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Toilet Talk

Frobush said:
Free repairs to flammable toilets.

Japan's leading toilet manufacturer Toto is offering free repairs to 180,000 toilets after some of them caught fire.
There have been three incidents of the electric bidet accessory in Toto's Z series catching fire.

"Fortunately nobody was using the toilets when the fire broke out and there were no injuries," a company spokesman said.

"The fire would have been just under your buttocks," she added.

Toto is a pioneer of high-tech toilets with built-in bidets, which are popular in Japan.

The Z series features a pulsating massage spray, a power dryer, a "tornado wash" flush, and a lid that opens and closes automatically.

It is not sold outside Japan.

The offending loos were all manufactured between May 1996 and December 2001.
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Link
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But aren't toilets with a pulsating massage spray and a tornado wash fairly hazardous anyway (whether they catch fire or not). I mean surely its just asking the customers to use the toilets in ways which do not comply with the manufacturers instructions and would be liable to cause injury?
 
My son was in Japan a couple of weeks back and he very much enjoyed the Japanese lavatorial experience.

I use the term 'lavatorial' advisedly here, as there were indeed cleaning, drying, massage and perfuming functions built into the elimination experience. 8)

Sounds a little over-the-top to me but he loved it and would like to bring one over here.
 
Sheesh! trust the Japanese to turn waste disposal into an Experience

They should sell that to the scatalogical Americans
 
Toilet fumes force Flybe emergency landing
By David Millward
Last Updated: 9:03PM BST 13/06/2008

A pilot was forced to make an emergency landing after the flight crew were overcome by fumes from the aircraft lavatory.
The incident took place on a Flybe BAe 146 which was being flown from Birmingham to Belfast last September.

According to the Air Accident Investigation Branch the 52-year old pilot complained of feeling light headed shortly after take-off.

Other members of the crew also complained that they felt "drunk" after the fumes started seeping into the body of the aircraft and cockpit.

All five donned gasmasks. There were no passengers on board at the time.

The AAIB report said: "The commander described feeling a sensation in the aircraft like being drunk. He felt it was difficult to concentrate and he felt 'fuzzy.' "The commander felt similar to being inebriated and that he found it difficult to concentrate. The co-pilot initially felt she had a reduced capacity to fly the aircraft but this feeling quickly passed.

"One cabin crew member felt light-headed, sick and distressed. The other cabin crew member felt tired and sick. "The origin of the fumes was traced to the forward toilet and was probably due to a chemical in the toilet."

It concluded that problem was caused by too much formaldehyde being used to clean the lavatory during maintenance at Exeter airport.

A spokesman for the airline said that cleaners had "overdosed" the lavatory.

He added: "The CAAs findings confirm the fact that chemicals used to clean an onboard toilet had resulted in the crew suspecting that the cabin air quality had been compromised. "

Earlier this year the Government announced that it would carry out an investigation of cabin air amid reports that one in 2,000 flights could be exposed to toxins in cabin air.

The study will entail researchers flying on 100 passenger and cargo aircraft with monitoring devices to see what is in the cabin air.

But this will deal with particles feeding into the air system from the engines, which led to complaints from passengers and pilots of nausea, dissiness and other health problems.

There were 116 separate reports of contaminated air sent to the Civil Aviation Authority last year.

This affected a number of aircraft including the Boeing 757, Airbus 319 and BAe 146.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... nding.html
 
Tom Jones tape recorded in lavatory to be auctioned
Last Updated: 7:44AM BST 04/07/2008

A rare recording of singer Tom Jones singing in a lavatory is to go under the hammer at Christie's.
The reel-to-reel tape, made two years before Jones's breakthrough hit It's not Unusual is his earliest-known recording.

It has been put up for sale in a rock and pop memorabilia sale.

The four unreleased tracks were recorded in the lavatories at the YMCA in Tom's home town of Pontypridd, South Wales, before he hit the big time.

A spokeswoman for Christie's said: "These recordings have genuine historical significance as they mark the birth of the Tom Jones phenomenon."

The recordings are from 1962, when he was fronting a rock and roll band called The Senators and performed under the name Tommy Scott.

He was approached by two local songwriters who were putting together a demo of their tracks.

They were recorded by a TV sound man on an eight-track portable studio.

The sound man, who wants to remain anonymous, is now selling the tape.

The recording is expected to fetch £2,000 - £3,000 in next week's auction.

Liz Williams, president of the Pontypridd YMCA, added: "Tom began his singing career here and apparently he often used to sing in the toilets.

