther was a former anti-war activist who started the Public Media Center in San Francisco. It was, essentially, a marketing firm that worked exclusively on issues of the environment and social justice. “He convinced me early on that there was no effective campaign without a serious media strategy,” says Hayes.

Gunther says in the early- to mid-1980s, there was a steady stream of activists coming through his door, asking for advice, looking for strategy tips. But he connected with Hayes and with the save-the-rainforest movement, and the two companies worked together for three years, from 1986 through 1988. Gunther’s big idea was an elaborate education campaign. He purchased mailing addresses of subscribers from publications and looked for certain overlaps. A subscription to Mother Jones meant you were a lefty; a subscription to Forbes or Fortune or an American Express membership meant that you had money. And the cause needed both of those things.

If you’re wondering about the privacy concerns here, well, good point, but it doesn’t seem to have come up at all. “Nobody was worried about privacy, back then,” says Gunther. 

Gunther’s ad campaigns were totally unlike existing commercial campaigns. Instead of catchy, brief, pithy slogans, Rainforest Action Network included multi-page, multi-thousand-word stories of life in the rainforest. “When you read 1,500 words about the rainforest, you get converted,” says Gunther. Creating activism is, Gunther believed, a very different beast from creating a customer. You had to get inside a nascent activist’s head, take up space in there with imagery and facts about this wondrous place. It helped that few at the time knew very much at all about the rainforest. Rainforest Action Network made the rainforest seem like an Eden, a verdant wonderland, a dream in green and blue and brown. 

They also very intentionally did not use the word “jungle.” At the time, there were a few different terms being tossed around as potential replacements for that stigmatized word. “We were interacting with a lot of the seminal scientists of the time,” says Hayes. “‘Tropical Moist Forest’ was what they wanted to call it.” Gunther and RAN landed on “tropical rainforest” as their term of choice. A primary strength of the Save the Rainforest movement was that it was focused on something positive and amazing. The rainforest was magic, and saving it was fun, not grim. 

Gunther was RAN’s guide to branding. “He also cautioned me not to connect it too much with animal rights, at first,” says Hayes. “The animal rights movement at the time was kind of the anti-vivisection people. Vegetarianism wasn’t popularly well thought-of, the way it is now. It was a different era.”

Gunther’s mentality was aggressive. “If you want to start a movement, make an enemy,” says Gunther. “Get into a fight. People understand fights, because when there’s a fight, you can pick a side.” Hayes had already decided to essentially ignore the government; the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, these activists thought, were not going to be helpful but also did not make for a pointed enemy. The ideal enemy was a corporation. So Gunther and Hayes scoured the news for an enemy, finding a brief mention in a New York Times article about a massive contract Burger King had in Costa Rica, to produce beef. To clear land for the cattle, Burger King had to mow over massive swathes of pristine Costa Rican rainforest. They were a perfect enemy.

RAN ran full page ads in publications ranging from hyper-local hippie weeklies (for their grassroots movement) to BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal (to let executives at Burger King know they’d been targeted). They set up a widespread boycott of “rainforest beef”; worked with Earth First! and other organizations; and made Burger King’s Costa Rican connection a national issue. 

It worked, sort of. Burger King did, within a year and a half, cancel its $35 million contract with Costa Rican ranchers and suffered a double-digit-percentage downturn in sales. But there were other forces at play. “Rainforest beef” had significantly lower fat content than American beef, and Burger King itself knew that Americans simply didn’t like it very much. The company was embroiled in internal struggles, including unsuccessful marketing campaigns and backlash from franchise owners. It was a smart business move from a few different angles for Burger King to give in to the protests. But, you know, they still did.

The early success of RAN’s Burger King campaign led to the creation of many more activist groups. Perhaps the best known is Rainforest Alliance, whose founder, Daniel Katz, actually applied for a job at Rainforest Action Network. (Gunther told him to start his own thing.) Rainforest Action Network continued to focus on awareness campaigns, getting big stars (the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne) for concerts and splashy media work. Sting even started his own similar group, the Rainforest Foundation. But Rainforest Alliance tried something else: a certification program.

Rainforest Alliance was among the first major ethical food certification programs, even before the 1990 establishment of the National Organic Program. Their goal was to have a program that could alert customers, thanks to a little sticker on the package, that a given product adhered to some basic ethical standards. This was a new and ballsy idea at the time, and directly led to the birth of the Forest Stewardship Council, Fair Trade Certified, and all of the other certifications we know and (sort of) understand today.

Not all of the companies that sprang from the rainforest-saving well were activist groups. Seventh Generation, which sells recycled paper goods like toilet paper and paper towels, was founded in 1988. Unlike Rainforest Alliance and Rainforest Action Network, Seventh Generation is a company that directly sells products, but it was heavily informed by the awareness campaigns of the activist groups. It’s still successful today, a model for how a business can be founded on ideals and still sell stuff.

Some of these programs didn’t entirely work. You might remember Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch, which featured Brazil nuts. That flavor was supposed to set up a co-op to harvest nuts in a more equitable way for the farmers and donate a percentage of sales to Brazilian nonprofits. But Ben & Jerry’s realized after a few years that they weren’t actually succeeding at any of their goals; the co-op hadn’t made any profit so the company hadn’t donated anything. The co-op also couldn’t produce as many nuts as the company needed. Ben & Jerry’s, to their credit, announced all of this before anybody else figured it out, releasing all of their findings. The same thing happened with The Body Shop, which had sold Brazil-nut-based shampoos and conditioners. “That program … I mean, so many programs end up having flaws. It’s tricky. So that program went away, but Ben & Jerry’s continued to try to source really well,” says Katz.

The activist organizations started with awareness; before you can make anyone care about the rainforest, you have to actually tell them about the rainforest, and why it’s so cool. This worked perhaps better than any of the activists expected. By 1990, rainforests weren’t just something to be saved, they were an iconic motif to be utilized. Sometimes the products, like those movies and TV shows, had some environmental education aspect to them, though of course their main goal was to make money. Sometimes there were no noble intentions at all. The rainforest was simply cool, and people liked toucans, monkeys, macaws, tree frogs, and bromeliads. 

This was, of course, pretty frustrating to the activists who had started the whole thing. “Oh yeah, there was horrendous greenwashing going on,” says Hayes. “It was constantly talked about in our circles.” But this was a huge boom time for the environmental movement, even if a lot of the stuff relating to the rainforest wasn’t really helping much. “We started to get a lot more attention,” says Katz. “And there were a lot of groups and companies that wanted to play off our name and our reputation. It was kind of a wild time.” He even consulted with the makers of Ferngully.

But Rainforest Alliance was pretty annoyed with companies using rainforest imagery to sell their junk, and even proposed what they called a “nature tax.” “Like if you’re a car company and you have a cheetah in the ad, you should have to pay for that,” says Katz. It didn’t take off, but it’s kind of a good idea.

The trend eventually died down, as trends do, in the mid-1990s. Many of the activist groups and companies that had sprung from this period are still around and have looked back on that wild time. Did they succeed in their goals? Did they do as much good as they could have?

Deforestation in the tropical rainforest regions has certainly not stopped; the treatment of farmers in rainforests is still awful. (Coffee and chocolate, especially, remain largely abhorrent industries.) Environmental struggles don’t really end; it’s not as though you can just pass a bill and then the fight is over. “When we lose a battle, it’s permanent, and when we win, it’s temporary,” says Katz.

But a pure how-many-acres-did-we-save metric doesn’t really show the whole picture of what the Save the Rainforest movement achieved. By 1989, Costa Rican deforestation rates had dropped dramatically; by 1998, they had stopped entirely. Costa Rica, the first focus of Gunther and Rainforest Action Network, has become a world model of environmental conservation, actually increasing its forest cover and setting ambitious carbon-neutrality goals. In 1996, following a civil war, Guatemala protected millions of acres of forest thanks to a concession program that has actually halted deforestation there.

There were absolutely concrete improvements made during and as a direct result of these campaigns. But more importantly, there was a sea change. “Conservation” and “environmentalism” were no longer bad words. By 1987, the New York Times was starting to treat the rainforest in a more modern way, depicting the devastation that would befall the planet if deforestation continued unchecked. Environmental science programs became more and more common in American and European universities, birthing new generations of activists.

The fact that major corporations have sustainability departments, that they bother to even pay lip service to environmental and ethical causes, you could argue that this all comes back to the corporate-antagonizing efforts of Rainforest Action Network. That big companies bother to spend more money to make some of their products certified organic, fair trade, and more — there would be no market for this stuff without Rainforest Alliance, and no mechanism to charge more money for these products without their certification program.

Awareness campaigns are easy to sneer at. “What did they do?” you think. “Isn’t it just so easy to raise awareness and hard to get concrete stuff done?”

Some of these campaigns absolutely were self-aggrandizing, ineffective, or misinformed, sure. But they were also essential. Save the Rainforest was a movement in which entire countries woke up and started giving a shit about the natural world beyond their own borders. Just because it was sometimes stupid and just because the Amazon is currently on fire doesn’t mean it didn’t work. You just have to adjust your expectations about what was really being saved.

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There’s a joke in Seinfeld where George Costanza thinks he’s come up with this amazing conversation starter: that toilet paper hasn’t changed appreciably in his lifetime. “It’s just paper on a cardboard roll,” he says. “And in 10,000 years, it will still be exactly the same. Because really, what else can they do?”

Over the past five years, a host of startups, searching for something, anything, to disrupt, have decided that toilet paper is ripe for change. (The older companies, like Charmin, are trying new things too, sort of. At least bigger things.) These new companies have names like Who Gives a Crap, Tushy, Cheeky Monkey, and No. 2. Their paper is design-forward, made of theoretically sustainable materials, and available in more modern ways — namely, a subscription-based web purchase, sold through a direct-to-consumer model. Toilet paper is sold the same way as millennial-focused makeup, reusable straws, and foam mattresses. 

The push for new toilet paper became more intense with the release of a semi-viral report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in February 2019. That report, titled “The Issue With Tissue,” looked at several of the biggest-selling toilet paper brands, issuing them a sustainability scorecard. The NRDC’s report was designed to make people aware that toilet paper does in fact come from somewhere: usually, mature trees, cut down from Canadian forests. Some brands did okay, but major brands like Charmin, Quilted Northern, and Kirkland Signature all scored an F. 

The new toilet paper revolution is one of those specifically odd 2019 things. It’s an industry full of copycats and irritating influence-entrepreneur speak, of cutesy videos and banana-leaf designs, of claims to sustainability that don’t always hold up to inspection. It’s born from people, sometimes lazy or opportunistic or gullible but generally trying to do the right thing. They are, on the whole, making an improvement. Mostly. Probably.

The big toilet paper companies — Procter & Gamble (Charmin), Kimberly Clark (Cottonelle, Scott), and Georgia-Pacific (Quilted Northern, Angel Soft) — use primarily, sometimes exclusively, freshly cut trees. Some of those come from the boreal forests of Canada, which are exceedingly old trees that, when cut, leave the forest bare and unable to recover, a major problem for the ecosystem there. The best, softest toilet paper comes from softwood trees like pine and spruce, which Canada has plenty of. It takes a tremendous amount of water and energy to process trees into toilet paper, along with a startling amount of bleach, formaldehyde, and various organochlorines to increase strength, softness, and color. 

It’s probably worth stating here that a couple of people who work for these startup companies repeated an old thought to me — that toilet paper itself is an inferior tool for the task of wiping. “Would you clean your dishes with a piece of dry paper? Of course not,” say Jason Ojalvo, the CEO of Tushy. Many parts of the world don’t bother with toilet paper, opting for water solutions like the bidet instead.

The United States is the largest consumer of toilet paper in the world; Germany and the UK are close behind in per capita use. But toilet paper is not, if used properly, any less sanitary than a bidet. Poop is gross, but it’s not dangerous just sitting on your own skin. The only real danger, aside from somehow getting it in your mouth, is from the moisture content causing fungal infections, which toilet paper is very good at combating. 

Anyway, toilet paper is generally bad in other ways: bad for the environment, bad for plumbing, bad for energy consumption. This is not new information, and products designed to be non-bad are not new. Seventh Generation has been making toilet paper from 100 percent recycled paper since the early 1990s, and has achieved wide success with it. But the aesthetics of Seventh Generation are stuck in the 1990s, relying on a boring green leaf and dull fonts.

The first of the new generation of toilet paper companies is Who Gives a Crap. Founded by mostly Australians, the company launched with an Indiegogo campaign in July 2012. But Who Gives a Crap is, at its core, an advocacy company. The co-founders had all worked in nonprofits before and founded the company explicitly as a means to gain enough profit to donate to sanitation infrastructure. They started with 100 percent recycled paper, like Seventh Generation, and eventually introduced a bamboo paper line. 

Who Gives a Crap is a certified B corporation, which means it has to meet certain criteria of environmental sustainability, fair employment, and transparency. Who Gives donates half of its profits — about $1.7 million US so far — to a variety of organizations around the world. “We give unrestricted funding to organizations that we think are doing the highest-impact work,” says Danny Alexander, one of the company’s co-founders. Those organizations might dig pit latrines, install septic systems, or maintain clean and safe toilets, whatever’s needed in their area.

The company’s toilet paper is available online, via either subscription or à la carte purchases. It has pretty designs. The website is well designed. The company has essentially eliminated plastic from its supply chain. It’s slightly more expensive, with maybe a 5 or 10 percent premium over other toilet paper. Who Gives a Crap’s recycled paper currently costs $48 for 48 rolls of recycled paper, or $52 for the same number of bamboo rolls. Amazon’s best-selling toilet paper, a house brand called Presto, sells for about $45 for 48 rolls.

