About Sustainable Shopping: Wiping 2 - The Bum

The bum-wiping experience is another feature of the transition I experienced from post-war deprivation to present day plenty. I remember as a child using newspaper cut into squares and hung by a clip or nail in the outdoor closet.

As with a lot of things, our understandable longing for something better was satisfied by job-specific products becoming available – which, sadly, then went on to be tweaked and prettified to a point which has become ludicrous. As you look at the pastel coloured, scented, work of art in your hand, just reflect on what you are about to do to it.

I wouldn't want to go back to that newsprint. It's not good for the job and anyway we don't have that much of it around any more do we? But it was a fine example of reusing something no longer needed for its original purpose.

So I'm minded to adhere to the spirit of those make do and mend toilet paper years without resorting to the unpleasantness of newsprint. Surely the only acceptable bum wipe is made of recycled material which is no use for anything else. Recycled paper toilet rolls are available from online suppliers and many supermarkets have at least one such product.

Actually though, there are other potential ways to sustainably wipe the bum. A bidet is one of course. The fact that many other countries use them, while most of us in the UK don't, puts us high in the league table of per capita toilet paper users (see endnotes).

An enthusiastically marketed product is bamboo toilet 'paper'. I have a lot to say about bamboo  elsewhere, not all of it good (Bamboo), but in this context it looks OK. If, that is, it is supplied by an ethical producer who tells us how it got here. See for instance, the cheerily named Bumboo brand:

https://gobumboo.com/blogs/sustainability/bumboo-country-of-orgin

So what am I going to do to clean up my bum-wiping? Well, as with all sustainability issues, it's complicated when you go into it. Yet constipation looms if I hang around waiting for a definitive final answer. So for now, recycled toilet paper is what I'll use. I'll rephrase that: toilet paper made from recycled paper (unbleached and undyed of course). At the same time I'll keep an eye on those other options and go for one or the other if, at some point, they show themselves to be better. It's about consumer choice: I will reduce demand for the pimped stuff by one and increase demand for the better stuff by one. When enough of us do that, the bad stuff begins to wither away. It won't if we just sit on the bog and wait.

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Endnotes:

There's a good discussion of toilet paper and bidets here which compares brands and lists suppliers and also looks at the bamboo alternatives to paper.

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/home-garden/shopping-guide/toilet-paper

Ethical Superstore has 'Bumboo' brand bamboo toilet paper:

https://www.ethicalsuperstore.com/

Update December 2021:

I've just seen this fine example of toilet paper 'tweaked and prettified to a point which has become ludicrous'. I wonder how nice orange, cranberry and shit actually smells.