"When it came to the recording, he wanted to use the toilets because he believed they had the best acoustics in the building."

The toilets at the YMCA building in Taff Street were demolished in 1997.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... ioned.html
 
Indian poor paid a penny to spend a penny
By Rahul Bedi in New Delhi
Last Updated: 1:13AM BST 07/07/2008

Residents in southern India are earning a penny every time they spend one at public lavatories in an effort to clean up the streets.
Scores of people queue every day in Musiri, a town in Tamil Nadu, to be paid 10 paise (around 0.8 pence) for each visit. The trips are entered on a “user card” and totalled up once a month, usually earning about 50p.

The government backed scheme – organised by the Society for Community Organisation and People’s Education – is a response to the common practice of Indians relieving themselves in the open, as sanitation still eludes millions.

“Many of us began using toilets for urination only after these ecologically friendly toilets were constructed in the area” said S Rajasekaran, a local resident.

And the waste does not go to waste – local authorities are also collecting 250 litres of urine every day to be used as a crop fertiliser, an official from the state’s agricultural university said.


According to experts at the World Toilet Summit in Delhi earlier this year around 2.6 billion people – over 40 percent of the world’s population – do not have access to proper toilets; half of them live in India and China.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... penny.html
 
as sanitation still eludes millions.
Click to expand...

It may be true, but its a delightful turn of phrase.

(And I know people who want to go back to little huts down the bottom of the garden for ecological purposes...Ho hum.)
 
'De-gendered' toilets spark row

A row has broken out at the University of Manchester after its students' union toilets were "de-gendered".

Temporary signs have made the "ladies" simply "toilets", while the "gents" have become "toilets with urinals". :shock:

The changes are in response to an unspecified number of complaints from trans students who are uncomfortable using the men's toilets.

A university newspaper criticised the move but the student union said it was needed to tackle transphobia.

There are no figures on the number of transsexual and transgender students believed to be among the university's population of more than 35,000 students.

The students' union welfare office declined to reveal the number of complaints, but said it was an important issue.

Welfare officer Jennie Killip told the BBC: "If you were born female, still present quite feminine, but define as a man you should be able to go into the men's toilets - if that's how you define.

"You don't necessarily have had to have gender reassignment surgery, but you could just define yourself as a man, feel very masculine in yourself, feel that in fact being a woman is not who you are."

Asked about the change, some female students questioned the move.

One said: "Girls might not want to use the same toilets as boys, so then you just end up with people complaining about that - so you can't really win.

Another told the BBC: "I personally wouldn't want to be in the same toilet as a man."

The move prompted an editorial in campus newspaper Student Direct last week which criticised the new arrangements.

Newspaper spokeswoman Susannah Birkwood said: "The toilets have been provided for men who don't self identify as men and women who don't think of themselves as women.

"Whether or not this is political correctness gone mad.. because it certainly seems that way to some members of our student community."

Union officials have rejected the criticism and permanent signs for its first gender neutral toilets are being made.

Almost 60 people, including Ms Killip, have signed a letter to the student newspaper criticising the editorial.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manc ... 643175.stm
 
I dont want to know about this, I really dont.

<gets out shewee>

I was doing security at an Event once, Just one loo for the girls and four for the boys (the fact that this was between 300+ staff is of no concern)

If you dont like boys using the girls...use theirs and see how uncomfortable they get.

(the showers were mixed, to begin with. Its amazing how broadminded you can be if you need to)
 
rynner said:
'De-gendered' toilets spark row

A row has broken out at the University of Manchester after its students' union toilets were "de-gendered".

Temporary signs have made the "ladies" simply "toilets", while the "gents" have become "toilets with urinals". :shock:


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manc ... 643175.stm
Click to expand...

I remember there was a debate in the Student's Union at Manchester in 1973 or 1974, about whethet to desegregate the toilets...I can't remember whether the motion was was passed or not, but certainly it never happened and at that time was never likely to happen as someone claimed it was illegal. (I've no idea as to whether it was illegal, or if that was a get out by the Union oficers)

Thirty-five years later it happens...
 
i'm sure the girls at my college used the boys toilets on a fairly regular basis, when things got busy enough... cira mid to late 80s.

being a trans woman at the time was a pain in the ass... i did try to make sneaky visits to the mens at discrete moments, but the cubicles were often being hogged by gay men shagging, and when you did get one, you could usually count on some sports students to either kick the door in and run off, or lean over the top of the cubicle and spit on you :(

when i was in NYC, a lot of places there had unisex toilets, and no-one had a problem with it...
 
