Kimberly-Clark is growing a succulent in Yuma to reduce its reliance on forest pulp

Kimberly-Clark has begun building a fibre facility in the Arizona desert at a cost of more than $100 million. It reported meeting a long-standing forest fibre target in June, moved most of its international tissue business into a joint venture in July, and expects to complete its acquisition of Kenvue before the year is out.

 

The maker of Kleenex, Scott, Kotex and Huggies is preparing to source fibre from a low-water succulent native to the American southwest. Kimberly-Clark announced the programme on 3 August 2026, after researchers screened more than seventy candidate fibres and settled on hesperaloe, a drought-tolerant plant adapted to arid conditions.

 

The company is putting more than $100 million into a 50,000 square foot pilot facility at Yuma, Arizona, near the point where the Colorado River turns toward Mexico. Around fifty full-time jobs come with it, the site is already under construction, and operations are due to begin in 2027. Chief R&D Officer Craig Slavtcheff called the programme "an exciting moonshot" and the culmination of more than two decades of materials and plant science expertise.

 

In June, Kimberly-Clark reported that it had met its 2025 interim target for reducing natural forest fibre use, measured against a 2011 baseline.

 

Greenpeace, 2004

 

Greenpeace launched a campaign called Kleercut in November 2004, arguing that Kimberly-Clark was drawing up to 22 per cent of its paper pulp from Canadian boreal forest. It ran for almost five years, ending on 5 August 2009 at a joint press conference in Washington, where the company announced a new fibre sourcing policy and a commitment to stop buying non-FSC-certified boreal pulp by 2011. Kimberly-Clark's Suhas Apte thanked Greenpeace for helping develop the standards; Greenpeace's Scott Paul called Kimberly-Clark a "responsible company" whose efforts challenged its competitors.

 

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which grades the US tissue market annually, credits Kimberly-Clark with becoming the first major American tissue manufacturer to set concrete commitments to eliminate deforestation and reduce the impact of natural forest degradation across its supply chains. The underlying sourcing figures back that up. FSC-certified virgin wood fibre reached 77 per cent of virgin fibre purchases in 2025, up from 47 per cent in 2011, and 95 per cent of tissue fibre came from environmentally preferred sources for a third consecutive year.

 

NRDC's scorecard is still tough on the products themselves. Its seventh edition, published in November 2025, graded 152 products and placed Cottonelle Ultra, Kleenex Everyday, Scott 1000 and Scott ComfortPlus in the D band, above outright Fs largely because of the deforestation commitment. The top grades go to products made from postconsumer recycled content. On the same scorecard, Procter & Gamble's core Charmin range and Georgia-Pacific's Angel Soft and Quilted Northern all receive Fs.

 

The report states how the milestone was calculated: the 50 per cent reduction was achieved on a monthly average run rate measured over the last five months of 2025 rather than across the full year, a basis it repeats in both the narrative and the progress tables. A run rate can demonstrate that a structural change has taken hold rather than a single strong quarter, and the sourcing figures above support that reading, but the full-year comparison has not been published.

 

Inside the plants

 

Scope 1 and 2 emissions are down 46 per cent against 2015 on a market-based basis, against a 50 per cent target for 2030. Energy efficiency has improved 14 per cent over the same period, and more than 130 projects implemented during 2025 delivered 77,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent in reductions, with green hydrogen under development at UK sites and electrification underway at plants in Germany and France.

 

Landfill diversion runs at 99 per cent, with 217,338 tonnes recycled through secondary sales. Water use at manufacturing sites in water-stressed regions is well down against the 2015 baseline. The recordable incident rate is 0.65 for employees and 0.50 for workers who are not employees, with no fatalities. Deloitte & Touche provides limited assurance across energy, fibre, greenhouse gas, water, waste and safety data, a lower level of assurance than a financial-statement audit but still an external check over much of the dataset.

 

Renewable electricity accounts for 46 per cent of purchased power. That describes a contractual position rather than physical supply, since the report discloses that certificates from virtual power purchase agreements are not matched to the electricity its facilities draw or to the time of day they draw it, which is standard practice in market-based Scope 2 accounting.

