Customers stock up on toilet paper at a Target store in Orlando, Florida in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. March 19, 2020.
- Toilet paper consumption is unsustainable and requires a tremendous amount of resources to produce.
- Americans use the most toilet paper in the world and have been hoarding it due to coronavirus.
- Alternatives to toilet paper are gaining more popularity with the public.
A surprising byproduct of the coronavirus pandemic has been its effect on the availability of toilet paper. Americans and shoppers across the globe have vacuumed supermarket shelves, stockpiling toilet paper and other paper products with pre-apocalyptic urgency. The resulting shortage places focus on toilet paper and the wastefulness involved in its production and disposal.
The numbers about toilet paper consumption are staggering. Around the world, the equivalent of 270,000 trees are flushed down the toilet or find their way into landfills every day. About 10% of that — the equivalent of 27,000 trees would be from toilet paper. That's about 15 million per year. Per person, this adds up to about 384 trees over a lifetime.
Americans consume the most toilet paper in the world, using up about 34 million rolls per day. Annually, this amounts to about 36.5 billion rolls. Impressive numbers to say the least. Another important fact to consider is that as much as 70% of the world does not use toilet paper, so obviously there are other solutions.
The Scientific American reported it takes about 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce all that toilet paper for Americans and 253,000 tons of chlorine to bleach it. In terms of electricity, the manufacturing requires about 17.3 terawatts of electricity annually.
To break this down further, it takes up to 37 gallons of water to make a single roll of toilet paper. That same single roll of TP also requires 1.3 kilowatt/hours (KWh) of electricity and 1.5 pounds of wood to make.
This chart from Statista highlights 2018 data on toilet consumption around the world, with North America coming in decidedly ahead of other parts of the world.
In terms of per-country consumption, Germany, UK and Japan also use up a lot of toilet paper every year as this chart shows --
While Americans clearly love toilet paper, there's no big danger of it truly running out any time soon, say the experts. The shortages we've all experienced are related to a spike in demand, but the overall pipeline is not affected and will continue to churn out the precious product.
What to do instead of toilet paper?
Install a bidet. You knew this option was coming. In light of the toilet paper shortages, Americans are actually showing more interest in adopting them, with bidet sales growing eight times. There are a number of great sustainable bidet companies like Tushy you can turn to. They also grow their toilet paper from bamboo and utilize no plastic wrapping. Bamboo is rapidly renewable and compared to regular trees, absorbs about 30% less carbon dioxide.
While bidets also incur some environmental costs from the use of water, on the whole they are significantly less resource-hungry and waste-producing than the process of making toilet paper. A bidet uses up about one eighth of a gallon of water to clean and flush.
Here are some more bidets ideas.
A few snapshots of the toilet paper crunch around the world:
A senior citizen gets the last pack of toilet rolls at Sainsbury's Supermarket on March 19, 2020 in Northwich, United Kingdom.
Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Women buy toilet paper from tradesman in street market by the City Wall, Xian, China. March 14, 2020.
Photo by Tim Graham/Getty Images
Customers purchase toilet paper at a Target store in Orlando, FL during the panic shopping. March, 2020.
Credit: Paul Hennessy / Echoes Wire/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
As part of a new exhibition, the worlds of culture and technology collide, bringing sound to the colors of abstract art pioneer Wassily Kandinsky.
Kandinsky had synesthesia, where looking at colors and shapes causes some with the condition to hear associated sounds. With the help of machine learning, virtual visitors to the Sounds Like Kandinsky exhibition, a partnership project by Centre Pompidou in Paris and Google Arts & Culture, can have an aural experience of his art.
An eye for music
Kandinsky's synesthesia is thought to have heavily influenced his painting. Seeing yellow summoned up trumpets, evoking emotions like cheekiness; reds produced violins portraying restlessness; while organs representing heavenliness he associated with blues, according to the exhibition notes.
Virtual visitors are invited to take part in an experiment called Play a Kandinsky, which allows them to see and hear the world through the artist's eyes.
Kandinsky's synesthesia is thought to have heavily influenced his 1925 painting Yellow, Red, Blue.Image: Guillaume Piolle/Wikimedia Commons
In 1925, the artist's masterpiece, "Yellow, Red, Blue", broke new ground in the world of abstract art, guiding the viewer from left to right with shifting shapes and shades. Almost a century after it was painted, Google's interactive tool lets visitors click different parts of the artwork to journey through the artist's description of the colors, associated sounds and moods that inspired the work.
But Google's new toy is not the only tool developed to enhance the artistic experience.