:lol:

Ok so here's my 2 cents:

I sympathise with peoples' desire to use toilets of the gender they feel they are, but the feelings of the other people in those toilets also have to be considered.
If a person identifies more with females than males, but looks like Russell Crowe, then using the ladies loo might make the women already in there a little uncomfortable.
Here's my idea: Using the disabled loo. Over here there's always a disabled loo available next to every female/male toilets and they're not gendered (probably because there's almost always only one). They're generally cleaner too.
 
...and just when you thought this story was already bizarre enough...

Second lottery win makes Kansas man flush
4 hours ago

GREAT BEND, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas man whose girlfriend was physically stuck to the toilet in their home wins $20,000 in the state Lottery, for the second time this year. Kory McFarren cashed in his winning $2 Bonus Crossword ticket in Great Bend Monday.

On July 29, the 37-year-old received six months of probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor mistreatment of a dependent adult.

McFarren called deputies in February to report that his girlfriend, Pam Babcock, had refused to come out of the bathroom for two years. Authorities found her stuck to the toilet.

Medical personnel estimated Babcock had been on the toilet for at least a month and said the seat had adhered to sores on her body. She was released from a Wichita hospital after several months of treatment.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/3jbmex
 
Man's arm trapped in train toilet

A passenger on a French train had to be rescued by firemen after having his arm sucked down the on-board toilet.

The 26-year-old victim was trapped when he tried to fish out his mobile phone, which had fallen into the toilet bowl, and fell foul of the suction system.

The high-speed TGV train had to stop for two hours while firemen cut through the train's pipework.

The man was carried away by emergency services, with the toilet still attached to his arm. :shock:

"He came out on a stretcher, with his hand still jammed in the toilet bowl, which they had to saw clean off," said Benoit Gigou, a witness to the man's plight.

The incident happened on Sunday evening, aboard a train travelling in western France between La Rochelle and Paris.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7693386.stm
 
they must have some suction on them to trap his hand like that.

had his phone fallen right to the back or something cause he must of had his hand a far way back?
 
Heres another take on the arm in loo.

Man Flushes Arm on Bullet Train

Frenchman gets arm stuck in speeding British loo, Internet laughs; but is the tale even scientifically possible?
By Stuart Fox Posted 10.27.2008 at 5:43 pm 1 Comment

What is the Sound of One Hand Flushing?: The world may never know.
Jack Handy once mused that if you drop your keys into molten lava, you should probably just let them go. Apparently, the same is true for cellphones dropped into toilets on trains. As first reported on the BBC, a 26-year old Frenchman got stuck up to the shoulder in a high speed TGV train toilet after dropping his cellphone into the bowl.

The BBC article claims the victim “fell afoul of the suction system,” but some think that claim is either incorrect or raises more questions than answers.

According to Charles Iliff, president of Iliff Aircraft Repair and Services, vacuum pump toilets (like the kind used on airplanes), don’t produce nearly enough suction to trap someone. And even if the suction did draw in the victim’s hand, the suction would stop shortly thereafter, allowing the victim to remove his arm.

In fact, most trains don’t use vacuum pump toilets at all. Rather, they use chemical recirculating toilets. These toilets flush the waste with a chemical solution, and can easily trap an arm. Instead of terminating in a small aperture like the vacuum pump toilets, the chemical recirculating toilets end in a metal flap.

“A flapper valve acts like a Chinese finger cuff,” said Jaret Gallagher of the 360 Corporation, which installs and repairs airline toilets, “so when the gentleman put his arm in the toilet it wouldn’t let him pull this arm out because the flap shut on his arm. In other words he could push his arm in further but not pull it out.”

Depending on the toilet in the train in question, either the BBC article slipped slightly, or there’s more to the story than meets the eye.

“In a vacuum pump system there’s no way in hell,” said Iliff, “sounds to me like he was hunting some insurance money instead of his cellphone. I don’t much buy this story.”

Regardless of what kind of toilet the victim got stuck in and why he ended up getting stuck, the deep thoughts of Jack Handy are as true today as when they were first spoken. Just let the phone go, because man, it’s gone.


http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2008 ... or-does-he
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Top 10 toilet horrors: Times readers kick up a stink

There’s always been one good outlet when life feels as if it’s going down the drain: write a letter to the The Times. To celebrate World Toilet Day, Ellen Przepasniak has scoured the Archive for ten particularly choice missives from readers who've got themselves in a lather about lavatories [click on the links to read the originals].