That model was swiftly copied, sometimes mutated. Tushy, which started out selling bidets, began selling bamboo toilet paper in early 2018. No. 2, which has been featured on Goop, launched in April 2019. Other companies crowded the space, some offering offensively masculine wipes, some selling paper made from sugarcane, some not doing anything particularly different at all. All of them tout their eco-friendly paper. None besides Who Gives a Crap bothered with that whole giving-away-half-your-profits thing.

Samira Far, who founded No. 2, was looking for a new idea in 2017. She had sold her last company — a chain of eight nail salons called Bellacures that were created to be cleaner and nicer than competing salons. “I guess I have a passion for seeking out areas of improvement in both products and services,” she says.

She landed on toilet paper, seeing it as “a very outdated industry,” and started looking into it. “Initially I looked at it as: The branding is super old, the packaging is super old, there’s a way to do this better so it’s cute for the bathroom,” she says. “But in my research I actually started to see that there’s actually a way to do it so it’s environmentally friendly and doesn’t have as many chemicals inside of the paper as it usually does.”

No. 2’s first priority is in its design and the quality of the product. The environmental stuff seems to have been a happy accident. “I’m not a 100 percent zero-waste-living kind of person. I try to be as eco-friendly as possible whenever the option is available, but I’m not, like, taking jars to the supermarket and filling them with beans and nuts,” Far says. 

No. 2’s bamboo is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which, though really the only trustworthy option for assessing sustainable forestry, is pretty limited. “FSC’s standards are a floor, not a ceiling, for responsible forestry, and still need to undergo significant improvements before they can fully protect forests, species, and Indigenous rights,” says the NRDC. I asked Far a bit about where the bamboo is sourced from and what type of bamboo it is. “The bamboo plant, I don’t know that there are different species,” she said. (There are well over 1,000 species of bamboo.) 

No. 2’s bamboo toilet paper is probably as ecologically responsible as any other bamboo toilet paper. But it’s not motivated by environmentalism; it feels more like a standard-issue startup that’s pleased things worked out in a greenish way. No. 2 is certainly not more egregious than anyone else; there’s a Silicon Valley vibe to most of the companies in this space. I just feel like someone at some point described it as “Uber for toilet paper,” and that grosses me out.

The new toilet paper companies sell, generally, three types of paper. There’s the 100 percent bamboo, like No. 2 and Tushy sell. Some companies, like Pure Planet Club, sell toilet paper made from a mixture of bamboo and sugarcane fibers. (Sugarcane fibers are left over after the cane is squeezed for its juice in the process of making sugar.) Who Gives a Crap started with, and still mostly relies on sales from, its 100 percent recycled toilet paper. Recycled paper is by far the best option from an environmental standpoint, requiring much less energy especially in transportation needs. 

But bamboo is a fascinating alternative. It’s a grass, grows incredibly quickly, requires little water and no pesticides, and can be chopped down multiple times — it’ll just grow back. One problem is that the only sizable bamboo producers are in China, where environmental and labor concerns are sometimes tossed aside. (This could change; bamboo grows just about anywhere.) That FSC certification becomes vital, and its limitations become a problem.

Switching away from your standard Charmin is good, objectively. Despite issues with bamboo production and processing, it’s still far and away a superior environmental option to cutting wild forests. The idea — from Seventh Generation to Who Gives a Crap to the countless copycats — is a basically sound one. 

That doesn’t mean that the copycats aren’t annoying. “The companies who are taking our donation approach, and making sure they’re shifting people away from virgin paper and ideally donating some of their profits? I think that’s great, and if one of them succeeds and beats us, more power to them,” Alexander says. “It’s the companies that are copying our model and either not shifting people towards a more sustainable option or delivering an inferior sustainable option, those hurt us and hurt the whole movement, and those are the ones I really get frustrated with.”

Few companies are actually incorporating any donation elements. Better Planet plants trees, and the venerable Seventh Generation — the original in the space — donates 10 percent of its profits.

For Far, this is just another disruption enterprise. Copying is not really a concern; none of the companies that came before hers achieved massive success, so there’s still room in the market. “Of course anybody can do what I’m doing, but I think that branding is just like, no matter if somebody copies you, there’s just a different energy behind it, because who’s leading the brand has a specific voice, specific energy, a specific feel, and it either speaks to you or it doesn’t,” she says.

Like other well-intentioned disruptions, the new toilet paper makers are, probably, doing some good. On the one end of the scale is the possibility of actual, positive change. On the other end: consumerism, greenwashing, pandering millennial marketing. It feels impossible to avoid the joke, so here: The toilet paper industry is messy. 

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