Why using recycled toilet paper is dangerous to your health, and three green, nontoxic and sustainable alternatives to consider instead.
Like many of you good little girls and boys out there trying to be responsible citizens of Planet Earth, I bought recycled toilet paper in an attempt to be more environmentally conscious.
Alas.
This method of going green in the bathroom is not such a good idea after all. In fact, it is a most decidedly BAD idea.
Green does not necessarily mean healthy!
Recycled Toilet Paper is Toxic
Two studies published in Environmental Science & Technology have shown that BPA and cousin chemical BPS used in “BPA free products” but also highly estrogenic in nature, are much more pervasive in our common, everyday products than we could have imagined.
Yeah, that BPA free stuff is no better and will mess up your hormones just as much. But then, you sensed that was the case already didn’t you? I know I did.
The term “safe chemical” is kind of an oxymoron. If a product contains chemicals, just assume they are toxic unless proven otherwise.
How does all this relate to recycled toilet paper?
Hormone Disruptors in Recycled Paper
These two studies involved examination of hundreds of samples of paper from everyday items such as toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, newspapers, magazines, tickets, and even business cards.
Most of the paper samples tested contained the hormone disruptors BPA, BPS or BOTH.
How and why the paper was so contaminated is a question that requires further study to ascertain.
But for now, the key is to avoid thermal paper as much as possible. This stuff is the worst offender perhaps because it is often recycled and may somehow become contaminated during the reclamation process.
The ink itself may also be a culprit in the overall toxicity of recycled toilet paper.
In fact, it is best to avoid touching all recycled paper period! Sister chemicals BPA and BPS absorb very readily through the skin.
You don’t have to eat it to have them enter your bloodstream.
If your job involves handling thermal paper receipts, for example, best to wear gloves. And, if you can turn down receipts and instead rely on an online itemization of your expenditures, that would be a good step as well.
TP Used for Thin Skin Near Reproductive Areas
As for your backside, opt for toilet paper made from virgin pulp or better still, bamboo toilet paper.
This is an especially important area to protect from BPA and BPS as the skin in these areas is thin and delicate.
This means that the chemicals can more easily enter the bloodstream with very close proximity to the reproductive organs.
Green AND Safe Options to Toilet Paper
If you don’t want to change habits right now, at least switch to bamboo toilet paper (I suggest this brand). It is nontoxic and sustainably produced.
If you really want to go green with your toilet habits, skip the toilet paper entirely and invest in a bidet attachment for your toilet. They are very reasonably priced and easy to install.
If this European method of saving trees doesn’t work for you, your other option is to go the reusable TP cloths route.
Any of these approaches makes for a sanitary, nontoxic and sustainable bathroom experience.
Reference
(1) Bottom Line Publications, Toxic Toilet Paper? You Got It
Time to get a beday.
well I use regular toilet paper, but not much of it. As a Muslim woman, I regularly use water to clean myself (with my left hand :)) after going to the bathroom. It allows much more of the filth to be removed. You don’t have to go and get a bidet, although you can do that if you want. Many Muslims just keep a watering can/water bottle on the floor next to the toilet and fill it up before going to the bathroom and we use it to clean ourselves and we also use toilet paper, but because of the water, we use much less. then we wash our hands thoroughly! If you don’t want to use tp, clean yourself with water (and maybe some gentle soap if you want) and you can towel dry. 😛
I agree. Most Muslims I know, including my family, have never gotten a UTI in their life.
We use “family cloth”. I bought wash clothes at the dollar store for 50 cents a piece. We picked one color different from anything else we have so that we never mix them up with any of our other wash cloths. We keep them in a wet bag that hangs where the toilet paper roll should be. We have very hot water and I don’t worry about pathogens. Our cloth diapers always come out clean as well. Honestly, a bidet isn’t even really necessary. You get less “mess” on the cloth than you would if you use cloth wipes with cloth diapers. It’s not like you sit in your “mess”. A quick cold rinse before washing and then wash on hot with detergent.
For several years, at my gynecologist’s suggestion I have used a toilet seat bidet which brings my TP use to about nil. There are several brands: the Toto Washlet is the best known but I have an obscure Korean brand that cost about $100 on ebay. Instead of using paper, I turn on a small stream that washes my nether regions with no BPA or other endnocrine disruptors. We are a lot cleaner, can even space out showers in lieu of a pit wash and face wash, and less water is used than in the manufacture of toilet paper. You can get warm water or a reservoir that brings water to room temperature or cold. I have also seen a kitchen spray hose attached at the side of the toilet with a T joint, for around $10. Frankly I hate traveling without it.