1. It seems railway lavatories have never been clean. In August 1886, a reader signing himself Viator Infelix shared his noisome experience aboard the Transcontinental Express. The stench of a lavatory in the stagnant August heat can’t have been pleasant, but the language is what makes this letter especially, shall we say, pungent: “The so-called lavatory, a pandemonium of stinks, some six feet square, with water-closet, urinal, and washing apparatus cheek by jowl, was apparently never cleansed; and neither in this one in the Pullman were there any antiseptics to deaden the sickening effluvium.”

The agents for the South Italian Railway Company wrote back vouching for “one of the best appointed and most comfortable services in Europe.” They claim: “The condition reported is entirely exceptional, and in contradiction to the testimony of hundreds of passengers by this service.”

Still the matter wasn’t dead. Another letter followed from the International Sleeping Car Company, with the ‘we’re doing the best we can’ excuse: “We may say that they are kept in as good a state of cleanliness as it is possible to do during a two days’ journey across hot and dusty countries and while in constant use.”

2. In August 1892 (what is it about lavatory complaints in August?), a woman wrote in complaining about the introduction of the penny-in-the-slot lock on women’s lavatories on trains. She calls it “not only a nuisance, but a most unfair imposition.”

Another writer calls for the abolition of the ineffective system. She claims to have seen people holding doors open for one another and five people going in at a time, and adds: "In more than one instance under my notice the non-possession of the necessary penny has caused inconvenience which amounts to the endangering of health."

A male sympathizer weighs in, calling the penny slot system a “scandalous development of a scandalous traffic,” and an “injustice to the weaker sex”.

3. When was the last time you heard complaints about queues and cleanliness at a festival? This summer, most likely. Things have not changed since the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908. Our correspondent wrote: “It is impossible even to estimate the mischief already wrought by these insanitary lavatories.”

Further scandal is exposed when this letter reveals that female exhibition workers were forced to pay for use of the lavatories, which were “erected without sufficient provision for the extra sewerage necessary for these thousands of employees and visitors.”

The Medical Officer of Health for Hammersmith defended the Public Health Committee’s planning ...

but he’s blown out of the water by “A representative at the Rest Room for Employees for the National Union of Women Workers”.

4. The polio scare in the 1950s provoked one reader to blame the lack of hand-washing facilities. He says: “There are few indications that public bodies in this country are doing anything at all to make hand-washing even possible in what are miscalled public lavatories.”

While another points the finger at British Railways lavatories for helping to spread the virus, both on the trains and in the stations.

5. “I find it a matter of serious public concern,” writes Mr John A. Turner under the heading, Closed at Night, “that a person anxious to attend to the calls of nature, but equally desirous to catch the last tube from Tottenham Court Road to the suburbs, discovers to his frustration that the Underground convenience is padlocked, and his only recourse to relief lies in the Soho backstreets.” We know you’re a rube, Mr Turner, but didn’t anyone ever tell you about the Tottenham Court Road gents? Believe us, whoever locked them was doing you a favour.

With admirable restraint (“the acute staffing position”), the chairman of the general services committee of Westminster City Council writes back with the locations of 24/7 public lavatories in Central London.

6. In 1981, Miss Susan Corbett celebrates the recent introduction of the warm-air hand drier to UK lavatories as a convenient way to dry one’s socks when coming in from the rain.

7. In 1874, the Medical Offer of Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for Girls wrote in to clarify an obituary for one of its doctors. Apparently, the girls were inadvertently infecting each other because of faulty plumbing linking the drinking and bathing water in one of the lavatories. During a post mortem examination of an infected girl, Dr Anstie cut his finger and “imbibed the poison which so unhappily proved fatal”.

8. A Lieutenant-Colonel recalls the unsanitary conditions on board HMS Malabar in 1889. There were three to a bed, cockroaches everywhere, animals being slaughtered on deck and “the lavatory and washing facilities were so inadequate that the men were covered with vermin”.

9. Be careful the next time someone tells you there’s dirt on your jacket and suggests you repair to the gents to wash it off. This retired colonel went to the lavatory, hung up his jacket on a peg and his pocketbook was promptly stolen.

The same thing happened, not once, but twice to Mr W. W. A. Elkin.

But clever Mr Mead foiled the lavatory pickpockets, who struck while he was visiting the Natural History Museum.

