DISPOSABLES
DON’T FORGET THE TOILET PAPER
Toilet paper is rarely at the forefront of our minds, but we are quick to notice when it is lacking. Jamie Wright of Tork manufacturer SCA delves into the history of the humble loo roll, and considers the importance of this essential consumable in today’s society.
The humble toilet roll is an afterthought on most of our grocery shopping lists. It is also one of the last things that facilities managers consider when ordering supplies for their buildings.
Yet when we run out of toilet paper, chaos ensues. When a 16-year-old youth travelling from London to Glasgow on a Virgin train recently discovered there was no toilet paper in the on-board washroom, he immediately tweeted it and it became an international news story.
This was partly due to the reaction of the train line managers, of course, who monitored the tweet and ensured that the boy was supplied with a loo roll within minutes.
Toilet paper has also been in the news in Venezuela. After years of recession, the country had become accustomed to shortages of basic items such as medicines, milk and sugar. But
56 | Tomorrow’s Cleaning February 2016
in 2013, the scarcity of toilet rolls caused such alarm that consumers panic-bought until supplies ran out and the government had to import 50 million extra rolls. Shortages continue and Venezuela now has a black market for toilet paper.
In Japan, meanwhile, sales of toilet rolls have increased dramatically over recent years despite a steady decline in the country’s population. This is a nation that knows what it is like to do without: toilet paper disappeared from the supermarket shelves altogether following the 2011 earthquake.
A government directive urged Japanese people to stock up on the commodity since more than 40% of the nation’s toilet paper supply comes from a high-risk earthquake zone. Since then sales have spiked and are still rising – and this in a country where 70% of households have a toilet with a built-in bidet function.
Toilet paper was also considered to be so important to the success of the New York Jets American football team last autumn that they brought 350 rolls with them when playing in the NFL International Series games at Wembley. They spurned our British paper, claiming it was ‘very thin because their plumbing isn’t as good’.
So most of us in the western world regard toilet paper to be one of life’s essentials. But believe it or not, it has only been around for little over 150 years.
Before that a common alternative was the daily newspaper cut into sheets and threaded on to a piece of string. But paper itself is a relatively new invention and in the more distant past, people tended to use whatever came to hand.
Vikings in Britain used sheep’s wool for example, while Americans
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