America's love of luxury toilet paper is destroying Canadian forests | Hacker News Reader

America's love of luxury toilet paper is destroying Canadian forests

theguardian.com

26 pointsdrugme24 comments

Surely the paper is being harvested from sustainably managed tree farms? And surely if demand for said paper decreased, to the point where the tree farm wasn't profitable, said tree farm owner would raze the farm.

most paper in the US is sustainably forested. The article overstates its case.

Those Japanese luxury toilets that many Asians and some Western celebrities and rich people use might actually be the most environmentally friendly choice.

https://www.totousa.com/products/neorest

They absolutely are. Every Foreigner who lives in Japan for any length of time at first fears them, then comes to love them.

With a bidet, it doesn't matter what kind of toilet paper you have, because it's just for drying. NOT using a bidet means effectively smearing your waste all over your backside because it won't get fully clean without water, which is tbh just plain disgusting and unsanitary.

Even a hand bidet like those in the middle East are a huge improvement, and can be bought for $30 on Amazon.

The only downside of a bidet is that you get so used to the cleanliness that using a restroom with toilet paper will seem primitive and you will feel unclean for the rest of the day. You will also wonder how can it be that everybody else laughs, plays, and generally acts normal while having stuff smeared on their behind.

Heh you don't have to spend $5k. You can swap out almost any standard toilet seat for a $350 Toto Washlet to get a heated seat and heated water. They are incredible, and you're right, they almost eliminate the need for toilet paper.

Or you can go super cheap and get a $20-50 version with unheated water.

And the only reason they cost $350 in the US is due to rarity - here in Japan you can get them (with heated seat/water) from Panasonic and Toshiba for under $150

here are three for less than $100

https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/review-toilet-seat-bidets-f...

You can get a basic version for a couple hundred. I got one, it's great.

I'll take 2, 1 for each bathroom!

Why not 4? Two people can use the same bathroom at once then!

I really dont get why the west doesn't use a bidet.

Its really mind blowing to me that if someone smears a cake on your face, you wash it with soap, but use TP to clean feaces.

Why use so much paper and do so mich environmental damage, if you can just use water for a better cleansing outcome.

> average four-person household in the US uses over 100lb of toilet paper a year

Well that's super helpful. Who buys it by the pound? Sheets of paper, or rolls, yes I could visualise and compare. Not even how many football fields it covers!

Sounds like a heck of a lot. Probably.

An average toilet paper roll is 227 grams / roll [0] or ~0.5 lbs / roll. Consequently, this would be ~200 rolls, or 0.547 rolls per day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper#Description

That seems on the high side. Maybe quarter roll per day per person.

Using more than that it’s probably cheaper to buy a Toto with the bidet.

you obviously don't have a wife, girlfriend, or daughters. Women use toilet paper to clean up their makeup and their ahem, stains, and for a whole bunch of other things besides just wiping their butts.

Relevant Scientific American article.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-bidet...

"Popular everywhere except North America, where Americans use 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper annually, switching to bathroom bidets could save some 15 million trees.... 'This also involves 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of chlorine for bleaching.” He adds that manufacturing requires about 17.3 terawatts of electricity annually....'

I wish those sink-sprayer looking things they have in India would catch on in the west. It's like a minimum viable bidet. I thought it works better and you never run out. Maybe a slightly damp butt would be more problematic in cooler climates...

Is anyone passing out bidet's for free or low costs?? Don't think so...

You can get "add-on" bidets for ~$20 which just hook up to your existing water line.

Even a fancy bidet seat can be had for a couple hundred dollars (maybe 400 if you want to go all in for a fancy model) and installs in about 10 minutes. You still might need some toilet paper (drying function is on a weaker side on these) but I use maybe one tenths as much as before i got one...

Since the service inception, my family has been subscribed to bamboo toilet paper from Tushy [0].

[0]: https://hellotushy.com/products/tushy-bamboo-toilet-paper

That looks extremely expensive for something you use every day.

This is damn outrageous, anyone whose done any serious woodworking or carpentry knows how the price of just about every type of lumber has increased over the past few decades. Seriously, it is now becoming a scarce resource and wasting high quality wood fiber this way is just plain stupid.

Perhaps we should tax wood fiber to point of where we're all forced to use recycled stuff or we have to switch back to using old newspaper (as was the case when I was a kid). Nowadays we no longer use nasty antimony printing plates, so we've no longer any reasonable excuse not to.

Reckon, many could perhaps do with a stint in the army to toughen up their posteriors. I recall the stuff it issued was only marginally better than using leaf droppings.

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