Our products are responsibly made in China. This statement raises some eyebrows at a time when countries across the world are facing challenges of how to best support people, economies, and our planet through uncertainty. While most of the products we consume are made overseas, there’s a growing desire to support locally made.
We get it and we love supporting local businesses as well, but it’s not always that simple. We’ve never shied away from answering questions about our production process and wanted to bring everything together in one place. This way, it’s clear how we think about this topic as a business trying to do the most good in the world. It’s also worth calling out if our products aren’t for you, that’s ok! Our goal is to provide you with enough information so you can make an informed choice.
Why do you make your products in China?
When we first started Who Gives A Crap, we’d hoped to make our product in Australia, where we were (and a lot of our team still are!) based. There were, and are still today, only a small number of recycled tissue producers in Australia and none were capable (or willing) to partner with us to make the product we sell.
After a lot (and we mean A LOT) of thoughtful consideration, we decided to establish production in China for a number of reasons:
We wanted to make products with the most sustainable materials. China’s supply chains for collecting and converting post-consumer recycled paper and bamboo into tissue are unique and don’t rely on importing any raw materials from other countries.
We wanted to package our products the best we can. This means without plastic and with maximum space efficiency to reduce the environmental footprint of our product. Chinese suppliers can wrap our rolls in paper, get 400 sheets on small rolls and pack them into boxes of 48. Western producers had non-flexible, automated production lines designed to make low sheet count rolls, wrapped in plastic to service the supermarket world at scale.
We were a small team with a big vision. Where local producers needed to see a supermarket range to justify a production run, in China we could be flexible and scale quickly. Ultimately, that’s allowed us to expand to the UK and USA from a single supply base.
All of these factors ensure we’re building a sustainable business model that delivers quality and environmentally responsible products at competitive prices. This allows us to focus on our greater mission: building toilets for those who need them.
“This allows us to focus on our greater mission: building toilets for those who need them.”
Will you ever look at production in other countries?
Yes – we’re exploring this right now! As we grow, so does our ability to influence how goods are made, including broader production line infrastructure. If we can take these next steps to influence industry, we can make our products the way we want to without sacrificing sustainable business practices and do this closer to the places we sell. This means getting products to you faster, reducing environmental impact, and we hope, helping to stimulate domestic manufacturing. There are lots of things to consider, and the exciting part is that our options will start to open up as our business gets bigger.
But what about supporting local jobs in Australia, the UK, the US or Europe?
The more products we sell, the more jobs we create. So, thanks to our customers for getting us this far! We now directly employ a full-time team of more than 200 people, plus a freelance network spread across Australia, Asia, the US, and Europe. Indirectly, we support and create a significant number of local jobs through our warehousing & shipping partners. Hundreds of staff are picking, packing, and delivering Who Gives A Crap products to customers around Australia, UK and USA from our warehouses in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Pennsylvania, California and Coventry.
We hope to keep adding to that. For production, we’re still optimistic that local manufacturers will work with us. If so, and if we can make products using the right materials, packaged the right way, in factories closer to those warehouses - then local production is what we’ll aim for.
But isn’t working with China unethical? What about working conditions and fair pay?
We don’t think there’s a perfect government in any country, but there are good people in all countries. These are the people we want to work with, and we think it is possible to do business in China with integrity.
Our approach focuses on two key things.
We maintain close working relationships with all our factory partners in China. In fact, we have a full-time team in China devoted to managing these relationships and overseeing our production processes and quality.
All our partners in China are independently audited and scored across a range of categories, including workers’ rights, freedom of association and collective bargaining, no discrimination, no child labor, no precarious employment, no bonded labor, and overall ethical business behaviors. We’ve adopted the amfori BSCI Code of Conduct and use this as our audit standard. We’re confident in our partners, and they share in our successes as an impact-led business.
We care, first and foremost, about people. Whether it’s our impact partners and the hundreds of thousands of people they support through WASH programs, our own global team across Australia, the US & Asia, our warehouse, logistics, and courier partners, or our production partners. In everything we do, our goal is to change lives, encourage best practices, change social and business structures, do better for the environment, and ultimately prove that business can be a force for good.
This is no easy task, and to get there, we need to engage with the things - businesses, sectors, economies, and people - that we hope to positively influence. This includes China, where we’re really committed to ensuring goods are made sustainably, workers are paid fairly, and operate in safe working conditions. This is the way we change how the world works.
“We care, first and foremost, about people.
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But what about the environmental impact of shipping products from overseas?
One important thing to know about making toilet paper is that the production process and raw material sourcing, rather than the transport process, make up the vast majority of the carbon footprint. The absolute best thing you can do for the planet is to switch to recycled toilet paper. The Natural Resource Defense Council’s report on the damage that virgin toilet paper is having on our native forests does a great job of explaining this further.
Because we know the production process and raw material sourcing are such an important part of the overall environmental footprint of our products, we’ve focused our efforts here first. We make all of our products from recycled fibres, bamboo or sugarcane waste because they have lower carbon, water and land use footprints.
But we’d still love to do better! We’ll continue to do the work to understand and offset our carbon footprint as a business and our goal is to improve this over time consistently. We know transparency is really important to our customers and supporters, and we already have some projects in the works for this coming financial year that will share more insight into how we’re tackling this topic.