Please Do Not Use Tissue Toilet Paper
This story was written long before the pandemic, but now we are hoarding toilet paper and fearing the next shortage, and Nick Douglas’s message seems even more timely, even urgent. So, we present this to you as a reminder that tissue toilet paper should never be something to think about. It’s all bad, but not so bad. – Ed.
Family Tissue is a reusable toilet paper alternative made from rags, old T-shirts, sewn tissue, or commercially available tissue napkins. They are mainly used for wiping up urine, but in some families they are used for poop and menstruation. This practice (prevalent before the modern era) is now dominated by eco-friendly and sustainable cleaning blogs and Etsy stores . BuzzFeed posted a sympathetic review of napkins a while back. (At the end, readers are asked to answer, “Good for them, not me!” Or “I would try this at some point.”) Before it gets any bigger, let’s be clear: “Family tissue” is not a life hack. …
The downsides of cloth napkins (we refuse to call them “family cloth”) are obvious: you need to keep a sealed basket and you need to wash more. Wearers of the fabric claim that there is nothing wrong with this, that it is no worse than dealing with dirty underwear, as if dealing with dirty underwear is already a good thing. They insist on maintaining good hygiene, on the fact that the napkins do not smell, that in fact all this does not really matter. Okay.
Tissue napkins also pose a problem for guests as you should never offer napkins to your guests . “We always keep a box of facial tissues in the guest closet in the bathroom,” says one source to BuzzFeed. This is disgusting and pointless! Keep a roll of toilet paper for your guests! Oh my God!
There are two reasons for using tissue-based toilet napkins: they save the environment and they save money. Let’s explore the implicit assumptions: toilet paper is expensive and harmful to the environment.
Toilet paper is expensive
Toilet paper costs … not much? If an adult uses about 50-100 rolls a year , that’s a lot less than $ 100, even for the high-end Cottonelle . A hundred bucks a year is worth the little savings, not the big life changes associated with storing, washing, drying, and folding rags covered in feces, urine, and menstrual fluid.
Toilet paper is harmful to the environment
Every year, American toilet paper uses 7.5 to 54 million trees (some of them old-growth ), 17.3 terawatts of electricity, and 474 billion gallons of water (about 13 gallons per roll). As toilet paper becomes popular in developing countries, the environmental costs are increasing . In the US, product review site The Wirecutter recommends Cottonelle and Charmin over recycled brands, but the best they can say about their environmental impact is:
Both Kimberly-Clark , producer of Cottonelle, and Procter & Gamble , producer of Charmin, state that their timber sources are 100% legal and that they only buy from suppliers that practice sustainable forest management.
Ah, at least it’s legal.
Laundry towels also use water and electricity, but to be honest, that’s probably less than 13 gallons of toilet paper per roll. The exact amount depends on whether you are using hot water, hanging the napkins to air dry, and throwing the napkins with other laundry items.
But that doesn’t matter, because there are two technologies that reduce waste and completely eliminate the use of a washing machine: recycled toilet paper and a bidet .
Recycled toilet paper saves trees
I personally didn’t want to give up the comfortable Cottonelle after a bad experience with Seventh Generation. But the Natural Resources Defense Council lists 17 grades of recycled paper ; probably one of them is soft enough to wipe clean. And some of these brands are cheaper than top non-recycled brands like Cottonelle and Charmin.
Bidets save more trees
The bidet attachments (which fit right into the toilet) can clean you with little to no toilet paper. They are much more expensive; The Wirecutter’s top pick is $ 430 and their budget is $ 235. But if you can keep yours running for five years (major manufacturers offer repair services), you come out on top. Or go super cheap: One $ 30 model on Amazon has a 4.5 star rating after nearly 5,000 reviews.
Environmentally friendly bidet; just two cups of water will replace a wipe. They are perfectly hygienic and popular in Europe, Asia and South America. Americans occasionally run into them in high-end Japanese restaurants; Unlike cloth napkins, bidets work well in public spaces.
So why ignore these obvious decisions in favor of rubbing the buttocks with a cloth? In the words of Rosa Princess, who expertly roasted a gruesome, since deleted video with clever “tricks” like making an ottoman out of 36 soda bottles:
More broadly, some people may be showing frugality and environmental awareness instead of evaluating which steps will benefit the most. They build themselves a lifestyle that feels virtuous, regardless of whether it is virtuous. They buy specially sewn napkins that fold up like a snowsuit.
It’s annoying, time-consuming and pretentious, but is it harmful? This is definitely not the best PR for the environment; Part of America’s problem is that we view frugality and environmental awareness as bullshit for weird hippies. And in the case of tissue napkins, America is right.
This story was originally published in 2018 and updated on 07/24/2020 by Alice Bradley. Updates include: reformatting sections, updating links and bidet prices, and an added introduction.