Going to the toilet is universal but how often do we take the time to reflect on the environmental impact of our bathroom habits?
Talking about your toilet exploits would not get you many invites to dinner parties, but what we do in there has significant effects on the environment and our health.
It has also changed drastically throughout history.
Until the last century, going to the toilet was not the cosy comfort that most of Europe knows today.
Researchers believe that fragments of ceramic known as ‘pessoi’ were used to clean oneself in Roman times.
As experts so delicately put it in a British Medical Journal article: “The abrasive characteristics of ceramic suggest that long term use of pessoi could have resulted in local irritation, skin or mucosal damage, or complications of external haemorrhoids.”
If you didn’t fancy that, another option was to use a sponge on a stick. It sounds more agreeable until you learn that the sponge was often communal.
When was the bathroom invented?
The existence of the modern private bathroom with a flushing toilet and other luxuries is very recent, becoming widespread in the last century.
The way we clean ourselves has also evolved. Go to any bathroom across the continent and you’ll find a stack of toilet rolls ready for action, but the first packaged toilet paper was only invented in 1857 and it didn’t become common in roll form until 1907.
“It’s really a very, very slow transformation of understanding and behaviour that accelerated in the 20th century,” says Dr Peter Ward, professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia and author of ‘The Clean Body: A Modern History’.
Ward was struck by the rapid pace of change in our hygiene habits when his grandfather divulged he only used to have two baths a year as a child.
“Then jump forward to my two daughters who in their adolescence were sometimes having two showers a day. So there’s a timeline of massive cultural change that is connected to me,” he says.
Is toilet paper bad for the environment?
As a mass consumer economy saw a vast array of hygiene products come on to the market and toilet paper became widespread, the question of its environmental impact needs to be raised.
It’s estimated that the average person in the US, Canada, and western Europe uses between 15 and 25 kg of toilet paper per year.
The European Environmental Bureau says turning wood into paper is a polluting process and adding fragrances to toilet paper often uses unnecessary chemicals.
“Tissue represents about 10 per cent of the global production of paper products, so it is not as big as packaging, but it is growing,” says Sergio Baffoni, senior campaign coordinator at the Environmental Paper Network.
Some of the main global producers of tissue have been criticised by environmental organisations for contributing to deforestation and in some cases for being linked to human rights abuses.
The EU agreed to rules that will ban the sale of products sourced from deforested land.
However, their introduction was threatened last year, a move which sparked a toilet paper protest in the European Parliament by environmental activists.
Members of the group Canopée entered the Parliament building and switched out toilet paper with messages in support of the new regulation.
The ban has now been accepted but the implementation has been delayed by a year until 30 December 2025 for large and medium companies and 30 June 2026 for micro and small enterprises to give them more time to become compliant.
‘Forever chemicals’ have been found in toilet paper
A new concern has also cropped up when it comes to toilet paper.
In 2023, researchers at the University of Florida checked 21 major toilet paper brands in North America, western Europe, Africa, Central America and South America for PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), also known as ‘forever chemicals’.
“Our results suggest that toilet paper should be considered as a potentially major source of PFAS entering wastewater systems,” they concluded, while adding that further research is necessary.
So does this mean we should ditch toilet paper and find alternatives?
What are the alternatives to toilet paper?
In large parts of the world bidets or the so-called bumgun (a kind of handheld hose used to clean yourself) are popular.
Yet they have failed to catch on in some countries.
“Historically, the bidet was a device used by prostitutes,” Ward explains. “It was really associated with behaviour of some of the sexual underclass.”
“I think that that gave the bidet, which is an eminently practical or sensible device, a reputation which was pretty salacious,” he adds.
Advocates say adopting the bidet or bumgun is a sustainable way to slash toilet paper usage.
“Bidets and bidet toilet seat attachments not only significantly cut down on the use of toilet paper but also require less water per use than the forest fiber tissue-making process does,” the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US NGO, says in its annual ‘The Issue with Tissue Scorecard’.
In defence of the toilet roll
However, Giovanni De Feo, associate professor of environmental and sanitary engineering at the University of Salerno, argues that the benefits of toilet paper should also be remembered while discussing its environmental impact.
“Nothing is zero impact,” he believes. “Toilet paper was a revolutionary invention used to solve the sanitation issue.”
Researchers say that poor sanitation and the resulting bacterial infections have killed more people than armed conflicts throughout human history. De Feo believes that toilet paper has played a role in improving sanitation and reducing deaths.
“We need toilet paper,” he continues. “But we can reduce the amount of toilet paper that we use because even using one single piece less is three litres of water that we can save.”
De Feo founded Greenopoli, an initiative to promote environmental awareness among young people. One of his key teaching props is a toilet paper roll which he uses to illustrate the life cycle of products so his students can think about their environmental impact.
“I have even written a poem about toilet paper roll,” he reveals. “Because I say at the end, our life is like one. Step by step, piece after piece, day by day, only our soul remains.”
