The Crappy reality of loo roll

Why did i choose this as my first official blog? of all the interesting subjects to choose from in the world why Loo Roll?

The answer is very simple, Myself i am a big fan of recycling, re-using and not wasting whether its the fact i am a bit of a tight arse or the fact that i want to save the world we live in i don’t know.

Anyway the answer, I was sitting on the throne the other day and i looked at the small wooden shelf opposite which the day prior was filled with 4 brand new, nicely arranged loo rolls which were placed there by my partner. To my amazement after no more than 24hours had passed in their place stood 3 empty tubes and one poor roll who had been stripped of his dignity praying that the bathroom door wouldn’t open again and he wouldn’t fall foul to the same fate as his compatriots.

So this got me thinking about the trees, I have to make clear i am not one of these eco nuts but i do like to do my part in protecting the world that we have undoubtedly abused.

So yeh the trees. So i did a little research into the amount of trees that die just for our two seconds of pleasure on the throne and it is quite astonishing each day 12.5 million!! tonnes of paper and cardboard are used annually in the UK. The average person in the UK gets through 38kg of newspapers per year, and in the United States around 71 million!! which is crazy. So i delved deeper.

People use at least 57 sheets of toilet paper per day and 27 rolls per person annually, adding up to 384 trees in a lifetime. Now the average price of a loo roll in the uk is around 40p per roll and on the average of 27 rolls per person per year that comes to around £11 per person, which sounds okay. However my partner went through three in a day herself i am convinced she is eating them, and if she does this i am sure she is not alone. At this rate it is going to cost me more like £400 per year.

So i delved deeper again and it turns out around 27,000 trees end up in landfill a day from Loo roll usage alone(globally), which is only around 10% of the actual amount of trees that end up there from other sources.

Enough of boring facts and figures though, how about a fun toilet roll fact:

It wasn’t until 1935 that a manufacturer was able to promise “Splinter-Free Toilet Paper.”

Ouch!!

Anyhow i am sure you get it that we use excessive amounts of loo roll and in turn we are killing trees for a clean bum. So to end i propose to you all try and use just one less sheet on each wipe(unless you are a one sheet kinda person because that could get messy.)

Better Planet paper realeased this statement: 544,000 trees could be saved each year if each US household used just one less roll of paper towels.

On that note i am signing off, I hope this topic wasn’t to crappy for you(apologies).

The Attic-Realist