I Want Scratchy Toilet Paper!

You know, I hate to interrupt you all in the middle of your searches for “boobs,” “breasts,” “strippers,” “Nadya Suleman,” and Wife Swap, but there’s something more important on tap here.

I’ve just received notice that Americans’ passion for soft toilet paper is killing precious Canadian trees!

Yes, yes, I always knew that toilet paper was made from trees, just as I knew that hamburger is generally made from cows, except in India, where they don’t always make such a fuss over toilet paper, incidentally.

But surely toilet paper isn’t made from the GOOD trees–the pretty ones!? I mean, they make it out of the scraggly, disgusting scrap wood, don’t they?

They don’t.

See that baby tree there? It’s gonna DIE unless you start wiping with the stuff Europeans use, the stuff that feels like newspaper.

We’re BABY TREE MURDERERS. Every time we wipe.

Which, for some of us, is apparently a lot.

Americans spend $4.8 BILLION on toilet paper each year, and we only want the cushy stuff, which is mopping up a larger market share every second. Unfortunately, the very thing that makes toilet paper soooooo soft down there is the lovely quality of the wood fiber of live trees that makes such soft pulp. Add a bunch of bleach to make it white (cause you wouldn’t want to wipe with, like, BROWN paper!) and a disgusting, toxic chemical fragrance, and voilà! You have a roll of American-style toilet paper, which the average Joe flushes down at the rate of 24 a year.

Here’s some math: 300,000,000 Americans x 24 rolls per American per year = 7,200,000,000 rolls. At 1,000 rolls per tree, that’s…7.2 million trees per year. Just for toilet paper!

That’s what I want. Starting today, I will no longer buy Big’n’Soft, Precious Butt, Tender Tushy, Delicate Partz, Cotton Ass, and any other brand of toilet tissue that’s marketed as being “extra soft.” Only recycled toilet tissue for me, from now on. Toilet tissue is crap anyway. Bring back the bidet!

“Toilet paper – and no baby wipes – in the bathroom. If they’re using dry paper, they aren’t washing all of themselves. It’s just unclean. So if I go in a woman’s house and see the toilet paper there, I’ll explain this. And if she doesn’t make the adjustment to baby wipes, I’ll know she’s not completely clean.”
–Terrence Howard, actor and likely bidet fan, speaking in an Elle interview, August 1, 2007.

So he knows about the baby trees too!

Notes:

I like Terrence Howard.

Greenpeace and Greenpeace Canada both have guides to recycled paper products.

Install a bidet kit!