 

Scope 3 and plastics

 

Kimberly-Clark's value-chain target covers Scope 3 Categories 1 and 12, purchased goods and services, and end-of-life treatment of sold products, which together account for around three quarters of the Scope 3 emissions it publishes. Against a 2015 baseline of 9,242 kilotonnes, the company reported reductions of 6.3 per cent in 2021, 10.8 per cent in 2022 and 19.3 per cent in 2023. The 2024 figure came in at 7,791 kilotonnes, a 15.7 per cent reduction, and 2025 at 7,769, or 15.9 per cent. Progress sits several points below where it stood in 2023, driven by purchased goods and services, and the report does not discuss the change.

 

The plastics footprint is down 16 per cent against a 50 per cent reduction target for 2030 from a 2019 base, and a 20 per cent recycled content target for 2025 came in at 18 per cent. The metric is worth understanding: Kimberly-Clark counts virgin fossil-based plastics minus plastic waste collected for beneficial use, excluding tape, adhesives, binders and absorbents, so it is a net figure rather than a measure of plastic placed on the market. Chief Sustainability Officer Lisa Morden is direct about the shortfall in her letter, acknowledging that lasting progress depends on infrastructure and policy the company does not control.

 

Thrive and ReNew returned approximately 406 tonnes of hand towels, recycled 90 tonnes of dispensers and converted 30 tonnes into alternative fuels across more than 540 customers in 2025. Their scale remains modest beside the company's wider material footprint, but they show recovery systems moving beyond isolated trials into programmes involving hundreds of customers.

 

Arbex and Kenvue

 

On 1 July 2026, Kimberly-Clark and Suzano launched Arbex, moving 22 manufacturing sites across 14 countries, roughly 9,000 employees and around $3.3 billion of annual sales out of the consolidated business, with Suzano taking 51 per cent. Kenvue told investors in August that its acquisition by Kimberly-Clark, at an enterprise value near $48.7 billion, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, bringing Tylenol, Listerine, Band-Aid and Neutrogena inside the boundary.

 

Recalculating baselines after changes of this size is standard practice. The GHG Protocol requires companies to recalculate the base year after structural changes that significantly affect emissions, leaving each company to define and disclose what significant means, while SBTi applies a threshold of 5 per cent or less for validated targets. Kimberly-Clark's own wording changed this year. Its 2024 appendix said the company "initiates a baseline recalculation for 100% of the facility footprint changes associated with mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures activities." The 2025 appendix, dated nine days before Arbex closed, says it "evaluates a baseline recalculation for changes that impact the base year" from the same events.

 

Kimberly-Clark's targets were validated in 2020 and it has said it intends to renew them during 2026 under the Corporate Net-Zero Standard, which gives it a natural opportunity to set out how the new perimeter will be measured. Kenvue arrives with validated targets built differently, a 42 per cent Scope 1 and 2 reduction by 2030 from a 2020 base year and a 100 per cent renewable electricity commitment. Reconciling the two, and explaining which baselines survive, is the disclosure task that will define the next reporting cycle.

 

Yuma

 

Kimberly-Clark is working with growers, technical experts and community stakeholders across Arizona, California and the wider southwest to assess whether hesperaloe can support a year-round agricultural supply. "Yuma offers a unique combination of agricultural expertise, natural resources, and talent that make it an ideal location for our alternative natural fiber facility," said Michael Todd, the company's Vice President and Managing Director for the project.

 

The facility will extract fibres that have, in the company's words, the potential to be used in future hygiene products. It is a pilot rather than a production line, and no date has been given for when hesperaloe might carry a meaningful share of the fibre in a roll of Scott or a box of Kleenex. A company that had treated the fibre question as closed would not be building in the desert.

 

Cutting natural forest fibre use by 50 per cent was a milestone. Getting the rest of the way is a harder problem, and Kimberly-Clark has started building for it in the Arizona desert.

 

Sources: Kimberly-Clark 2025 Sustainability Report and 2025 Appendix; Kimberly-Clark 2024 Sustainability Report Appendix; Kimberly-Clark proxy statements 2024 and 2025; NRDC, The Issue with Tissue, seventh edition, November 2025, and NRDC commentary on Kimberly-Clark's 2024 commitments; Greenpeace USA on the Kleercut campaign, and contemporaneous coverage of the August 2009 agreement; SBTi corporate near-term criteria; GHG Protocol Corporate Standard; Kimberly-Clark and Kenvue SEC filings and press releases, June 2025 to August 2026; Suzano completion announcement, 1 July 2026; Greater Yuma Economic Development Corporation, City of Yuma and Arizona Commerce Authority, 3 August 2026.