The “countless brands” across e-commerce and on the shelves of major US groceries and pharmacies have mostly vanished. Industry analyst Greg Grishchenko explains the benefits and challenges facing this “marvellous grass.”
In my TWM article four years ago about the status and likely future of bamboo tissue in the North American consumer market I was far from enthusiastic and claimed that it “will remain in a niche within 10% imported bath tissue commodities coming to the US every year.” I was wrong.
Certainly, there were sensible reasons behind the assessment. At that time bamboo toilet paper and paper towels, both in bleached and unbleached variety, were mostly sold online, apart from a relatively short retail presence at one of the major US-based drugstore chains.
Also, after the end of the first Donald Trump presidency, the United States was getting into toilet paper shortages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and going back to a “green” agenda by returning to the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere and slowing down global warming.
The change has been dramatic. Today countless brands of bath tissue, kitchen towels and napkins made of bamboo have increased their presence not only in e-commerce but on the shelves at major groceries and pharmacies.
Indeed, one of the most popular bamboo tissue brands, Caboo, is being sold in the US based supermarkets at Meijer, Wegmans, Safeway, Hannaford, Big Y and IGA grocery chains, Whole Foods, Akin’s, Natural Grocers and New Seasons Market natural food chains. In Canada, Vancouver-based Caboo is on sale at Sobeys grocery chains and London Drugs pharmacies. The toilet paper brand Bim Bam Boo – which claims of being “designed in Minneapolis, Minnesota and responsibly made in China” – is offered in American supermarket chains Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods.
Source development
Bathroom tissue is just one of more than 10,000 sorts of bamboo products currently developed in China. Zeng Xiang Wei, Deputy Secretary-General of the Chinese Society of Forestry (CSF), recently declared China as the world’s richest bamboo resource and the leader in utilising it, gaining the title “Kingdom of Bamboo.”
All claims listed on packaging labels of bamboo tissue household rolls for bathroom or kitchen are true. Biodegradability, sustainable sourcing, minimal processing, and hypoallergenic properties supported by eco-certifications create appeal to environmentally conscious consumers.
Bamboo is widely available in its origins across Southeast Asia, but only in China has this marvellous grass achieved not only economic grandness from food source to universal industrial applications, but also became a strong political tool for the Communist Party government. Every year the country’s ruling body issues an “initiative” for the next three, five, ten or more years presenting plans, directions, and prospects on bamboo development to the public.
At least two the most important programmes should be stated. Since 1950s the Chinese government initiated and financially supported research and development of bamboo species resistant to cold climate. These attempts were quite successful. and led to expanding bamboo forests and plantations from the traditional bamboo-rich south provinces like Sichuan, Guangdong, Fujian, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Jiangxi to Northern China.
The most recent campaign was dedicated to the modern “green” trend to replace petroleum based plastic packaging and single-use consumer goods. It was no surprise the bamboo happened to be the best alternative.
When doing research for this article I was stunned to watch the recent video from CGTN (China Global Television Network) showing a process of making drinking straws (a plastic replacement) at one of the household farms on bamboo-rich South China. The worker laboriously drilled a hole in an eight-inch-long bamboo stick. He was doing it in a one-by-one sequence with a long and very thin drill. Once in a while he broke through a thin wall and quickly threw the unfinished straw to a pile of flaws bound for recycling. Bamboo processing not only effectively solved significant unemployment problems in remote rural areas but also created thousands of new product applications, especially when mixing bamboo stock with the other materials.
Cost dilemma
The growing development of bamboo resources has become a new phenomenon in the modern world. However, considering my almost forty years in tissue processing and converting, I see only one thing which is missing in bamboo tissue success – it is the Economy 101 (the name several colleges and universities use for their introductory undergraduate economics course, and also shorthand for the ideas at the heart of classical economics) for North America. The obvious downside of bamboo tissue products is shipping cost. The industrial process of making a bamboo toilet roll from pulper to rewinder is identical to the one for wooden fibre. Material, labour, and energy costs are at close vicinity, but transportation costs for very light and bulky stuff are immense.
My attempts to figure it out took quite some time going through varying freight rates from a number of shipping agents located mostly in Asia. The highest numbers of about $0.30 to $0.60 per roll came from KG Ocean using their rates per kilogram for a 150-gram toilet roll that was shipped six thousand miles from China to the west coast of the USA. The lowest numbers of about $0.18 to $0.24 for the same roll by TJ China Freight are based on the price of shipping a 20ft container with thirty-three cubic meter volume fitting 17,000 bath tissue rolls.
These days an American consumer can buy a premium white FSC-certified bath tissue in Costco supermarkets for $0.69 per roll (private label) and $0.99 from top brand Charmin. The lowest price for bamboo toilet roll was $1.25 in Whole Foods Market.
The purpose of the elementary calculation above is an attempt to find a business logic (such as profit, for example) in the fact that a consumer market for obviously disposable, inexpensive, and “green” household product is located about six thousand miles from its origin. Cost of transportation as a significant share of total product price and availability of competitive locally produced alternatives appear to be non-essential for many American shoppers. Indeed, as of 2019, just twenty US states out of fifty require some knowledge of geography for high school graduation, according to the Education Commission of the States.
Afternote
According to the estimate based on Seair Exim Solutions shipping data, 32% of bamboo bathroom tissue out of 26,000 metric tons of toilet paper was imported from China to the US in 2023 (see chart).
SD Analytics, a market information provider from India, predicted 16.2% annual growth of the global bamboo toilet paper market over the period from 2023 to 2030. This development will be rendered to equivalent results in bamboo tissue imports to the United States where its growing consumer base puts environmental concerns over frugality.
The initial duties of 10% on Chinese imports introduced by this Trump administration grew rapidly to 145% in just few weeks.
The current situation with China’s tariffs is still quite fluid with negotiations and temporary rate freezes. Unsurprisingly this situation quickly affected bamboo toilet paper shipments to the US market. By the end of April 2025 easily distinguished packages of bamboo toilet paper had mostly vanished from the shelves of US supermarkets and drug stores. This break in the supply chain might be a short-term event due to the absence of bamboo tissue converting facilities in the US – or more serious economic concerns.
The entire tariff event may slowdown the inflow of bamboo tissue products to an environmentally concerned North American consumer. The persistent enigma of a bamboo toilet roll keeps generating rhetorical but essential questions.
Does the real profit margin for selling bamboo hygienic stuff lie only within the system of go-betweens in North America?
Is it possible to compete with Chinese imports when the actual costs of things are always hidden?
What will happen in the future to a strange crossover between Communism and Capitalism created in 1978 by the genius Chinese statesman, revolutionary, and political theorist Deng Xiaoping?
