Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing that the bin in my office toilet has been filling up exceptionally quickly. And I started to think to myself: Exactly how much paper is used up in the world each day on a frivolous task as drying our hands?
After washing our hands, why can’t we just use an air dryer to dry our hands instead? There’s always the jeans option as well. The way we’re plowing through our planet’s resources is just astounding.
And as more and more cities expand and creep into rural and forested areas, these resources are just going to be depleted further and quicker. When the wife and I went to Japan for a holiday, we found toilets with washlets/bidets very common, and that after taking a dump, washing instead of wiping was the norm with the Japanese. Although it definitely felt weird at the time, it was certainly… refreshing to try.
Reading up more though (from cracked.com no less), it seems that the use of toilet paper is really causing a lot of damage to Earth. Using a washlet may be an alien concept to a lot of us, but think about it. When we’re dirty and sweaty, we take a shower. Water is the best cleaning agent, not paper. Otherwise, we’d be wiping ourselves, and not washing ourselves.
If the trend catches on, and the world at large used washlets to cleanse their anuses, and used airdryers to dry their hands after washing them, god knows how much paper and how many trees can be saved.
I would be very very keen to install for at least one toilet in my home, and take one small step towards saving Gaia.
Now, time to go convince the wife.
Fun fact: It takes 384 trees to make the toilet paper that one man uses in his lifetime. We’re hitting 7 billion people this year. Do the math.
