Can't See the Forest in the Bum-Wipe

Am I Wiping With An Ancient Tree?

More than 200 quintillion rolls of toilet paper are consumed every single year. OK, I made that up. But one person over 80 years gets their ass wiped with 70000 kms of soft paper. (I made that up too). Soft shreddy paper. Which leads me to India.

When I went, before I went, a big concern was cleaning my crotch without paper. I need paper to wipe my ass, don't I? I had anyone who went to India tell me about wiping your ass with your hand. I was going to have to touch poo. My poo, but poo none the less.

The thing about India was I was told that people of India may find a paper wiped ass a dirtier practice than a water washed ass. There is a lot of water used everywhere in India. So water, liberally applied with a bit of a shower wipe cleans your ass. Soap and water wash to your hands. Resulting in really clean everything, no paper used.

Toilet Paper Use in a Frugal House in North America
We use between 50 - 100 rolls per year in my house. White 100% post consumer ‘recycled’ tp. Sometime in the early 90s brown tp, ‘unbleached’, was available, but I don’t see it anymore.
Sometimes I’ve thought about our sometimes ‘rough’ paper and how visitors will see that. Who cares, right. But marketing and advertising enters my psyche with the cultural field of ‘acceptable uniqueness’. Unique, but not a freak. So we use toilet paper and don’t force our guests to use water.

Trees Here
I live in the northern Pacific Raincoast Forest. Trees grow really big. Forests grow in diversity. Wood is used, pulp and paper are used and made. Whole logs are cut and shipped away. Whole logs are left to rot. Trees and forests are wasted. Some tree farms are planted. Paper is wasted, some is recycled.

I’ve thought about going paper free. It’s hard- even for a day. I thought about going tp-less, using water. So much works against this.

Can’t we just use post-consumer brands of tp? Don’t use brands that are not post-consumer? If we cared maybe. If we knew, perhaps. Trees live longer than most any other life form we know of. Large, life giving, diverse beings of life. We cut, kill, waste or at best wipe our asses with it. Gives new meaning to spoiled-ass people.


Books to read:
The Giving Tree- Shel Silverstein
Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History- Katherine Ashenburg

Blogs to read:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ahershkowitz/will_recycled_fiber_toilet_pap.html

Music to listen to:
Are My Hands Clean? - Sweet Honey and the Rock