The Numbers Will Blow Your Mind

Most people don't give much thought to their roll of toilet paper. It's something that has always been there, a tool that simply exists but is gone from your mind once you leave the bathroom. Most don’t think any further about how much goes into making a simple roll of toilet paper. Producing a single roll of toilet paper requires a massive supply chain from sapling to packaging, which means you need everything from water and power to trees and logistics. There’s a lot that goes into it!

By the Numbers

The average American adult uses roughly one roll of toilet paper every week, or about 50 rolls in a year. For a family of four, that makes 200 rolls of toilet paper a yearly supply. With a US population of 330 million and a non-potty trained group of 0-5 year olds totalling 23 million, that’s 15 billion (with a B!) rolls of toilet paper used every year!

Water Consumption

Even though toilet paper is used to clean and dry you off, it takes a lot of water to get from raw materials to the finished product. Toilet paper is of course paper, so it comes from trees that need plenty of water to grow big enough to chop down and form into fluffy toilet paper. It takes almost 60 gallons of water just to grow and process the wood needed for one roll of toilet paper! And based on yearly consumption, that’s over 3,000 gallons of water every year for one person and nearly 13,000 gallons for every family. To clean the country, it takes 660 million gallons of water each year, which is the equivalent of 1 million Olympic swimming pools.

Power Demands

It’s not as simple as chopping down a tree and rolling it up for your bathroom; there are a lot of mills and factories that are needed to process the wood down into pulp and fibers to actually make TP. Machines need power, and that means that one roll of toilet paper takes 1.3 kWh of electricity to make (that’s 260kWh per family per year). Or put another way, 78 Million MWh of electricity, more than the consumption of the entire state of New Jersey!

Environmental Needs

Unfortunately, a lot of toilet paper is made from trees harvested in old-growth forests; these are large swaths of land that have grown for centuries, cut clean just for our bums. Someone choosing to give up toilet paper would save 75 pounds of wood each year. If every TP user gave it up too, that’s 22.5 Billion pounds of wood every year, which is enough trees to fill up New York’s Central Park 1,162 times!

At Least It’s Cost Effective, Right?

But people are at least saving money by using toilet paper, right? Ehhhh, not so fast. The truth is a bidet toilet seat costs less than $30/year in water and electricity costs, and one year’s worth of toilet paper for a family of four costs $160 (and that’s when you are buying in bulk)! It doesn’t take long for a bidet seat to pay itself off, especially if you have regular issues of too-much-toilet-paper needing a plumber to take care of your toilet.Switching will also make it trivial to give up wet-wipes, which are notorious for not being as flushable as they claim.

Not only are bidets better for the environment, they’re better for your health and your wallet. Making a change and joining the BidetMate family is a great way to find the exact model that caters to your unique needs while solving a massive problem in global sustainability.

Check out our available bidet seats and toilets and make the change today!