Artist Neil Harbisson has developed an artificial way to emulate Kandinsky by turning colors into sounds. He has a rare form of color blindness and sees the world in greyscale. But a smart antenna attached to his head translates dominant colors into musical notes, creating a real-world soundtrack of what's in front of him. The invention could open up a new world for people who are color blind.
Reprinted with permission of the World Economic Forum. Read the original article.
The United States of America, land of the free, is home to 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. The cost of having so many people in the penal system adds up to $80 billion per year, more than three times the budget for NASA. This massive system exploded in size relatively recently, with the prison population increasing by six-fold in the last four decades.
Ten percent of these prisoners are kept in private prisons, which are owned and operated for the sake of profit by contractors. In theory, these operations cost less than public prisons and jails, and states can save money by contracting them to incarcerate people. They have a long history in the United States and are used in many other countries as well.
However, despite the pervasiveness of private contractors in the American prison system, there is not much research into how well they live up to their promise to provide similar services at a lower cost to the state. The little research that is available often encounters difficulties in trying to compare the costs and benefits of facilities with vastly different operations and occasionally produces results suggesting there are few benefits to privatization.
A new study by Dr. Anita Mukherjee and published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy joins the debate with a robust consideration of the costs and benefits of private prisons. Its findings suggest that some private prisons keep people incarcerated longer and save less money than advertised.
Mississippi Blues
The study focuses on prisons in Mississippi. Despite its comparatively high rate of incarceration, Mississippi's prison system is very similar to that of other states that also use private prisons. Demographically, its system is representative of the rest of the U.S. prison system, and its inmates are sentenced for similar amounts of time.
The state attempts to get the most out of its privatization efforts, as a 1994 law requires all contracts for private prisons in Mississippi to provide at least a 10 percent cost savings over public prisons while providing similar services. As a result, the state seeks to maximize its savings by sending prisoners to private institutions first if space if available.
While public and private prisons in Mississippi are quite similar, there are a few differences that allow for the possibility of cost savings by private operators — not the least of which is that the guards are paid 30 percent less and have fewer benefits than their publicly employed counterparts.
The results of privatization
The graph depicts the likelihood of release for public (dotted line) vs. private (solid line) prison inmates. At every level of time served, public prisoners were more likely to be released than private prisoners.Dr. Anita Mukherjee
The study relied on administrative records of the Mississippi prison system between 1996 and 2013. The data included information on prisoner demographics, the crimes committed, sentence lengths, time served, infractions while incarcerated, and prisoner relocation while in the system, including between public and private jails. For this study, the sample examined was limited to those serving between one and six years and those who served at least a quarter of their sentence. This created a primary sample of 26,563 bookings.
Analysis revealed that prisoners in private prisons were behind bars for four to seven percent longer than those in public prisons, which translates to roughly 85 to 90 extra days per prisoner. This is, in part, because those in private prison serve a greater portion of their sentences (73 percent) than those in public institutions (70 percent).
This in turn might be due to the much higher infraction rate in private prisons compared to public ones. While only 18 percent of prisoners in a public prison commit an infraction, such as disobeying a guard or possessing contraband, the number jumps to 46 percent in a private prison. Infractions can reduce the probability of early release or cause time to be added to a sentence.
It's unclear why there are so many more infractions in private prisons. Dr. Mukherjee suggests it could be the result of "harsher prison conditions in private prisons," better monitoring techniques, incentives to report more of them to the state before contract renewals, or even a lackadaisical attitude on the part of public prison employees.
What does all this cost Mississippi?
The extra time served eats 48 percent of the cost savings of keeping prisoners in a private facility. For example, it costs about $135,000 to house a prisoner in a private prison for three years and $150,000 in the public system. But longer stays in private prisons reduce the savings from $15,000 to only $7,800.
As Dr. Mukherjee remarks, this cost is also just the finance. Some things are a little harder to measure:
"There are, of course, other costs that are difficult to quantify — e.g., the cost of injustice to society (if private prison inmates systematically serve more time), the inmate's individual value of freedom, and impacts of the additional incarceration on future employment. Abrams and Rohlfs (2011) estimates a prisoner's value of freedom for 90 days at about $1,100 using experimental variation in bail setting. Mueller-Smith (2017) estimates that 90 days of marginal incarceration costs about $15,000 in reduced wages and increased reliance on welfare. If these social costs were to exceed $7,800 in the example stated, private prisons would no longer offer a bargain in terms of welfare-adjusted cost savings."
It is possible that the extra time in jail provides benefits that counter these costs, such as a reduced recidivism rate, but this proved difficult to determine. Though it was not statistically significant, there was some evidence that the added time actually increased the rate of recidivism. If that's true, then private prisons could be counterproductive.