I take a peri-bottle when I travel 🙂
Thanks for sharing. Did not know..now wondering if it is my regular kind as well…
thinking i will just cut up old shirts and go rhe cloth route….geeeeezzzzz! we cannot win!
What to do? Most toilet paper these days are manufactured using recycled post consumer content, they just don’t advertise it. Additionally, most conventional manufacturers use chlorine as a bleach which poses a whole bunch of other issues for body absorption via delicate body parts, including chemical exposure to dioxins. Wish I had a good answer…
Great article. I’m not surprised though. Once I learned “food” manufacturers were putting poison in their products for children to consume I knew nothing those types of corp.’s offered could be trusted.
The region I live in grows the cottonwood hybrids used for paper products. Our land is pretty flat with “forests” of these trees as far as you can see, growing in perfect rows. I always thought this was a great idea until researching it a little. Now I find out these trees are GM and render other crops grown close to them sterile. We just can’t win!
Another round up ready crop: http://www.tappi.org/Downloads/Journal-Articles/TAPPI-JOURNAL/2000/January/UNTITLED—00Jan164pdf.aspx
Looks like it’s time for a bidet.
“The term “safe chemical” is kind of an oxymoron so if something uses chemicals, just assume they are toxic unless proven otherwise.”
This is meant as some sort of elaborate joke, right? Salt is chemicals. Water is chemicals. “Natural” soaps are made from wood-based lye (sodium hydroxide) and animal tallow. The glue prehistoric man used to attach stone points to spear shafts is a monomer chain derived from wood sap that can, GASP!, irritate some people’s skin. Any paper, or cloth, is treated with several chemicals to bleach, stabilize, clean, and dye it. If you’re seriously concerned about exposure to chemicals, there is always the deep vacuum of intergalactic space, but you run the risk of slamming into a particle or two hydrogen now and then, so the only truly safe alternative is to just GET OVER IT.
And speaking of intergalacitc space and toilet paper – what did Spock find in the Enterprise bathroom?
The Captain’s log! I had a late night 🙁
Thank you for pointing that out! This is a huge beef of mine. I used to point it out all the time, but no one seems to care. I brought it up in another article of Sarah’s recently, and several people defended the fact that “natural” things were not chemicals.
Exactly. That’s the line where I stopped reading and came down to the comments. There are far more safe chemicals than unsafe ones… 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with a safe chemical that’s sometimes called salt water.
I understand this beef, along with the beef that those chemicals which ARE harmful to us are harmful in differing ways, to differing degrees.
That said, I tend to see that the preponderance of evidence shows unawareness of how ubiquitous — and how many different — chemicals are in everything.
I also find it logical that there could be issues with many of the manmade substances that have emerged in that last decades.
The testing for human health effects is often very short with these items. 90 days? A few months? Rarely 1-3 years. Sometimes not at all, depending on field.
It’s entirely plausible that many of these contribute to long-term health problems, especially given that they’re not often developed with long-term human health in mind, but rather efficacy for some other use: often industrial or cosmetic.
And it’s entirely plausible, given the general increase of things like chronic and autoimmune illnesses in developed areas, that these are a “developed area” factor.
Other comments have pointed out the other chemicals in toilet paper, like dioxin and chlorine bleach.
I think that people tend to have a bad risk-analysis with these new products. There is certainly a lot of benefit (or sometimes just perceived convenience) to many of these modern things (I suspect, say, more wide and cheap availability of paper to have contributed to how we approach knowledge now)… but it’s honestly more likely that these substances will end up being harmful somehow, especially in the long term.
We are only 1-2 generations into having such an exponential growth in manmade chemicals — it’s entirely plausible that the long-term effects could be uncertain, and there is certainly a rise in chronic health issues (or other things like developmental delays & mental “illnesses” (issues? malfunctions?) )
That said, I think that some people use “chemical” in a more aware, colloquial capacity to mean “a chemical toxic to man,” usually with some form of “not something humans have evolved being exposed to”.
So, I think there’s so degree of colloquial use.
… even putting aside the preponderance of risk being on the explosion of new chemicals that we have not evolved with,
…and issues of inaccurate assessments of whether common levels contribute to quality-of-life/health issues…
…and issues of a wide distribution of sensitivity and resilience among the population (how resilient were the subjects upon which the guidelines were based? Is the “average” level of BPA detrimental to health?)
…and issues of understanding pathways of effect on human health (due to a number of things — undiscovered pathways, poorly constructed studies, poor theory, ongoing development of higher threshholds of sensitivity in our science…)
The whole conversation of how and whether and how much [chemicals new to man] adversely impact the population (or just a % of it) … and then what to do about that … is actually a really complex one. (“new” being within the last 50-200-ish years of industrialization, but mostly within the last …70?)