Growing usage of toilet paper is contributing to climate crisis. While one roll of toilet paper takes 140 litres of water to produce, washing takes 500 ml- 1,000 ml for a user’s wash cycle
Do you wash or wipe after you relieve yourself inside a toilet block? Or do you do both in succession? Have you given it a thought?
While the majority of us in the Indian subcontinent are known to be washers, there is a growing fraction of us who have moved towards wiping or both. Dated in history is our practice of washing and an age-old practice of wiping. Both of these practices, respectively, have adopters split across sides of the earth. The Middle East, South Asia, and other regions had been using small vessels of water - called lotas or tabo - for cleansing for centuries.
Prior to the advent of paper, which was discovered in the 15thcentury - cultural practices for anal cleansing made use of objects such as broken pieces of ceramic pottery, spatulas with cloth-wrapped ends, rags, corncobs, and seashells. It was not until 1857, when medicated paper, now commonly known as ‘toilet paper', was discovered that drove the wiping culture further.
While 30 percent of the world population currently uses toilet paper, its users predominantly exist in the western regions. With much debate around the hygiene aspect of toilet paper for anal cleansing, bidets and jet sprays have seen a growing market in Europe and Northern America, indicating a growing acceptance of washing.
Meanwhile, a see-saw effect follows in India, with some users adopting toilet paper for a variety of purposes (substituting it for anal washing, seat and pan cleaning purposes, vaginal wiping, and also drying up post-wash). The fact is that toilet paper consumption in India has seen a small but steady rise in consumption - a country where wiping was never a preferred approach.
Let us talk about the environmental impacts of our rather seemingly simple action of extending our arm towards that toilet paper roll. One roll of toilet paper that you see hung inside a toilet block takes 140 litres of water to produce; in other words, each square piece of toilet paper takes about two litres of water to produce, compared to washing practice, which takes on average 500 ml- 1,000 ml for one user’s wash cycle.
On average, a West European - where wiping is predominantly the means in the person’s country - uses 15 kg of toilet paper annually. It takes 3,624 kg (one cord) of wood to manufacture about 450 kg of toilet paper, which translates into 120 kg of wood exhausted for an annual supply of toilet paper for a single individual.
If 1.3 billion Indians were ever to start using toilet paper, it would unleash an environmental disaster. A country like Finland—75 percent of its land is covered by forest—would be denuded of its green cover in just a few years. On to more impacts, chlorine is used to bleach the pulp to look white, while other ‘forever chemicals’ (poly-fluoroalkyl-PFAS) are added to make it soft, and their end-of-life disposal leads to accelerated pollution in our local water bodies.
Meanwhile, for comparison, by continuing with the washing approach, you will be saving, on average, about 384 trees that are cut down to make a single person's lifetime toilet paper supply.
Toilet paper is the sanitation sector’s concern. India currently adopts a mix of sanitation technologies to meet its growing and challenging sanitation demand by adopting faecal sludge management and conventional sewer-based technologies.
Meanwhile, toilet paper has been internationally reported as one of the major insoluble pollutant components in the influent of wastewater treatment plants. Toilet paper fibres contribute to large sewage sludge production, resulting in a higher treatment cost and energy consumption.
In an already burdened state of our nation’s Sewage Treatment Plants and Faecal Sludge Treatment Plants, toilet paper is an avoidable variable that, if not avoided, will certainly add more challenges than fixes along our sanitation value chain.
The limited availability of secondary literature on our toilet practices and their impact calls for concern.
It is estimated that, annually, at a global level, 42 million tonnes or 22 billion kilometres, of toilet paper are used. That is almost 50,000 times the distance around the planet Earth. It takes 712 million trees and 1,165 million tonnes of water to meet that demand, which finally end up in our drains.
Next time you extend your arm towards that toilet roll, remember that every square of that roll took two litres of water from the earth to make. Use judiciously. Don’t let your private business of toilet practice become a public matter on climate. Choose wisely next time.
(Anant Mitra is Programme Officer at Sanitation Capacity Building Platform, National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA))