Why I Started Bambaloo

Bambaloo didn’t start with a pitch deck or a five-year plan. It started, rather unceremoniously, at the top of my stairs.

At the time, I had two children under the age of two. Like most parents in that phase of life, I was operating in a fog of interrupted sleep, cold tea and an alarming volume of nappies. One day, I left a pile of them on the landing and stopped to look at it properly.

The amount of waste was… unsettling.

That was just our household. One small family in a small village. It prompted an uncomfortable thought: if this is what we are producing, what does that look like in a  town or a city? The UK. The world….

So I put the long hours spent awake — soothing and feeding a newborn — to use, and began to research it properly.

Globally, we use an estimated 380 billion disposable nappies every year. They do not biodegrade. They sit in landfill for centuries, long after they’ve served their very brief purpose.

My research also led me to discover other everyday habits which were alarmingly harming to the planet..

Loo roll production accounts for around 27,000 trees being cut down every single day. That is close to 10 million trees a year. CRAZY!  We are, quite literally, flushing trees down the loo. All while congratulating ourselves for planting them elsewhere. I had done the same, without ever pausing to consider the contradiction.

It’s difficult to think of a better example of how normalised waste has become.

At that point, the question wasn’t whether something needed to change, but where to start.

Bamboo emerged as an obvious alternative. It grows quickly, regenerates naturally, and has a significantly lower environmental impact than traditional tree-based paper. It’s also strong, soft, and entirely suited to everyday essentials.

Which is why Bambaloo began with loo roll.

Not because it’s exciting, but because it’s universal. Everyone uses it. Every day. And changing it doesn’t require anyone to rethink their entire lifestyle, just to make a better choice by default.

The longer-term ambition has always been to go further. Once we’ve established trust and built a business around genuinely sustainable products, the aim is to expand into bamboo baby wipes and nappies - addressing the original problem that sparked this journey in the first place.

Because meaningful change rarely comes from dramatic gestures.

It comes from small, habitual decisions, repeated consistently.

If a simple swap, (one you make without even thinking!) can reduce waste, protect resources, and lower your personal footprint, then it seems a rather sensible place to start.

That’s why Bambaloo exists.