Butt Sanitation: Water or Paper Rolls?

Bidets use green technology and provide increased cleanliness.

It is not a topic that finds place in a polite conversation, but figures in every civilized person’s everyday life. It affects you the moment you step out of familiar environs of your home and particularly, your country. I am talking of cleaning your butts after defecation. An icky, yucky job indeed, but it’s still yours; so you better brace yourself.

Each year, U.S. uses an estimated 36.5 billions rolls of toilet paper that involves cutting of 15 million trees, besides an annual 17.3 terawatts of electricity and energy needed for packaging and transportation, 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of chlorine for bleaching purposes.

Toilet paper also constitutes a significant load on the city sewer systems, and water treatment plants. It is also often responsible for clogged pipes.

Indians have always considered water the best purificator and used it for personal hygiene. Lavatories in my mother’s native village in those days were located away from the house and consisted of sanitary pits near which would be kept a pile of earth and dry leaves. Every body was expected to carry a small bucket of water inside to clean oneself and cover their tracks with mud and dry leaves after they used the pit.

Olden Toilets; Source

Once the pits were full, the makeshift roof and door would shift to the next newly dug pit. The old pit would be left as-is for some weeks, after which the village farmers would remove the earth and use it to fertilize their fields.
More pertinent to the topic, how did people clean themselves after the elimination act? They would wash their private parts in the privacy of the lavatories with water, and later wash their feet and hands with soap near the well before entering the main house.

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