Which Is Greener: Toilet Paper Or A Bidet?

What’s the best way to be kind to Mother Nature when answering the call of nature? Here’s an example of why green choices aren’t always black and white.

Over the course of our publication day, we might receive a dozen or so unsolicited product pitches. Some are useful; some are blatant greenwashing; and a few make us think.

Take, for example, this recent PR come-on:

Hi, I was hoping you could incorporate the story below into your site/blog. It talks about a bidet invention that helps reduce toilet paper usage, helping the environment in the process.

Ah — the bidet. Common in parts of Europe and a few other places around the world, but a mystery to the majority of Americans. For most, a bidet is a novelty to be contemplated in the dark recesses of some French hotel room, not a component of greener living.

The bidet in question, the Biffy Personal Rinse, seemed nice enough: a bolt-on attachment for standard commodes which retails for about $100. That’s a good value when compared to the rather hefty price people pay for traditional bidets. But it got us wondering: how green is this thing, really, especially when compared to recycled toilet paper?

A touchy subject

It’s difficult to understand why environmentalists are so willing to discuss their bathroom habits with perfect strangers — or get those same strangers to start “greening up” by changing such an intimate aspect of their lives. With all the possible ways to lighten one’s environmental footprint, you’d think potty time would be about the last thing on the list.

Sheryl Crow learned this the hard way, becoming the butt of late night talk show jokes after calling for the rationing of toilet paper. Public reaction was predictable. Colin Beavan, a New York writer also known as No Impact Man, quickly discovered his family’s abandonment of toilet paper was usually the first topic raised when interviewed about his year of low-impact living.

That being said, we’re all about saving resources. Let’s jump in.

All those trees

Biffy Personal Rinse leads with the idea of saving trees by replacing toilet paper with bidets: an admirable goal. Their proposition is quite similar to that used by green household product manufacturer Seventh Generation when promoting recycled paper products:

If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 500 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissue with 100% recycled ones, we could save 423,900 trees.

That sounds good. And it would be true, too — if lumberjacks were marching into natural forests with the sole purpose of hauling trees to the Charmin factory.

In practice, things aren’t that simple. Most tissue-grade paper is made from sawdust and leftover scraps of timber cut for other purposes. And while there are some outrageous exceptions, the trees come from vast stands of pulpwood forests, harvested like the vegetables you buy at the corner whole foods market.

That’s not to say there’s no negative impact to sustainable timber management: Pulpwood farms grow where native forests used to stand, and their relentless monoculture disrupts all manner of wildlife habitat. It takes fossil fuels to cut and transport the trees, and paper mills make terrible neighbors. It would be better if we used much less paper, but virgin toilet tissue doesn’t necessarily equal the destruction of virgin forest.

But bidets still save paper, right?

Once again, it’s not that simple. Let’s say you’ve just finished using a bidet. Now you’re sitting there with a very clean, very wet backside. What do you propose to do about that?

Using a washcloth would be somewhat taboo in the Americas, though it’s really no different than if you were toweling off after bathing. Traditional bidet use can involve the use of soap — think about it as a small shower. But even in countries where bidets are common, people often reach for toilet paper.

So it’s back to square one. Unless you’re happy to air dry or don’t mind using a washcloth, a bidet won’t save much paper or many trees. That doesn’t make the bidet a FAIL. Because, as usual, things aren’t that simple.

It’s about water

This seems counter-intuitive, but we think bidets are good environmental tech because they save water. A lot of it. Yes, a bidet uses treated water, an increasingly precious commodity. But it uses less than that utilized in the production of even recycled toilet paper — and a fraction of the amount consumed by virgin pulp.

Paper making is incredibly water-intensive. Even if water used by a mill is locally sourced, rather than drawn from a municipal system, the effluent from paper production invariably finds its way back into the environment. That means a flood of organic waste and chemical residue which must be processed or, worse yet, absorbed after being treated and dumped into some unlucky river or ocean.

Which brings us back to the Biffy Personal Rinse. Is it green? Yes, though for more nuanced reasons than simply saving trees. It will be at its most effective if you go the washcloth route; should still conserve paper if you use toilet tissue for drying, rather than cleaning; and will save water throughout its service life. It seems an affordable alternative to a full bidet, which would be expensive to retrofit in an existing bathroom.

Three reasonable alternatives

Let’s bravely propose three earth-friendly potty options. Choose the one which works best for you.

• Use a bidet. To be most effective, dry with a washcloth. But you’re still ahead of the game with paper.
• Choose recycled toilet tissue. Recycled paper consumes fewer overall resources than virgin tissue.
• If you prefer conventional paper, buy it on the largest roll your bathroom fixtures will accommodate. It uses less packaging.

Or you can continue doing whatever you’re doing right now — and turn up your thermostat two degrees during the summer. We’ll call it even.

More Reading:

Saving the Planet, One Square of Toilet Paper at a Time (WSJ.com)
Ready to rethink toilet paper for Earth Day? (MSNBC.com)

Revive the Rag Bag!

Somewhere on the web, a site asks, “Can you imagine life without paper towels?” Frankly, yes. Our ancestors managed, and we can, too. Here’s how.

Paper towels are cheap and convenient. But let’s face it: society got along without them for thousands of years. If all the paper towels in the world suddenly disappeared overnight, somehow we’d all muddle through.

Paper’s real cost

It’s not just the sheer number of trees wasted by disposable paper products — most are farmed, and can be regrown. But large scale pulpwood production is the reason you can drive for hours in parts of the southern United States and see nothing but pine trees. It’s a poor substitute for diverse native forests and their rich ecosystems. Then there’s the issue of the bleaches used to make paper look white, and the cellulose-rich waste which gets dumped into our watershed. Paper production is messy business.

Of course, you needn’t give up disposable paper products altogether. But cutting back is a good way to save money and reduce your environmental footprint.

Bring back the rag bag!

Your mother probably had a rag bag. So did her mom. Long before supermarkets stocked row upon row of paper towels, families recycled their worn clothing and towels into useful clean-up rags.
Maybe it’s time to bring back this tried-and-true method. It’s always best to give away useable clothing, but sometimes old duds just come to the end of the line. That’s when you get out your scissors and start cutting.

Cotton makes the best picker-upper, but even synthetics can be used for polishing. Cut your scrap fabric into 9 or 10-inch squares. Put them in bags wherever you’d use paper towels — particularly in the kitchen. A short rinse before dropping your soiled rags into the wash, and they’re ready for the next job.

A quickie rag dispenser

Looking for the convenience of paper towels? Here’s a quick project to make things easy. Using a craft knife, cut a hole about four inches wide and two inches tall near the bottom of a discarded 2 liter soda bottle. Keep the cut just above the rounded bottom section, which provides the bottle’s structural strength.

Now stuff the bottle with lightweight rags. They’ll be in reach and ready to go whenever there’s a mess.