10. A “Spiritual Festival”, in Pilton, Somerset, lived up to the statement in its brochure that “man is fast ruining his environment,” according to the Chairman of Somerset County Council Health Committee, who wrote to point out that the “superior facilities” promised by the organisers turned out to be nothing more than “scaffolding poles suspended over poorly-screened 6ft deep trenches”.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/timesarc ... let-h.html
 
LaurenChurchill said:
What's a penny in a slot lock?
Click to expand...

They were locks on lavatory cubicle doors, in public lavatories which would only open after you inserted an old penny coin.

"I'm going to spent a penny" was a long standing jokey British euphemism for "I'm going to the lavatory"


Inflation means that where such things still exist you have to insert considerably more than a penny.
 
heck, they still have the penny-in-a-slot deals in some of the restaurants/retailers here in DC. The only way to get tokens (yes, potty tokens. I'll take a pic next time I'm downtown) is to purchase food or whatever.

S'posed to keep the homeless at bay... :roll:
 
Why are there so few public toilets for women?
There is a dire shortage of public loos for women and it is driving us potty
Fiona McWilliam

To those not already in the know, Wednesday is World Toilet Day, and for those of us who find ourselves all too frequently standing in line with our legs crossed - particularly those like me whose pelvic-floor muscles have been shot by repeated pregnancies - it seems a good time to address the question of why there are never enough women's loos.

Anywhere. From airports to theatres, supermarkets to pubs, football stadiums to the country's relatively few remaining public conveniences. James Brown said that it was a man's world; he was right when it comes to lavatory provision. “You can judge a nation by its toilets,” says Clara Greed, Professor of Inclusive Urban Planning at the University of the West of England, “and you can assess the true position of women in society by looking at its toilet queues.”

Britain led the world with the introduction of public conveniences, in 1852. Yet in recent years there has been a decline in their availability, by an estimated 16 per cent since 2000. Too many, it seems, have been redeveloped, or boarded up, not least because councils are not required to provide public loos.

Yet a committee of MPs, intent on reversing this inconvenient truth, is recommending that the Government impose a duty on local authorities to develop a public toilet strategy. It is urging councils to pay local businesses to allow the public access to their loos. A number of councils do already, including Richmond upon Thames, where 69 shops, restaurants, pubs, offices and supermarkets are paid £600 a year, plus VAT, for public use of their facilities.

Somewhat contentiously, the MPs are calling for councils “to provide a ratio of 2:1 public toilet provision in favour of women”, quoting expert advice that women go to the toilet more often and for longer, “thanks to a range of sartorial, biological and functional issues”.

I doubt that even this would be enough to relieve the existing iniquitous imbalance on the UK's loo front.

.....

People assume that [..] women take longer to use the loo, says Michelle Barkley, the technical director of Chapman Taylor, an architectural practice specialising in the design of mixed-use town centre redevelopment, but this is far from the whole story.

For the record, men take 35 seconds to use a urinal, while women take a minimum of 60 seconds to use a loo. Research undertaken in Japan - constituting what could accurately be described as time and motion studies - suggests that women take twice as long as men to go to the loo, and that's excluding time taken washing their hands afterwards. What most people do not realise, explains Barkley, is that women's lavatories normally contain far fewer “appliances” than men's.

This, she believes, originates from the practice of counting WC cubicles and not urinals when comparing facilities. And for years, architects have allocated equal floor space for men's and women's conveniences in public buildings, even though urinals take about half the space of lavatories.

Building Regulations specify “adequate” WC provision, and have always referred to the British Standard code of practice for the design of sanitary facilities for compliance. The latest 2006 version of the standard requires that the number of appliances (WCs) in women's lavatories is at least equal to the number of those in men's (WCs and urinals).

....

And you can forget those sexist gripes that what women are really doing is fixing their make-up. Studies prove this not to be the case, insists Greed. Rather, she confirms, it is “biological and sartorial considerations” that force women to spend longer in the loo than men, and this is something that is being acknowledged increasingly outside the UK, particularly when it comes to public provision.

In the US, for example, New York City and 16 states have adopted the “Potty Priority Law”, which recognises that women need twice as many public conveniences as men. New Zealand has even applied human rights legislation stating that no woman should have to wait more than three minutes to relieve herself.

Greed and Barkley are hopeful that recent gender discrimination legislation placing a duty on publicly funded bodies in this country to address whether or not their facilities comply with the Sex Discrimination Act requirement to provide “services of like quality” to men and women will encourage these organisations to improve lavatory provision for women.

“We have to get the gender requirements mainstreamed into the British Standards 6456 on sanitary installations, which set the numbers and ratio of male to female toilets, and this is no easy task,” says Greed.

“Even then the regulations apply only to new toilet development, that is new buildings or those that are substantially refurbished, so they are not retrospective.” There may, however, be a legal challenge on this, she adds, “as many people are very concerned that women are so under-provided for particularly when they have paid for a ticket to a sports or cultural event, and where they do not get equal service to the men in terms of toilet provision”.

But surely even doubling current provision for female loos will only halve the length of the queues? If women take twice as long as men and have about half the facilities, we really have only a quarter of the provision. We could be crossing our legs for a while longer.

For more on World Toilet Day, Wednesday, November 19, visit www.worldtoilet.org

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life ... 154497.ece
 
Ah yes, when a nation turns to the toilet for humour, then the writing is on the wall.
 
TRUE_THOMAS said:
Ah yes, when a nation turns to the toilet for humour, then the writing is on the wall.
Click to expand...
Or is it the other way round? :?
 
47Forteans said:
barfing_pumpkin said:
The woman was completely potty, if you ask me.
Click to expand...

And to think I felt slightly guilty about making fun of this woman and her condition. To see others doing so is a relief!
Click to expand...

If any of my friends had told me this story, I'd say they were full of sh*t...But the same cannot me said of her. Oh wll, C'est Lavvy.
 
City hit by 'legal to pee' prank

People should ignore signs telling them that it is legal to urinate in certain public places in Nottingham, the city council said.

The signs, which were put up by pranksters in and around Nottingham, are designed to look official.

They feature a toilet sign and include the words: "Public Urination Permitted After 7.30pm".

Nottingham City Council is now urging the public to ignore the notices as it sets about removing them.

'Cleaned daily'

The prank also featured a laminated note, headed with the logo of Nottingham City Council, which said the scheme was aimed at reducing the mess faced by residents outside their homes.

A spokeswoman for the authority said: "It is an offence to urinate in public and these signs have been put up illegally, for whatever reason.

"We would urge people to ignore them, otherwise they could find themselves inadvertently facing a prosecution.

"We are taking the signs down as quickly as possible and if anyone spots one of the illegal signs we ask them to please contact the city council so they can be removed."

The notice reads: "In an attempt to reduce late night public nuisance, during the holiday period, Nottingham City Council has designated several public urination areas across the city.

"This urination area will be cleaned daily between the hours of 5am and 6am."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nott ... 798194.stm

:shock:
 
American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'
Extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply toilet roll made from virgin forest causes more damage than gas-guzzlers, fast food or McMansions, say campaigners
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent guardian.co.uk,

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

"This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.

"Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution." Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.

A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.

More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Greenpeace this week launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.

"We have this myth in the US that recycled is just so low quality, it's like cardboard and is impossible to use," said Lindsey Allen, the forestry campaigner of Greenpeace.

The campaigning group says it produced the guide to counter an aggressive marketing push by the big paper product makers in which celebrities talk about the comforts of luxury brands of toilet paper and tissue.

Those brands, which put quilting and pockets of air between several layers of paper, are especially damaging to the environment.

Paper manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark have identified luxury brands such as three-ply tissues or tissues infused with hand lotion as the fastest-growing market share in a highly competitive industry. Its latest television advertisements show a woman caressing tissue infused with hand lotion.

The New York Times reported a 40% in sales of luxury brands of toilet paper in 2008. Paper companies are anxious to keep those percentages up, even as the recession bites. And Reuters reported that Kimberly-Clark spent $25m in its third quarter on advertising to persuade Americans against trusting their bottoms to cheaper brands.

But Kimberly-Clark, which touts its green credentials on its website, rejects the idea that it is pushing destructive products on an unwitting American public.

Dave Dixon, a company spokesman, said toilet paper and tissue from recycled fibre had been on the market for years. If Americans wanted to buy them, they could.

"For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides," Dixon said. "It's the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect."

Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue. Dixon said the company used products from sustainbly farmed forests in Canada.

Americans already consume vastly more paper than any other country — about three times more per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China.

Barely a third of the paper products sold in America are from recycled sources — most of it comes from virgin forests.

"I really do think it is overwhelmingly an American phenomenom," said Hershkowitz. "People just don't understand that softness equals ecological destruction."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ll-america
 
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