Soft Tissue Box

Details

A two-ply facial tissue with nothing added, for the situation in which people actually reach for a box, which is a cold, and a sore nose is the worst place in the house for perfume, menthol or printed dye. Two specifications carry it and both are printed. Grammage is 15 GSM per ply and 30 GSM for the finished two-ply sheet, measured to ISO 12625-6, which is lighter than the kitchen towel in this range at 42 and correctly so, because softness comes from short fibre and low weight while strength comes from long fibre and high weight, and a facial tissue trades one for the other on purpose. And there is no wet-strength resin in it at all, wet tensile under 20 N/m to ISO 12625-5, which is a designed property rather than a shortfall: a facial tissue should give way when it is wet so it does not scratch and does not knot up in a drain. It is still not flushable, because disintegrates is not the same word as disperses, and an Indian drain line or a septic tank is not the test rig those claims are written against. The other thing worth saying is about the count on the box. A pack marked two hundred tissues very often contains one hundred two-ply pulls, counted twice, once per ply. We state 100 pulls a box and we do not count the plies, so the pack of two boxes is 200 pulls and the pack of four is 400.

• Pulp is 100 percent virgin: about 85 percent short-fibre eucalyptus for softness and 15 percent softwood for enough integrity to leave the box in one piece
• Elemental chlorine free, bleached with chlorine dioxide, residual AOX under 0.2 kg per tonne of pulp. That is ECF and not chlorine free, and we are not going to round it up
• No fragrance, no menthol, no balm, no lotion, no dye and no print. A lotion coating is usually a mineral-oil or silicone film, and it is exactly what smears a lens
• Which makes this the right tissue for a spectacle lens, a phone screen and a camera lens, since there is nothing on it to leave behind
• Sheet 20 cm by 20 cm, 100 pulls per box
• The box is plain uncoated board with a paper dispensing collar in place of the usual plastic oval, so the empty box goes flat into dry waste or a raddi pile with nothing to separate out first
• Cost per pull is Rs 0.75 at two boxes and Rs 0.70 at four