It Smells Like Flowers, I Swear

(First published in Bali Advertiser, March 1, 2006)

“I’m not putting my hand back there in that stuff!” – the daughter of a friend, on a visit to Bali

Back when only two Australians were languishing in international jails on drug charges and they both happened to be young, photogenic models in the Denpasar jail -- one of the two was quoted in the papers telling her mother that she had not yet stooped to doing without toilet paper.

The comment has stuck with me for two reasons: One, the woman had been to Bali several times and apparently had never been in a situation where she had to adapt to local practice. Two, most young Australians I have met go overboard on environmental and other hot, hip, “spiritual” ideas – organic cigarettes, vegan diets, hemp products – and many have boasted of adjusting to local toiletry practice as a sign of attunement to the culture. But, then, I do not often meet the better class of Australians, who must assure their mothers that they would never, never …

And most Westerners don’t do well with the concept – in or out of prison. Indeed, just the idea that humans need to clean themselves on a regular basis hasn’t sat well historically with Westerners, particularly in the English-speaking world. One of the early marketing challenges to the toilet paper industry in the 1800s was that the product was considered one of the many “unmentionables” of Victorian society. You’d think they would have been more willing to discuss it when some of the contemporary and previous alternatives were scraper sticks, corn cobs, mussel and coconut shells, leaves, sand, and the frayed ends of old anchor cables, not to mention the pages of a famous American retail catalog. Those could all probably do greater damage than the “serious injury” one early advertisement warned might result from “harsh toilet tissue” (according to http://www.toiletpaperworld.com/tpw/encyclopedia/navigation/funfacts.htm).

No doubt it’s still a sensitive subject, but it’s not a subject that can be ignored. Consider these statistics from 2002, compiled by http://earthtrends.wri.org: That year, Finland used 321.78 kilograms of paper and paperboard per person, the United States 307.54 kgs per person, Japan 249.66 kgs, China 34.24 kgs, Indonesia 22.61 kgs, India 4.28 kgs, and Bhutan 0.04 kgs. Perhaps the only surprise is that the Finns used more paper per capita than people in the US.

Just getting “civilized” people to switch from toilet tissue to using their hands and water or another less wasteful option isn’t going to make a great difference. In the US, tissue accounts for only about 7 percent of total paper usage. The largest categories are containerboard at 31 percent and printing and writing paper at 28 percent. But taking the tissue category as a marker, what happens when the two billion people of China and India demand four-ply, cushioned, perfumed, perforated paper before they’ll go to the toilet? What happens when they start using other paper products at the same rate as the people of the US, Europe, and wealthy Asian countries?

Currently, industrialized countries hold 20 percent of the world’s population and consume 87 percent of the world’s printing and writing paper. The US, with 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes 27 percent of the wood harvested worldwide. That’s in line with the US’s consumption of about a quarter of the world’s daily energy requirements.

So why focus on toilet paper? Well, not everyone in the industrialized, developed world works in an office using up to 10,000 sheets of printing and copy paper each year (as the average US office worker does). Everyone, however, does have to answer regular calls of nature. Not only can a trip to the toilet be a universal daily reminder of paper consumption, it is a potent symbol of what developed nations are doing to those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. The twenty percent of the world’s population living in the highest-income countries accounts for 86 percent of total private consumption expenditures. This minority eats almost half of the meat and fish, uses over half of the energy, and has by far the most phone lines, the most cars. And while developed nations get all the goodies, the rest of the world gets the leavings, the waste, and the trash.

So, the next time you are in the ‘little room,’ the WC, the john, doing the necessary, take a moment to consider the toilet paper roll versus the bucket of water and the scoop. We might not save the world one toilet tissue square at a time, but it might get us used to the idea that we all have to clean up after ourselves, no matter the size, the smell, or the extent of the mess.

(Note: Where not otherwise stated, statistics and facts used in this column came from the Web sites http://www.ecomall.com/biz/paper.htm, http://www.environmentalpaper.org/PAPER-statistics.html, http://www.mdfsystems.com/artman/publish/article_42.shtml and http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption.asp.)

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi