Beyond Paperless: The Paperless Bathroom

Wikipedia (with sources tha may or may not be better than the Daily Mail) says the average American uses about half a tree worth of toilet paper a year[1]. I don't know about the virgin forest bit, nor how hard it is to find toilet paper from recycled sources (it is one of the lowest grade papers, so I think would be easy to produce from recycled fibers).

If you're worried about the environment, some other possible resolutions: * eat vegetarian one day a week * vow not to drive for errands less than a mile away * switch to low-energy light bulbs

(Caveat: Un-sourced claim) I suspect any one of those would offer a benefit for mother nature at least an order of magnitude above not using toilet paper.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper#Environmental_cons...

The casual assertion that people in the UK barely use lavatory paper is beyond funny. We use epic amounts

There's a good deal of energy and emissions involved in building a $400 fixture from scratch, and also an ongoing cost in pumping the water. Proper carbon accounting might actually reveal bidet use is worse than toilet paper (also, tree farms sequester carbon dioxide as a side benefit).

>Some other countries around the world, including Japan and the UK, however, rarely use toilet paper at all.

I can't speak for Japan, but the UK? Really? Are people secretly running around here washing their bums? I think I know one person with a bidet, and I'm pretty certain they've never used it to wash their bum.

The article reeks of poorly researched "facts". Encourage less use of paper, sure, but the environmental cost of installing an additional fixture and using more water must be considered.

Using paper to clean the anus is not only wasteful, it's unpleasant and ineffective. The universal solvent is clearly the superior option for this daily task.

As nice a thing as it is, it doesn't take a $400 bidet to wash your ass with water. Use your imagination. You can even do it in the woods, like a bear with a water bottle.

And if you insist on using paper, I humbly recommend the delicate tissues of the Christian Bible, which should be a fine alternative to such old darlings of western bathroom culture as the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, and are available for free all over the damned place.

The focus on getting rid of paper is naive when you start talking about Dyson Airblades. It's not just the cost of running the thing that matters, it's the cost of creating and maintaining the thing. The same principal counts for hybrid cars. They feel environmentally friendly because of marketing campaigns that focus on metrics like paper and gasoline consumption, but when you count the cost of creation, and even more importantly the cost of getting rid of them, it's not as black and white as "we should move off paper and gasoline."

I've always been a fan of the SE Asia style "two buckets" solution, and I tend to fall back on it whenever I'm in a country with dodgy plumbing that won't handle toilet paper.

For my money, I'll trade an extra thorough hand wash for a giant garbage sack of used toilet paper in my hotel room any day.

98% of toilet paper rolls the US come from virgin forest? And the only source for this is the Daily Mail? Riiight.

I did a quick search, and found a more reliable article[1] from the New York Times that states that 25-50% comes from tree farms, and most of the remainder comes from second-growth forests, not virgin forests.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/world/americas/26iht-paper...

A lot of Asia does this. It makes for great comedy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwJI_jwhub0

(For those who never lived in India: water has less than 50% uptime, so the empty bucket + water outage is the result of stupidity rather than bad luck.)

What about tissue paper (Kleenex to the layman)?

I came here to look for the obligatory 3 shells comment. :)