"Everyday about 270,000 trees are effectively flushed down the toilet or end up as garbage around the world; such a use of the forests is both wasteful and unneccessary," said Duncan Pollard of WWF, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund.

According to a WWF study, the five biggest manufacturers of disposable paper products in Europe are Procter and Gamble, SCA, Kimberly Clark, Metsa Tissue and Georgia Pacific, which control about 70 perent of the European market.

The vast majority of their products contain "alarmingly low levels" of recycled fibers, it said.

That means that "virgin fibers" extracted from natural forests and tree plantations around the world "end up as waste without the consumer's knowledge," the Switzerland-based international conservation group said in its communique.

"Consumers have no idea that they may be threatening the world's forests when they go to the bathroom," said Pollard, who heads the WWF program on European forests.

The manufacturers claim that retailers mainly want non-recycled products because that is what consumers choose, the WWF said.

"It's a myth that recycled tissue products are not of good quality," Pollard said.

The European tissue business is worth around 8.5 billion euros (10 billion dollars) annually and accounts for 26 percent of global consumption.

Each European uses on average 13 kilos of paper products per year, the equivalent of some 22 billion rolls of toilet paper, the WWF said.

The WWF has asked the companies to better inform consumers about how much of their household paper goods are made with recycled fibers and to advise them to buy brands of recycled toilet paper and tissues.

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