Toilet Paper Shouldn’t Come with Human Rights Abuses

Every other September in Toronto, thousands march alongside members of the Grassy Narrows community—which numbers about 1,000 people—in the annual River Run, demanding action from the Ontario government. Da Silva, Grassy Narrows’s environmental health coordinator, is one of the event’s leaders. Like many of the Elders, she participates from a wheelchair. Da Silva has dealt with the effects of mercury poisoning for years, including numbness in her hands and feet and poor balance. 

About 90 miles upstream from Grassy Narrows, the Dryden mill processes wood into pulp for the North American tissue industry. Between 1962 and 1970, the previous mill owners dumped approximately 20,000 pounds of untreated mercury, a neurotoxin, into the English-Wabigoon River system. These waters are a life force for the Grassy Narrows people, who fish the river and surrounding lakes for walleye, pike, and bass—which are dietary staples and a part of cultural traditions. 

“The fish, we know, are contaminated, but it’s part of our culture to have fish,” Da Silva says, when asked why people would continue to ply the local waterways. “It’s not just a food product; it’s part of who we are.” And you don’t need to eat a lot of the fish to become afflicted by mercury either. “Even if you have 20 fillets over 10 years,” she adds. “There’s no safe level.” 

Once released into a watershed, mercury accumulates in the bodies of fish and other aquatic life, creating severe, long-term health risks for anyone who eats these animals. And because the neurotoxin not only crosses freely through the placenta but also becomes more concentrated as it does, exposed mothers lead to children being exposed even before they’re born. Common outcomes of mercury poisoning include tremors, neuromuscular difficulties, cognitive and motor dysfunction, conditions impacting learning and overall childhood development, and premature death.

While the mill hasn’t discharged mercury into the river since 1970, concentrations of the neurotoxin in Wabigoon River fish remain among the highest present in Canada. Participants at the annual rally carry signs reading “Water Is Life,” “Justice for Grassy Narrows,” and simply, “Shut It Down.”

“We as Indigenous people always have to face environmental racism when we’re trying to defend the land and water,” Da Silva says. She describes having to present reams of evidence, in partnership with scientists, to assert that the government owes the First Nation both compensation and environmental rehabilitation. “We did contaminant studies, community health surveys; we found umbilical cord data in the archives of Health Canada that showed high levels of mercury were in Grassy Narrows babies. But it’s always a denial that there’s anything wrong.” 

Despite years of criticism and multiple ownership changes, Dryden has kept up business as usual. Making matters worse, a 2024 study from the University of Western Ontario found that the high levels of sulfate and organic material within the mill’s current wastewater is interacting with the previously dumped mercury, converting it to methylmercury, its most toxic form. The researchers estimate that mercury levels in fish in the Wabigoon River are effectively doubled due to the ongoing mill effluent. 

“For Grassy Narrows, the harm is not just historical—it’s ongoing,” says report author Ashley Jordan, a global forest risk analyst at NRDC. “Each new discharge from the mill continues a complex cycle of pollution with intergenerational impact, and it’s why we’ve stood alongside the community to demand justice.”

After 50 years, there has been no cleanup of the river. In 2017, the government of Ontario established an $85 million trust to fund remediation activities, with a panel of representatives from Grassy Narrows, Wabaseemoong Independent Nations, and the provincial government to direct the spending. To help guide those decisions, an independent team of mercury experts has begun modeling how mercury likely moves through the river system. In the meantime, however, the contamination remains while the Dryden mill’s wastewater continues to feed the formation of methylmercury.

Currently, the Grassy Narrows community is awaiting a trial date in the legal challenge it filed against the province of Ontario and Canada in June 2024. The lawsuit argues that the provincial and federal governments violated its treaty rights by failing to protect against or adequately address the mercury contamination in the English-Wabigoon river system, one of Canada’s most severe environmental and human rights disasters. 

This year’s River Run coincides with the release of NRDC’s eighth annual Issue with Tissue report, which holds companies accountable for unsustainable tissue products, including those connected to the Dryden mill. 

The mill is no small player in the tissue paper industry. Now operating as Dryden Fibre Canada, it’s a privately held subsidiary of the New York–based company First Quality Enterprises, a leading U.S. manufacturer of personal and household care products. New research conducted by NRDC uncovered that the pulp from this mill likely goes into branded goods, like Panda toilet paper and Plenty paper towels, and the private-label products that First Quality produces for major retailers like Costco and Walmart (all of which received failing grades in NRDC’s tissue paper scorecard).

In May, Jordan and her colleagues reached out to these retailers to see how willing they might be to investigate and disclose their sourcing practices. The responses were lukewarm, at best. Costco and Walmart failed to engage in any substantive way, despite the evidence presented. 

“Many companies, including Costco and Walmart, have committed to respecting Indigenous rights and upholding Free, Prior, and Informed Consent,” Jordan says, pointing to the United Nations’ principles for upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights. “But what those commitments mean in practice is often less clear.” 

The people of Grassy Narrows, for instance, do not consent to the industrial operations harming their community, raising serious doubt over the integrity of some brands’ support of Indigenous rights. Vague corporate replies to inquiries regarding the origins of their products are never a good look, and in fact, “undermine pathways to accountability and remedy,” states the NRDC report. Customers who care about human rights and sustainability also rely on corporate transparency to make good decisions.

Grassy Narrows is just one glaring example of human rights violations embedded within the tissue industry’s supply chain, and changing dynamics within the pulp industry in places like Canada are helping to drive destructive forestry practices elsewhere.

The ultimate result risks spreading environmental and human rights harms from one sourcing region to another. In Brazil, for one, companies are replacing native vegetation and natural ecosystems with eucalyptus plantations that require massive amounts of water, leading to the potential displacement of Indigenous communities, who face losing their home forests and traditional ways of life to the industry. 

Several brands affiliated with APP (Asia Pulp & Paper) also got F’s on NRDC’s tissue scorecard due to poor environmental practices and persistent human rights abuses taking place in Indonesia. Such offenses include land grabbing, harassment, forced evictions, and violent suppression of community resistance. 

These actions contradict companies’ supposed commitments to responsible business practices, but some major toilet paper retailers have started to live up to their word by removing APP products from their shelves and online offerings. Such successes offer proof of how consumer pressure can ultimately help steer the marketplace toward better values. 

As can allyship, Da Silva emphasizes. She draws resilience from “the people who stand with us and work with us,” and says it’s one of the reasons why she’s dedicated herself to sharing her community’s story far and wide. “People know of Grassy, and it’s because of our supporters and our helpers who are out there, sharing real information, real facts.”