by Ryan Reed
If you’re a big fan of the TV series comedy, Seinfeld, you likely remember the scene where Elaine finds herself in a bathroom stall with no toilet paper. Awkwardly, she asks the lady in the next stall the infamous line in the title above. The hilarious part was that the lady could not, despite Elaine’s pleading, and Elaine would later recount the interaction to Jerry with incredulous rage.
All jokes aside, toilet paper is perhaps the most ubiquitous of all the items one could expect to see in the bathroom (unless you find yourself in Elaine’s unfortunate situation), and we even have a national day (August 26) dedicated to the product. If you ever doubted its significance to Americans, I might remind you of the mass hoarding of it and the associated shortage during the Covid-19 days.
With Americans reportedly using, on average, 141 rolls per year, one gets a sense of just how important toilet paper really is to us. Assuming a reasonable average of 100 feet per unrolled tube, that means that we use about three miles a year per person. That length applied over the entire US population equates to over 4,000 trips to the moon or a little over a one-way trip to Saturn, per year. Yes, we Americans use roughly the length of a trip to Saturn in toilet paper every year.
How this topic intersects nicely with forestry, of course, is that most toilet paper is a forest product. A reported 30 million trees are cut annually to provide the raw material to make the final product, just to feed American demand. Assuming about 1,000 trees per acre (a practical number harvested in a commercial pulpwood stand), that means we would need to clear cut a forest the size of all the combined tracts of Weiser State Forest, or about 15 percent more than the entire acreage of Gallitzin State Forest.
As it turns out, “doing your business” is big business for the global toilet paper industry, raking in an estimated 67 billion dollars annually, 10.7 billion going to the US. Pennsylvania forests contribute a decidedly small share since the pulpwood most favored for toilet paper production comes from softwoods, not our predominant hardwoods.
Some say that toilet time is a great time to think, and I’ve heard many jokes about “solving the world’s problems” while “on the throne”. I think most of us are just glad we don’t need someone to “spare a square” very often.