Times Are Tough, Can We Take Our Toilet Paper Rough?
Tough times demand tough decisions, and perhaps, rough toilet paper. The New York Times' Leslie Kaufman says the soft puffy Charmin stuff many of us are addicted to is bad for forests. From recycled paper fibers you can only make the rougher toilet paper, which means ever more trees (including some old-growth Canadian forests) are being cut to -- softly -- wipe our butts.
Is this stupid? Yes.
"No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper," Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council, told the NYT.
Hershkowitz is right. However, do we have the time to convince everyone? More than ever, giving people a bad news message - Charmin and clear-cutting, or rough and recycled, take your pick - leaves many of us cranky and disgruntled. Give up chocolate for Lent, okay, that's part of my cultural traditions. Give up soft t.p. for trees? Nope. No can do.
Finnish-British documentary filmmaker John Webster in his film "Recipes for Disaster" questions the whole Western ideal around toilet paper. In one of the film's most comical scenes Webster's wife anxiously scours the city of Helsinki looking for toilet paper after the family self-imposes a plastic wrapper ban, and she is incredibly jubilant upon locating huge industrial rolls of toilet paper not swathed in a plastic wrapper. (Clip below includes her happily bringing home the loot.)
But why, Webster asks, do we entrust this soiled area of our anatomy to squares of dry paper (be it the rough or pillowy soft kind) anyway? Isn't that a little, well, unhygienic? Couldn't we shift to those Japanese toilets with the bidet and drying element built in?
Shouldn't we take a hint from Islamic culture and ask ourselves, "If there's **it anywhere on our body would we prefer to wipe it away with paper or wash it off with water?"
Yet somewhere between 1871, when Zeth Wheeler introduced the first rolls of perforated paper for bathroom use, and today, we've decided fluffy white squares and a white porcelain throne are the only way to go.
So what do we do? Do we, like toilet tissue manufacturer Marcal, spend $30 million on a campaign to convince Americans to buy more recycled content in their toilet paper.
Yes, with a caveat. Instead of waiting decades for carbon-soaking forests to stop being decimated by our need for t.p., this is an area where the government should step in. Someone needs to step up and tell us that next year or in two years or three, all toilet tissue will be 20 percent recycled fibers (for example).
Yes, Kimberly-Clark will scream and cry, and yes, it seems like a somewhat trivial matter. Yet enforced cultural change is hard. We keep buying the soft stuff that strips the forests because it's there on the shelf. So this might not be the place where we can afford to wait for every last human consumer to decide that recycled t.p. is okay. We need the forests and their CO2 absorption now.
So instead of letting demand drive forest decimation, let's get Euro and demand manufacturers put increasing amounts of recycled fiber into their squares. If we did I'll just bet they'll find another technique to eventually give us soft and recycled. In the meantime we all suffer the relative indignity of the new rough and tough toilet paper era together.
Read more on t.p. at TreeHugger
::Update on No Impact Man: The Year Without Toilet Paper
::Bidets: Eliminate Toilet Paper, Increase Your Hygiene
::How to Shop Smart, Save Forests and Send a Message
::High-Tech Bidets Save Paper and Your Health
::Green Your Toilet Paper: Over is Better!
::TreeHugger Tips: Hacking a Composting Toilet
Follow Graham Hill on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ghill
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Too bad we don't get those fat soft old Sears catalogs anymore. Corn cobs don't need to be just for making pipes anymore.
A question for the girls: Why not use cloth for going #1? Do you *like* those linty bits? I sure don't!
Anyway, recycled-paper TP is full of chemicals required to soften it. I don't want any of that down there.
Just use cloth, and throw 'em in with your whites! They come out just as clean as anything else. Like they say at pixiewipes.com: "That’s what the laundry machine is for. You’ve used it for spit-up, you’ve used it for handkerchiefs, you’ve used it to clean after your sick pet. You can surely use it for a little pee."
why even cloth? it costs under 100 bucks to install a handheld bidet... like a removable shower head... spray and dry... perfect, and a much, much cleaner feeling.
I was with you until we got to the point of having the govt mandate the compostition of our TP. Why not let the people be free to choose? Why do so many on the left see force as the first option to fixing every perceived problem?
Public good, buddy.
It's a question we all have to wrestle with, unless you're an anarchist.
