One of the many reasons we started Bumguns was the realisation that they can significantly reduce our environmental impact and save us money, in comparison to our current social norm, using toilet paper. We aren’t suggesting to eradicate toilet paper overnight, but we are suggesting that using a Bumgun to do the majority of the cleaning work is better for your bum, your pocket and the planet. Let's put it this way, If you got some poo on your cheek and wiped it off with toilet paper would your cheek be clean? Most would say, not until washed with water at the very least. So why do we treat our rear cheeks differently?
There are lots of different figures available on how much toilet paper people use globally and therefore how much it can cost an individual financially and how much it can cost the earth. We have taken a spread of the figures for global TP useage and used median figures to get a better understanding of the true environmental and economic impact of toilet paper for the individual and the earth.
How much toilet paper do we use?
Well this can depend on toilet habits and an individuals needs. However, A Bumgun competitor says we use 90 sheets of TP a day, Cottonelle says we use 35 sheets a day and Bamboi says it can be anything from 50-100 sheets a day. How many sheets do you use a day? Going forward we will take the conservative estimate of 45 sheets per day per person to calculate the sats you see below.
Lets put toilet paper use into some global perspective…
22 billion km of TP is used globally each year. To put that in perspective, The Voyager 1 has been traveling away from earth at 61,000km/h (17km a second) for 44 years and is now about 22 billion km away.
42 million tonnes of TP is used each year. The great pyramid of Giza is about 6 million tonnes, so it is the equivalent weight of 7 of these pyramids.
The production and creation of toilet paper is environmentally taxing it requires terra watts of electricity to process and transport the toilet paper. The production often uses chlorine and toxic chemicals such per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are known as "forever chemicals" because they don't break down in water. Once the toilet paper has been flushed it can also be an insoluble pollutant that's difficult to treat in wastewater facilities. This can lead to high treatment costs and energy use.
In order to make the toilet paper 712 million trees are cut down each year, that is the equivalent of deforestation of 1/5th of the of trees in the uk, every year. Furthermore 1165 million tonnes of water is used every year in the process. Let’s scale this up from domestic figures, it takes 35 litres of water to produce one normal roll of toilet paper. Say each person uses 48 loo rolls per year, 35 ltrs X 48 rolls = 1680 ltrs per year. In the context of the whole UK population 68.3 million people x 1680 ltrs = 114 Billion Ltrs of water used on toilet paper alone. This is the equivalent volume of 45,696 Olympic size swimming pools.
In comparison to using a Bumgun, we understand there is the initial resource extraction for the object, the manufacture and the transport to location. However once installed it can be used 500000 times, therefore if it is used 3 times a day it should last 400 years, or for a household of 4, 100 years. The Bumgun also utilises a pre existing resource, pressurised water, in your house. With a Bumgun you roughly use 568ml of water to thoroughly clean your underside. If you use a Bumgun 3 times a day it equates to 1.7 ltrs, over the course of a year this is 620 ltrs of water. This is 3x less water consumption when compared to using toilet paper. Furthermore as you’re using water there is less contamination in our sewage system, which if adopted collectively, will significantly reduce tax payers money being spend on energy intensive sewage treatment works.
Let’s look at the financial impact, of toilet paper. Going with a normal toilet paper brand, one will spend £50 per year on toilet paper. Over a lifetime this will come to £3,100, say you have a household of 4 this adds up to £12,400. Within 4 months of buying a Bumgun it has paid for itself.
But the bottom line, despite the impacts, you can’t put a price on actually washing your behind, rather than wiping and getting off the toilet clean!
Some helpful links:
Environmental Paper Network Paper Calculator Version 4.0.
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