Are you an anarchist?
I would consider myself a social anarchist (or more specifically a market mutualist), and I'm offended by your misuse of the term as a pejorative.
Anarchism doesn't imply the absence of public policy, it implies the radical decentralization of public policy and the replacement of forced constituencies (think gerrymandering) with self-selecting constituencies (think credit unions). It eliminates government suppression of competition, broadens the distribution of property ownership, and ends the exploitation of labor by capital.
Decisions don't have to be made exclusively by individuals or nations. We can spontaneously self-organize into private collectives that manage pooled resources for the benefit of their members. We can govern ourselves so long as we have the freedom to create and choose our own constituencies.
The word you were looking for is nihilist.
if one can't convince another to their point of view through open debate and instead have their view forced on others through the legislature, freedom for everyone is diminished.
There are two primary components of plant fiber: lignin and cellulose. Furthermore, plant fiber can be classified as wood fiber or vegetable fiber. Wood fiber contains more lignin, which is hard and rigid. Vegetable fiber contains more cellulose, which is soft and flexible. Wood crops also take several years to reach harvest, whereas vegetable crops are harvested annually.
Instead of making paper out of mature wood, we should switch to efficient vegetable fiber crops such as hemp, flax, jute, or kenaf. The high cellulose content of vegetable fiber produces superior paper products as well as other products, such as textiles and plastics, that aren't possible with wood fiber. Vegetable fibers are far less dependent on chemical processing than wood fibers and far less dependent on agricultural chemicals than seed fibers such as cotton.
Industrial hemp is the most efficient producer of biomass of all domesticated plants. It's nature's version of the solar panel. It can make food, fuel, clothing, shelter, medicine, and just about anything that we can make from petroleum. Which is probably why U.S. oil, paper, and chemical corporations had it made illegal.
Vegetable fiber isn't the answer to every problem, but it's the best answer to a wide variety of environmental and economic challenges we face.
Another excellent post jsarets!
This is a question that is greeted by blank stares from my "conservative" friends:
Is our "free market" truly a "free" market when an entire industry is made illegal simply so that other industries can obtain a competitive advantage?
You are probably right about the illegalization of hemp. If its the smoking of it that bothers them, then why make the whole product illegal? During Prohibition, did we make BARLEY illegal to grow simply because Scotch was distilled from it? Did we make pseudoephidrine illegal simply because it is used to produce Meth? Because child pornography is the misuse of a camera and a child, have we outlawed the birthing of children or the manufacture of cameras?
You strike a good point - why make the growing, harvesting, and industrial usage of hemp illegal when the only issue is that people shouldn't smoke it? People shouldn't drink Clorox or use fertilizers to make a bomb. Do we outlaw either of those in their entirety?
Thanks for the insights!
hemp contains only minute (less than 1%) amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. In addition, hemp possesses a high percentage of the compound cannabidiol (CBD), which has been shown to block the effects of THC. For these reasons, many botanists have dubbed industrial hemp "anti- marijuana."
The right place for our government is in our bedrooms not our bathrooms!!! When will you people learn!?!
I'd go for a bidet. Not all butts are created equal; some people have painful conditions that require extra softness.
Then again, I suppose widespread bidet use will waste precious H2O.
Back to the catalog pages! Dry leaves, anyone? How 'bout that left hand?
Seventh generation is my recycle t.p. of choice.
Personally, after living in India for half a year, I would much prefer to go the bidet route. My butt never felt better than when I was washing it with water instead of scraping at it with squares of dry paper. ;)
Try blotting instead of scraping.
Charmin is for wimps.
We prefer the term "tender hineyed"
Old-growth timber is far too valuable to use for pulpwood. I'm not aware of any forest products company using irreplaceable sawlogs to make paper.
Its unbelievable to me that Kimberly-Clark, despite being pressured for nearly four years to stop destroying ancient forest like the Canadian Boreal Forest continues to fight against using more recycled fibre. Come on - the Boreal Forest stores the largest amount of CO2 on the planet! We shouldn't be trashing it to make a product that we use once and then flush down the toilet. I can tell you that I no longer use Kleenex and Cottonelle products by Kimberly-Clark and I have convinced 8 of my friends and family to do the same. Sure, its a bit funny to talk about one's choice of toilet paper but climate change and old growth forests are a serious issue.
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